The wisdom of moral repugnance
Leon R. Kass.
Reprinted in The Human Life Review 1997; 23 (3): 63-88.
presentation and English translation: Gonzalo Herranz.
Leon R. Kass, a biochemist and physician, has devoted himself for many years to bioethics, of which he is a very prominent figure. His articles never disappoint: not only do they say interesting things, but they comfort by the vigour of their thought and educate by the reasonableness of their argumentation.
In The Wisdom of Moral Repugnance, Kass sharply analyses the many and varied aspects of human cloning, framing them in a broad and illuminating perspective. The study thus becomes an intense critique of the frivolity dominant in large sectors of current Bioethics, blind to the transcendent of man and sensitive only to the flattery of utilitarianism.
The article was published last June in The New Republic magazine. The following translation is not complete: in order to shorten the B text, some paragraphs have been shortened and most of the allusions to certain aspects of US domestic politics have been deleted.
I. Taking Cloning Seriously, Then and Now
V. The perversities of cloning
VI. Response to some objections
Our habit of being amused by news of great scientific and technological breakthroughs has just been dealt a rude blow with the advertisement of the birth of a sheep called Dolly. Although Dolly shares with all the sheep that have gone before her "her woolly, soft, shining dress", William Blake's question "O little sheep, who made thee?" has a radically different answer for her: Dolly has been made, in an absolutely literal sense. She is not the work of nature or of nature's God, but the work of one man, a British man, Ian Wilmut, and his scientific colleagues. And what is even more: Dolly has entered this world, not only asexually, but as a genetically identical copy of an adult sheep, of which she is a clone. This long-awaited but surprise success in cloning an adult mammal immediately raised the possibility - and the spectre - of cloning humans.
I. Taking Cloning Seriously, Then and Now 
Cloning first came to public attention thirty years ago now, following the asexual production of a batch of tadpoles in England using the nuclear transplantation technique. award The person who was most instrumental manager in bringing the possibilities and promise of human cloning to public attention was Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and man of far-reaching vision. In 1966, Lederberg wrote a highly article B in The American Naturalist detailing the eugenic advantages of human cloning and other forms of engineering Genetics. The following year, he devoted a column in The Washington Post, where he wrote frequently and seriously about science and society, to discussing the advantages of human cloning. He suggested that cloning could help overcome the unpredictable variety that dominates human reproduction and that it would give us the advantage of being able to perpetuate superior genetic endowments. These writings triggered a brief public discussion in which I was able to participate. I was then a young researcher in molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I wrote a response in the Post, arguing against Lederberg's amoral treatment of the issue and insisting on the urgency of addressing a number of problems and objections, and concluding by suggesting that "in fact, programmed human reproduction would ultimately dehumanise man".
Much has happened since then. Among other things, it has become, not easier, but much more difficult to discern the true meaning of human cloning. In a sense, we have become soft on the idea of human cloning, which has been presented to us in films, jokes, and repeated commentary, some serious, some joking, in the media at speech. We have become accustomed to new human reproductive practices: not only in vitro fertilisation, but also embryo manipulation, embryo donation and surrogate motherhood. Animal biotechnology has given us transgenic animals. It seems, moreover, that the burgeoning science of engineering can soon and easily be applied to humans Genetics.
More importantly, changes in the general cultural environment now make it much more difficult to express a common and respectful understanding of sexuality, procreation, birth, family, or the meaning of motherhood, fatherhood or the links between generations.
Twenty-five years ago, abortion, largely illegal, was considered immoral; the sexual revolution (made possible by the extramarital use of the pill) was still in its infancy; little had yet been heard about the reproductive rights of unmarried women, homosexuals or lesbians. (No one had ever thought of writing shameless memoirs about incest itself!). At the time, one could argue, without the slightest haste, that the new technologies of human reproduction (having children without intercourse) and their chaotic effect on kinship relations (who is the mother: the one who donates the egg, the surrogate who gestate the child and gives birth to it, or the one who raises and educates it?) could "undermine the justification and support that biological parenthood gives to monogamous marriage".
