One of the neat things about the cloning debate is that it’s one of very few places where you’ll hear Christian conservatives saying that sex is good. Normally one hears that sex is at best a mortal sin and at worst the cause of all that’s wrong with modern society. But give us a chance to make babies any other way, and all of a sudden it’s sweetness and light. I mean, which of the following two kinds of activities looks to you like a ‘repugnant’ way to originate life?
- The kind of activity that goes on in nightclub bathrooms and on the sets of porn movies and between teenagers in the backseats of their parents’ cars.
- The kind of activity that goes on when people who have dedicated their lives to understanding a particular natural mystery try to carefully apply their knowledge in order to improve the lot of their fellow humans.
If you picked option 2, then you too can be Leon Kass’s friend. More seriously, I wonder how much my own support for cloning comes from somewhat different feelings of repugnance to Kass’s.
This isn’t to say, as might be hinted, that I find option 1 particularly repugnant. If I were a good conservative I could quite imagine that I would think that. Maybe I would think something like the following:
Cloning gives us the chance for the goodness of life without the badness of sex, so it looks like a Godsend. Sad to say, some people think Godsends are only announced by people in white gowns, not people in white coats, so they don’t recognise what a miracle this is. Imagine all the people, living lives unstained by sex.
Returning to the subject at hand, I think it’s very natural to be completely opposed to restrictions on reproductive rights. Here’s a quote from Gregory Pence’s Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? (I borrowed the point that Christian attitudes to sex are in a little tension here from Pence’s book, though he didn’t put it quite the way I did.)
There are people in medical genetics and medicine with much stronger views than the one expressed here, people who have all their professional lives seen the terrible results of genetic disease. For example, respected genetic researcher Marjery Shaw once suggested that deliberately giving birth to a child with the gene for Huntington’s disease should be a criminal offence. [Footnote: Shaw’s suggestion is in “Conditional Prospective Rights of the Fetus”, Journal of Legal Medicine 63 (1984) 99.]
My initial reaction to Shaw’s suggestion is that it is simply abhorrent. Criminalising conception and birth is not something we should be in the business of, even if we can quite properly make judgments about the morality of different acts of conception and birth. Now this isn’t much of an argument, which just goes to show we all have to rest on a moral intuition somewhere.
Pence’s book by the way is reasonably good, but it’s a bit long for what is really covered (despite being only 170 pages) and he doesn’t address some of the arguments that have arisen in the comments threads here. (I don’t know whether this is because (a) he missed those arguments in the literature, or (b) those arguments weren’t in circulation when he wrote his book in 1998 but are now, or (c) the arguments are new to these threads. I suspect not (a), but I don’t know about the (b)/(c) split.)
There is one very worthwhile point running through Pence’s book. He stresses that as well as the risks that are raise by cloning, there are many other risks that are diminished. For example, he notes that we can be confident the cloned child will not have a genetic disease that causes early death. So he thinks we can reach a stage where cloning is (as far as we will know) no more dangerous than traditional breeding. He thinks this is the standard that should be reached before cloning is permissible. (I’ve been defending a somewhat weaker standard here, and I might write a later post on the differences between our views.)
Still, it would be nice to have a response to the more recent arguments. For future reference, here’s a list of the interesting arguments that have arisen in the previous threads, as well as my responses to them. (Actually I should say ‘our’ response, because many of these are from the paper I’m co-writing with Sarah McGrath.)
- Cloned children would know too much about what will happen as they develop.
This is a bit unclear, but the thought is that it’s good for humans to not know too much about how they will develop. Even if some kind of determinist thesis is true, there is a value in having an epistemically open future. I agree this is a value, but I don’t think cloning significantly undermines it. In most cases the connection between genes and life history is so weak that all the child could know is that she is more likely to have this rather than that kind of life. But of course knowing that your parents are world-class violinists, or that early grey hair or heart disease runs in your family, already provides this kind of probabilistic knowledge, so clones aren’t any worse off than bredders. The only exception is if a child is deliberately cloned from a person with a genetic disease. While this is a possibility, it is really rather unlikely. It would be a rather monstrous parent who would do such a thing. And it’s bad public policy to ban a technology because monstrous people could do monstrous things with it. - Would-be parents of clones should adopt rather than clone.
Let’s agree that it would make the world a better place for such parents to adopt rather than clone. I’m not sure that’s right (the two possible worlds seem incomparable in important respects to me) but let’s just stipulate it. We don’t normally legally require that people do whatever they can to improve the world. If a person faces a choice between an action that will improve the world and one that will further one of their most deeply held values, we normally let them act on their values provided they do not thereby harm others. (The pitiful amount we tax people to pay for humanitarian aid is a small exception, but note the individual values that don’t get to be expressed because of such taxation are less central than the value in having genetic descendants.) So even if parents could do better for the world by adopting, I don’t see why this is the kind of moral choice the state should require them to make. And let’s not forget how much people do value having genetic descendants. For most women it would be much more convenient to adopt a child than to go through the rigours of pregnancy and childbirth, but the vast majority of women think those costs are worthwhile because they will have a child that is biologically related to them at the end. When people have such a strong value, whatever we may think of its merits, the state should not prevent its expression. - Cloning will reinforce inequality in society.
Pence does discuss this, and basically dismisses it. He says there’s no more reason to ban cloning on this ground than to ban yachts or any other luxury good. I don’t think this is a good enough response. If cloning does fundamentally alter society, then it should be equitabbly distributed. Put another way, the fact that cloning allows for the expression of a widespread important human value makes it different to yachting. (Not that yachting isn’t of fundamental importance to some, I guess.) I think the right response to this is to stress that cloning isn’t that different to things we already accept. For one thing, it only involves replication of genes, not replication of a person in any broader sense. For another, it doesn’t even involve complete replication of genes unless the egg is supplied by the person being cloned. For yet another, unless the child gestates in the womb the person being cloned gestated in, the person will be different in some ways practically from day 1. There’s more to be said here, but I think there are plenty of reasons to treat cloning as just another technique of reproductive assistance, and there’s no reason that it need add to inequality in society. (I also think it should, ideally, be distributed through a needs-based or lottery-based system within a socialised health care system. But I don’t think we need that to respond to the inequality argument.) - There could be involuntary cloning.
It’s not clear whether this will be technologically possible, but one fear is that people could be cloned against their will from stray cells they leave around. Of course this practice should be illegal, but if it were widespread and laws against it were unenforceable because it was too hard to detect violations, the prevalence of the practice might undermine a right I think is very important, the right to decide when and how one reproduces. (I think this right, and not the right to bodily autonomy, is the basis of the best pro-choice argument.) Provided the cloning industry is well-regulated though, this danger seems fairly remote. One fact that looks like it won’t change any time soon is that, unlike breeding, cloning is not something you can simply do in your own backyard. (I guess breeding in your backyard might be illegal in some jurisdictions unless you have fairly high fences.) It should be possible to regulate cloning centres heavily enough that they have the fear of God (or at least the fear of heavy fines and potentially prison sentences) put in them in order to ensure they do not clone a person without their consent.
There’s still a pile of anti-cloning papers on my reading stack, but I’m not being tempted to move far from my original position that cloning should be legally available, though I have been convinced there are several reasons to heavily regulate it.
(UPDATE: I edited the above a little to remove some of the more obviously erroneous points, especially about ecclesiastical history. Some of the comments below won’t make much sense because they are perfectly good objections to what was previously written. So just assume that the ones that don’t make sense are correct and that I was wrong.)