Neil has a new homepage with four new papers up on it. This will go on the papers blog soon, but until then, here are the links.

Moral Particularism and Thought Experiments
Against the Unity of the Virtues
Contextualism and Luck, Moral and Epistemic
The Coming of the Cyborgs

In his paper “Dolly: The Age of Biological Control”, Ian Wilmut suggests one interesting use for cloning technology. In that paper Wilmut basically opposes what we normally think of as reproductive cloning. (In a recent paper with Glenn McGee he has slightly softened his attitude.) But he thinks the following procedure, which as far as I can tell would be illegal under current anti-cloning legislation, would be entirely appropriate if provably safe. I agree with Wilmut, and I think there’s a very strong argument for amending the legislation to ensure this procedure is permissible.

But there is one way nuclear transfer technology might be used in procreation that I do find attractive. This is its use to replace the mitochondrial DNA in an egg. Mitochondria are the small bodies in each of our cells which supply energy. They contain DNA, which is subject to error (mutation) leading to diseases in just the same way that chromosomal mutation may cause disease. However, in the case of mitochondria we inherit those only from our mothers. A woman suffering from mitochondrial disease knows that her children will inherit the same condition. In principle, there is no reason why the embryo nucleus could not be removed from the defective egg and be placed in a recipient egg cell, itself enucleated. The recipient egg would be provided by a woman known not to have similar damage to her mitochondria, with her full informed consent. The resulting child would be exactly as it would have developed, except that it would not suffer the disease associated with mitochondria. The catch with this is that it would be possible to make multiple copies of the embryo—you might start with a thirty-cell embryo and end up with six fertilized eggs. Done thoughtfully, however, this method of nuclear transfer could provide a way to treat currently untreatable mitochondrially carried diseases.

If you think 30 cell embryos are worthy of legal defence, then I guess you shouldn’t like this idea. But that is very much a minority position, and I can’t see why anyone else should oppose Wilmut’s proposal, provided it is safe.

One of the central issues in the cloning thread has been whether infertile couples should adopt rather than use new technologies like cloning. So far I’ve been content to run with the line that even if it would socially advantageous for the couple to adopt rather than clone, they should have a legal right to clone, because they should have the legal right to have children from their own genetic stock. But perhaps I was too quick to accept the virtues of adoption. Stephen Coleman, in Should Liberals Ban Reproductive Cloning? argues that adoption may have flaws of its own.

The problem unique to adoption is that these cases involve an existing child, and in most cases, existing parents. In the words of Barbara Katz Rothman “For every pair of welcoming arms, there is a pair of empty arms. For every baby taken in, there is a baby given up”. The vast majority of mothers do not relinquish children for adoption because they want to, but rather because they are forced to through poverty. They are not unwilling to care for the child, they are simply unable. This is especially the case with international adoption. Virtually all the children adopted internationally come from economically or politically oppressed areas. Probably only the orphans from these areas can really be classed as “unwanted”. Even within the USA, one study found that 69% of parents giving children up for adoption cited external pressures, including financial constraints, as the primary reason for surrender.7 Given these problems, adoption hardly looks the glowing alternative to reproductive technology…

I’m not sure this is conclusive. Even if adoption is a faulty system it may still be right for couples to participate in it while it is, hopefully, reformed. (In general I suppose I think too much is made of sins of complicity.) But there’s some reason here to think adoption is not the perfect solution for the infertile couple some have suggested. Coleman’s article contains more reasons, as well as snappy responses to many of the prominent anti-cloning arguments.

No argument this time, just a serious question. If cloning is to be banned, that presumably means there will be criminal penalties for creating clones. Who, exactly, should be vulnerable for those penalties? If a couple X and Y decide they want a cloned baby (say with Y’s DNA inserted into one of X’s eggs), and Dr. Z assists with this so clone baby A is born of X, who should be punished for this act of illegal cloning? X? Y? Z? A? (Well, presumably not A.) Any others?

I think many people who want to ban cloning have in mind punishing Z, but I can’t tell from most discussions just exactly what their position comes to. The Weldon-Stupak bill that passed the House doesn’t distinguish, and seems to leave at least X and Z liable, and possibly Y as well. The British Human Reproductive Cloning Act only says Z would be liable, but in debate in the House of Lords Lord Hunt said that the birth mother may also be liable “under the general rules of criminal law if she is an active and knowing participant.” And obviously neither Bill settles the moral question of who should be liable, assuming, as I do not, that there should be a ban. (I think in this case punishing X but not Y seems rather absurd, but maybe Y would also be liable as an active and knowing participant.)