Today, advocates of monogamous and stable marriage risk seriously offending adults living in "new family forms" or those children who, even without the financial aid of assisted reproduction, have acquired three or four parents or even none at all. Today, one even has to apologise for expressing views that, 25 years ago, were almost universally held as the core of our culture's wisdom on subject. In a world whose natural boundaries of yesteryear have vanished as a result of technological change and whose moral boundaries have seemingly become mere rubble, it is much more difficult to give convincing force to the general opinion against human cloning. As Raskolnikov said, "man - that villain - gets used to everything".
Perhaps the most depressing feature of the discussions that followed the news of Dolly was their ironic tone, their witty cynicism, the moral fatigue that dominated them. Gone from the intellectual scene are the wise and courageous voices of Theodosius Dobzhansky (Genetics), Hans Jonas (Philosophy) and Paul Ramsey (Theology), who, only 25 years ago, had offered strong moral arguments against the idea of cloning a human being. Now, we are too sophisticated for such arguments subject; we cannot be caught in public defending a strong moral stance, let alone one that smacks of absolutism. Post-modernism is the fashionable thing to do now.
Cloning has become the perfect embodiment of the dominant ideology of our time. Thanks to the sexual revolution, we are able to deny on internship, and increasingly in thought, that there is a procreative teleology inherent in sexuality itself. But, if sex no longer has any intrinsic connection with the generation of children, children need not necessarily be linked to the sexual act. We are constantly being pushed, thanks to the feminist and gay rights movements, to regard the natural difference between the sexes as a mere convention, as a "cultural construct". But if masculine and feminine are neither normatively complementary nor generatively meaningful, children need not come from the complementarity of male and female. Thanks to the massive frequency and social acceptance of divorce and children born out of wedlock, monogamous marriage is no longer the cultural rule accepted as the only worthy place to have children. In this new status, the clone is the ideal emblem: it is the ultimate form of the "child of the unattached parent".
Thanks to the idea that all children must be wanted children (so says the highest intellectual principle used by the promoters of contraception and abortion), sooner or later only children who fully comply with our wishes will be acceptable. Through cloning, we will be able to realise our wishes and projects about the identity of our children and exercise unprecedented control over them. Thanks to modern forms of individualism and the speed of cultural change, we no longer see ourselves as bound to our ancestors and defined by traditions, but as projects for our own self-creation. We see ourselves not only as self-made men, but as man-made selves. Self-cloning is simply an extension of that rootless, narcissistic self-creation.
Unwilling to acknowledge our debt to the past or to accept the uncertainties and limitations of the future, we establish counterfeit relationships with one and the other: cloning embodies our desire to totally control the future, while freeing ourselves from all control. Subjugated and enslaved by the lure of technology, we have lost our awe and reverence for the profound mysteries of nature and life.
Part of the blame for our complacency lies, sadly, with Bioethics itself and its claim to be an expert in moral matters. Bioethics was founded by people who understood that the new biology touched, and threatened, the deepest layers of our humanity: bodily integrity, identity and individuality, offspring and kinship, freedom and self-control, human love and aspirations, the relations and struggles between body and soul. As it has been taken over by analytical philosophers, however, and has undergone subsequent routinisation and professionalisation, the field of bioethics has become increasingly content with merely analysing moral arguments, merely reacting to new technological developments, merely describing possible positions that might be adopted in the face of new problems and the new public rules and regulations : all done in the naïve belief that all the evils that frighten us can be avoided through compassion, regulation and respect for autonomy. Bioethics has brought us some important contributions in the protection of human subjects from biomedical research and in other areas where freedom staff was threatened; but, in general, its cultivators, with few exceptions, have been bent on mashing up the big questions about man.
