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Morality of Cloning Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more during the past several decades or yielded so many palpable improvements in human welfare. Yet none except nuclear physics has aroused greater apprehensions among the general public and leaders in such diverse fields as religion, the humanities, and government. There is much discussion going on about the morality of cloning. It is undecided whether human cloning should be left to individual choice and discovery, regulated (for example, limited to married couples or infertile married couples), or banned at all. Leon R.
Kass and James Q. Wilson arrive at different answers to these questions, on the basis of different assessments of the ethical implications of cloning for human sexuality and the traditional family in the The Ethics of Human Cloning. Although in their lively dialogue both authors share a fundamental distrust of the notion of human cloning, they base their reticence on different views of the role of sexual reproduction and the role of the family. Professor Kass contends that in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproduction technologies that place the origin of human life in human hands have eroded the respect for the mystery of sexuality and human renewal.
Professor Wilson, in contrast, asserts that whether a human life is created naturally or artificially is immaterial as long as the child is raised by loving parents in a two-parent family and is not harmed by the means of its conception. This whole book is concerned with the permissibility of conduct of genetic research and the permissible uses of its discoveries. The first section of the book is by Leon R. Kass and is called The Wisdom of Repugnance.
Kass says that even though human cloning is not an entirely new concept, it is still a revolutionary one, and nobody can be quite sure about its easily foreseeable consequences. The first argument that Kass gives against cloning is that it breaks the natural way of sexual reproduction: generation of new life from (exactly) two complementary elements, one female, one male, which is the natural way of all mammalian reproduction. The author underlines that it is completely up to the nature and chance to decide whether a boy or a girl would be born. Kass seems to be strongly against human designing other human he is convinced that each human child shares the common natural human species genotype, each child is genetically (equally) kin to both parents, yet each child is also genetically unique.
Kass is also very concerned with the actual process of making a child. He says that nature has given people pleasure in sex, so that people have a desire to make children. The author claims that anything (including cloning) that is prevents people from sex, love, and intimacy is unethical and dehumanizing, even if the product of it is perfect. Cloned children however, have only one parent, and this situation has been created artificially. There is going to be a great misunderstanding and mis balance in the family because neither mother, nor father, sister, nor brother will be completely able to say their relationship to the cloned member. A family, a social institute that has been cultivated throughout the entire history of humanity, and cloning is something that might put its well being in jeopardy.
James Q. Wilson, in The Paradox of Cloning claims that there are both philosophical and utilitarian objections to cloning. Wilson says that cloning violates the will of God because a person is born, but not as a result of a sexual intercourse of two people, which, therefore leaves the question of how the cloned person is going to get a soul. Only God, according to Wilson, can endow somebody with a sole, and that is only done when two people love each other. Wilsons other philosophical objection is that cloning is contrary to nature. There is also a danger, that some mad scientist may use his abilities and knowledge to crate another Adolf Hitlers or Saddam Hussein's.
The author believes this is possible because the cloned child will have no real family and parents, who will be attached to the person emotionally, and to whom he / she will feel affection and love as well. Wilson is sure, that if cloning has to occur, the society needs to make sure that the cloned person gets a two-parent family that wants a child for their own benefit. The author doubts that man is made in the image of God and can make himself (by cloning) and he will still be in God image? Leon Kass next argument against cloning is that Family Needs Its Natural Roots. Like Professor Wilson, he does not seem especially worried about possible political abuses of cloning, for example, the mass production of identical clones or the replication of dictators, or about threats to human evolution. Kass also agrees that, at least in the short run, cloning is unlikely to be widely used as a means of satisfying the reproductive desires of married couples.
Both of the authors share a deep commitment to marriage and the normal two-parent family and seem to be very much concerned about the well-being of their children. Kass agrees with Wilson that a cloned child might be happy if cared for lovingly and responsibly within a marriage like any other child, and his / her life can actually turn out to be no worse or less happy a person. He, however, absolutely disagrees with Wilson that a practice can be successful the intra marital cases. Kass criticizes Professor Wilson in his view that it is completely innocent to clone a husband or a wife. He also calls Wilson naive in believing that cloning can be confined to married couples seeking merely a remedy for childlessness. Kass states that couples interested in cloning, especially those who have figured out the dangers of self-cloning, will certainly want to make use of high-class donor nuclei.
He, however, calls his readers to notice that for people willing to go outside the marriage for sources of gametes, in vitro fertilization with donor sperm and embryo donation are already alternatives to cloning, so there is almost no one for whom cloning is the only alternative to either childlessness or adoption. In the chapter called Sex and Family, James Wilson acknowledges that some views of Dr. Kass overlap his, but they are somewhat different in emphasis. He worries that creating babies without marital sex is the fundamental error.
He is distressed by the prospect of children being "made rather than begotten" because that will weaken the "soul-elevating power of sexuality" that has been established "by nature. "By nature, each child has two complementary biological progenitors... [And so] the precise genetic constitution of the resulting offspring is determined by a combination of nature and chance, not by human design. " We are profoundly threatened, he suggests, by "asexual reproduction" that produces "-single-parent- offspring. " Such offspring will experience confusion over their identity, suffer from being produced as "artifacts, " and become the victims of "despotism. " Asexual reproduction, in his view, is an effort to maintain "self-preservation"; sexual reproduction, by contrast, implies that we are perishable: "when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise. " If Dr. Kass thinks that sexuality is more important than families, then he would object to any form of assisted reproduction that does not involve parental coition. Many such forms now exist. Children are adopted by parents who did not give them birth.
Artificial insemination produces children without sexual congress. Some forms of such insemination rely on sperm produced by a man other than the woman-s husband, while other forms involve the artificial insemination of a surrogate mother who will relinquish the baby to a married couple. By in vitro fertilization, eggs and sperm can be joined in a petri dish and then transferred into the woman-s uterus. There have been several efforts to study how well the children fare. I am aware of none that shows in vitro fertilization to have had a harmful effect on the children-s mental or psychological status or their relationships with parents. One study in the Netherlands found children conceived by in vitro fertilization in two-parent families to be the object of more maternal involvement and pleasure than were children of similar parents whose offspring had been conceived without in vitro fertilization.
If the child is born of a woman who is part of a two-parent family and both parents work hard to raise it properly, and if the child-s life is not harmed by the fact that it was adopted, conceived artificially or in a petri dish, or even conceived with an egg or sperm from another person, we poor mortals have done all that man and God might expect of us. My views on assisted reproduction do not coincide with Dr. Kass-s because I do not attach the same overriding significance to ordinary coitus as the source of children. I know of very little evidence that assisted reproduction, other than reluctant surrogacy, harms either the children or their parents. I certainly favor limiting cloning to intact, heterosexual families and placing sharp restrictions on the source of the eggs. We do not want families planning to have a movie star, basketball player, or high-energy physicist as an offspring.
But I confess that I am not clear as to how those limits might be drawn, and if no one can solve that puzzle, I would join Dr. Kass in banning cloning. Perhaps the best solution is a kind of screened lottery akin to what doctors performing in vitro fertilization now do with donated sperm. One can match his race or ethnicity and even select a sex, but beyond that he takes his chances. I am persuaded that if only heterosexual families can clone, and if we sharply limit the sources of the embryo they can implant in the woman, cloning will be quite rare. Sex is more fun than cloning, and artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization preserve the element of genetic chance that most people, I think, favor.
Dr. Kass is right to stress the mystery and uncertainty of sexual union. That is why hardly any woman with a fertile husband who could obtain a sperm from a donor bank will do so. Procreation is a delight.
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