In part I want to figure this out so I can get the opposition picture right. As people have noted, I’ve been fairly cavalier in my representation of opposing views in earlier postings. (Normally I’m fairly easy-going about these things, but I’m actually a little embarrassed about some of the mistakes in the last post, even by blogging standards it was pretty bad in places, so I want to get things better in the future.) And in part it’s so I can have a go at dramatising the difference between pro- and anti-cloning forces. The image of Feds storming into the maternity ward to arrest X and Y, as repugnant an image as I can imagine in this whole situation, seems to make vivid some of the libertarian concerns I have with the anti-cloning movement. But if X and Y would be left to raise baby A, and only Z, the handmaiden, was taken off to jail, then obviously we can’t use just that image.

(I know that even if X and Y were thought to be criminally liable here there might be a humanitarian reason for not arresting them at the, like, ‘scene of the crime’. But it might be thought better to arrest them before A forms any emotional attachments, so maybe the Feds would choose just this moment to storm in.)

No argument this time, just a serious question. If cloning is to be banned, that presumably means there will be criminal penalties for creating clones. Who, exactly, should be vulnerable for those penalties? If a couple X and Y decide they want a cloned baby (say with Y’s DNA inserted into one of X’s eggs), and Dr. Z assists with this so clone baby A is born of X, who should be punished for this act of illegal cloning? X? Y? Z? A? (Well, presumably not A.) Any others?

I think many people who want to ban cloning have in mind punishing Z, but I can’t tell from most discussions just exactly what their position comes to. The Weldon-Stupak bill that passed the House doesn’t distinguish, and seems to leave at least X and Z liable, and possibly Y as well. The British Human Reproductive Cloning Act only says Z would be liable, but in debate in the House of Lords Lord Hunt said that the birth mother may also be liable “under the general rules of criminal law if she is an active and knowing participant.” And obviously neither Bill settles the moral question of who should be liable, assuming, as I do not, that there should be a ban. (I think in this case punishing X but not Y seems rather absurd, but maybe Y would also be liable as an active and knowing participant.)

In part I want to figure this out so I can get the opposition picture right. As people have noted, I’ve been fairly cavalier in my representation of opposing views in earlier postings. (Normally I’m fairly easy-going about these things, but I’m actually a little embarrassed about some of the mistakes in the last post, even by blogging standards it was pretty bad in places, so I want to get things better in the future.) And in part it’s so I can have a go at dramatising the difference between pro- and anti-cloning forces. The image of Feds storming into the maternity ward to arrest X and Y, as repugnant an image as I can imagine in this whole situation, seems to make vivid some of the libertarian concerns I have with the anti-cloning movement. But if X and Y would be left to raise baby A, and only Z, the handmaiden, was taken off to jail, then obviously we can’t use just that image.

(I know that even if X and Y were thought to be criminally liable here there might be a humanitarian reason for not arresting them at the, like, ‘scene of the crime’. But it might be thought better to arrest them before A forms any emotional attachments, so maybe the Feds would choose just this moment to storm in.)

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?

1. 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.
2. 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.)

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?

1. 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.
2. 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.)

Odd. After Matthew Yglesias followed up my little post earlier about health care costs with a comment on Tapped, I wanted to go back to the OECD archives to do a little more digging for interesting numbers. In particular, I’m pretty sure the scales the OECD uses to make PPP adjustments are (usually) available online, so if we wanted to find the raw numbers of dollars per capita each country spends, we could do that. (Off the top of my head speculation – these numbers will look even worse for the USA than the adjusted numbers, but that won’t really matter because the adjusted numbers are what we should be looking at.) But the OECD site is down. At least, it’s homepage is down. It’s still possible to access Excel files (like this one) if you know what you are looking for, but if you look for the homepage you get a 404 message. Just which kind of website has its databases up but can’t find it’s homepage? Odd. Maybe they just don’t work weekends in Paris. Or maybe the website is also overcome with World Cup excitement.

The response from various right-wing circles about the TCS brouhaha is either charmingly antique or extraordinarily naive. The position seems to be that we should ignore who’s paying the piper and just listen to the tune to see whether we like it. Arguments, they say, can be evaluated independently of the context they appear in. But this relies on views about the nature of testimony that don’t stand up to empirical or philosophical scrutiny. As Grice put it, communication requires cooperation, and since advertising masquerading as honest opinion is not particularly cooperative, it is unlikely to be communicative, but without successful communication there simply isn’t a presented argument to evaluate. (This is long, so I’ve moved most of it to the extended entry.)
Continue reading →

The response from various right-wing circles about the TCS brouhaha is either charmingly antique or extraordinarily naive. The position seems to be that we should ignore who’s paying the piper and just listen to the tune to see whether we like it. Arguments, they say, can be evaluated independently of the context they appear in. But this relies on views about the nature of testimony that don’t stand up to empirical or philosophical scrutiny. As Grice put it, communication requires cooperation, and since advertising masquerading as honest opinion is not particularly cooperative, it is unlikely to be communicative, but without successful communication there simply isn’t a presented argument to evaluate. (This is long, so I’ve moved most of it to the extended entry.)
Continue reading →