One reason for this lies in the piecemeal way in which public regulations have been enacted, a way that tends to shred the big questions of morality, reducing them to small issues at procedure. Many leading bioethicists in this country (USA) have served on national commissions, state work groups or advisory boards, where they have understandably found that utilitarianism alone is the only acceptable vocabulary for all those involved in the discussion of legal and administrative problems. Since, moreover, many of these commissions have either been under sponsorship of the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Health and Human Services, or have been dominated by powerful voices in favour of scientific progress, the ethicists who sat on them have had to content themselves - most of the time and after having tried to "clarify values" and mustered some displeasure - with giving their blessings to the inevitable. But, curiously, it is now bioethicists, not scientists, who are the most ardent defenders of human cloning. In particular, the two experts who testified in favour of human cloning before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission were bioethicists, eager to dismiss what they saw as the irrational concerns of those of us who opposed cloning. One wonders whether this commission, constituted like those before it, can sufficiently free itself from the accommodating patron saint of giving the nihil obstat to all technical innovation, in the mistaken belief that all other goods must bow to the idols of better health and scientific advancement.
If it is to do so, the committee must first persuade itself, just as each of us must persuade ourselves, not to be complacent about what is being discussed here. Human cloning, although it is in some respects in continuity with current reproductive technologies, also represents something radically new, in itself and in its easily foreseeable consequences. The stakes are high. I know I am exaggerating, but in the direction of the truth, when I insist that we are in the position of deciding nothing less than whether human procreation is to remain human, whether children are to be made rather than begotten, whether it is a good thing, humanly speaking, to say yes in principle to the path that leads (at best) to the dehumanised rationality described in Brave New World.
This is not an ordinary matter that can be ruminated upon for a few moments, but one that will receive our seal of approval. We must rise to the occasion and make our judgements as if the fate of humanity were at stake. For indeed it is.
II. The State of the Art
While we cannot underestimate the significance of human cloning, neither can we exaggerate its imminence nor misunderstand what exactly it entails. The procedure of cloning is simple. The nucleus is removed from a mature, but unfertilised, oocyte and replaced with another nucleus obtained from a specialised cell of an adult (or foetal) organism (in Dolly's case, the donated nucleus came from the epithelium of the mammary gland). ) Since the vast majority of a cell's genetic material is contained in its nucleus, the "renucleated" oocyte and the individual that develops from it are genetically identical to the organism from which the transferred nucleus originated. By means of nuclear transfer, an unlimited number of genetically identical individuals, clones, could be produced issue . In principle, any person, male or female, newborn or adult, could be cloned and at the desired issue . By culturing and storing tissues in the laboratory beyond the lifetime of the providers, cloning of the dead could be achieved.
The most difficult technical hurdle, overcome by Wilmut and his colleagues, was to find a means of reprogramming the state of the DNA in the nuclear donor cells, to reverse their differentiated expression and restore their full totipotency, so that it could again drive the entire process of producing a mature organism. Now that this problem has been solved, we can expect to see a stampede among scientists to develop the cloning of other animals, especially in animal husbandry, in order to reproduce champion meat or milk-producing animals in perpetuity. Although it is pure guesswork to indicate when someone will be able to clone man, Wilmut's technique, almost certainly applicable to humans, makes attempting such an achievement an imminent possibility.
However, it is worth expressing some caution in order to correct some possible errors. To begin with, cloning is not like xeroxing. As has been reassuringly stated, Mel Gibson's clone, even if he is his genetic double, will enter the world without teeth and peeing in his nappies, just like any other child. Moreover, the success rate, at least initially, will not be very high: the British transferred 277 adult nuclei into enucleated sheep oocytes, and implanted 29 cloned embryos, but only managed to birth a single cloned sheep. For this reason, among others, internship is unlikely, at least for now, to become very popular, and there is certainly no immediate concern about large-scale production of multiple copies. The need for repeated interventions to obtain oocytes from women and, more crucially, borrowed wombs for the implantation of cloned embryos will limit the use of the technique, even apart from the economic cost. Moreover, it will not appeal to many: those who are able to do so will presumably prefer the natural way of conceiving children.
However, for the tens of thousands of people in the more than 200 assisted reproduction clinics in the United States, who already use in vitro fertilisation, intracytoplasmic sperm injection and other assisted reproductive techniques, cloning could be an option with few additional complications (especially if the success rate improves). If commercial entities would then appear offering nucleus banks, just as today there are sperm banks; if some famous athletes or other celebrities would put their DNA on the market, just as today they market their name, their autograph or the like; if, as prophesied, the techniques of selection and manipulation of embryos and gametes would be applied, thus increasing the role of laboratory in "improving the quality" of the embryos; if all this were to happen, then cloning, if allowed, would become just another technique for the simple reason that it increases reproductive freedom, even without social support for the improvement of the gene pool or the replication of superior individuals. Moreover, if the research of laboratory on human cloning goes ahead, even without the intention of producing cloned human beings, the very existence on laboratory of cloned human embryos, created for the sole purpose of research, will certainly pave the way for further reproductive implantations.
Advocates and promoters of human cloning have been quick to announce possible uses for it when the technique is perfected, uses that range from the sentimental and compassionate to the grandiose. They include providing a child for an infertile couple; "replacing" a much-loved spouse or child who is dying or has already died; avoiding the risk of disease Genetics; enabling the reproduction of homosexual or lesbian individuals who want nothing to do with the opposite sex; ensuring a genetically identical source of organs or tissues perfectly suited for transplantation; producing children of chosen genotype, not excluding one's own; making copies of individuals of extraordinary genius, talent or beauty; having a child who really "looks like So-and-so"; and creating large series of genetically identical human beings suitable for research, for example, on the nature/Education problem, or for special missions in times of war or peace (not excluding espionage), where the use of identical human beings may be an advantage. Most supporters of cloning do not, of course, want any of these possibilities. That they cannot state why is not surprising. What is surprising and welcome is that, in such cynical times as ours, they dare to give an opinion.
III. The Wisdom of Disgust
"Offensive, grotesque, nauseating, disgusting, repulsive": these are the words most frequently heard at the prospect of cloning human beings. The reaction is as strong among ordinary men and women as it is among intellectuals, believers as well as atheists, humanists as well as scientists. Dolly's creator even said he would "find it offensive" to clone a human being.
People are repulsed by many aspects of human cloning. They recoil at the prospect of mass-producing human beings, with large sets of identical, identity-damaged types; the idea of father-son or mother-daughter twins; the bizarre possibility of a woman giving birth to and raising a child who is a copy Genetics of herself, her husband or even her deceased parent; the whimsy and grotesqueness of conceiving a child as an exact substitute for one who is already dead; the utilitarian creation of embryonic genetic copies of oneself, to be frozen and developed in case of needing homologous tissues or organs for transplantation; the narcissism of those who would clone themselves, or the arrogance of others who claim that they know both who deserves to be cloned, and what genotype they would like to receive in a child to be created; the Frankensteinian exaltation of creating human life and increasingly controlling its destiny; that is, man playing God.
Hardly anyone finds any of the suggested reasons for cloning human beings acceptable. Almost everyone is able to foresee its possible abuses or misuses. Moreover, many people are oppressed by the feeling that there is almost certainly nothing that can be done to prevent anyone from carrying out human cloning. This makes the future prospects even more repugnant.
Disgust is not a definitive argument. Some of yesterday's repugnance is today quietly accepted - though, it must be added, not always for the better. On crucial issues, however, disgust is the emotional expression of a deep wisdom that is beyond the capacity of reason to articulate. Can anyone give a fully adequate argument about the atrocity that is incest (even consensual incest) between father and daughter, or about the internship of sex with animals, or about mutilating a corpse, or about eating human flesh, or about simply raping or killing another human being? Could anyone's inability to give a fully rational justification for such practices make ethical disgust suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we would be suspicious of those who think they are capable of rationalising our horror and would find it sufficient to explain the enormity of incest with arguments referring exclusively to the genetic risks of inbreeding.
Revulsion against human cloning falls into this category. We are repulsed by the mere possibility of cloning human beings not because the subject is so strange and new, but because we sense and feel, immediately and without the need for argument, that it violates things we hold dear. Repugnance, here as in other things, revolts us against the excesses of human arbitrariness, it warns us that we cannot harm something that is inexpressibly profound. True, in this time when everything is considered permissible as long as it is done freely, when respect for the nature we have been given is no longer demanded, when our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous wills, disgust may prove to be the only voice that speaks in defence of the central core of our humanity. The souls of those who are no longer capable of feeling moral shivers have been flattened.
The goods protected by repugnance are generally overlooked when we consider the value of new biomedical technologies. And yet, how we ethically evaluate cloning will be shaped by how we characterise it descriptively, by the context in which we place it, and by the perspective from which we view it.
The first task of ethics is to give an accurate description of the problem we are dealing with. And that is where we begin to fail. Typically, cloning is usually discussed in one of three familiar contexts, which might be called the technological, the liberal and the meliorist.
According to the former, cloning is to be seen as an extension of existing techniques that assist reproduction or determine the endowment Genetics of offspring. Cloning is to be seen as a neutral technique, devoid of intrinsic meaning or goodness, but susceptible to many applications, some good and some bad. Thus, the morality of cloning depends absolutely on the goodness or badness of the motives and intentions of the cloners. As one pro-cloning bioethicist has put it, "ethics should be judged (only) by the way in which the parents raise and educate the resulting child; that is, whether or not a child brought into the world through assisted reproductive technology is given the same love and affection as a child born in the usual way.
The liberal (or liberationist) perspective places cloning in the context of individual rights, liberties and powers. Cloning is simply another opportunity to exercise the individual's right to reproduce or to have the subject child of his or her choice. Alternatively, cloning reinforces our liberation (especially women's liberation) from the limits imposed by nature, from the uncertainties of chance, or from the necessity of sexual copulation. Certainly, cloning would free women from dependence on men, for the process requires only oocytes, nuclei and (at least for now) wombs - plus, of course, a healthy dose of that (distinctly "male") manipulative science, a science that likes to make amends to mother nature and natural mothers. For those who hold this view, the only moral restraints on cloning are to obtain valid informed consent and to avoid any bodily harm. When no one is cloned without their consent and when the clone suffers no physical harm, then the liberal conditions for lawful and therefore moral conduct are met. Moral concerns that go beyond violation of will or injury to the body are scorned as merely "symbolic", which is to say as much as unrealistic.
The meliorist perspective includes those nostalgic for the perfect world and eugenicists. The latter made a lot of noise in the past, but are now generally happy to see their aims advanced under the much less threatening banners of freedom and scientific progress. These people see cloning as a new way to improve human beings (on the low end, by ensuring the perpetuation of healthy individuals, while avoiding the risks of disease Genetics inherent in the lottery of sexual relations; and on the high end, by producing "optimal children", preserving top-notch genetic material; and, with the financial aid of soon-to-arrive techniques for high-precision engineering Genetics , improving in many respects congenital human capacities). Here, the morality of cloning, as a means, is justified by the excellence of the end, i.e. by the exceptional traits of the cloned individuals, be it beauty, strength or brains.
These three approaches, all American to the core and all perfectly attractive in their own right, are, as approaches to human procreation, sadly lacking. It is, to say the least, grossly distorting to view the wondrous mysteries of birth, of the renewal of generations or of individuality, through the prism of our reductive science and its powerful technologies. Similarly, to view reproduction (and the most intimate relations of family life) primarily from the politico-legal, litigious and individualistic perspective of rights only leads to undermining the private, but basically social, cooperative and duty-laden character of both the procreation and rearing of children, and the bond created by the promises of marriage. Trying to escape nature altogether (in order to satisfy the natural desire for the natural right to have children) is a self-contradictory theory and a self-alienating internship . For we humans are beings who can fall in love, i.e. erotic, and not mere intellects and wills imprisoned in our bodies. And while being healthy and fit are clearly great goods, it is deeply disturbing to regard children as products of artifice, perfectible by engineering Genetics, increasingly adaptable to our arbitrary designs, as things, in short, that take care of agreement with certain specifications and tolerable margins of error.
IV. The depth of sexuality
Technical, liberal and meliorist approaches alike ignore the deeper anthropological, social and also ontological meanings of bringing new human life into the world. With respect to this deeper and more appropriate view, cloning presents itself as a degeneration, or, rather, as a decisive violation of our nature as begotten and begetting beings and also of our social relations built on that natural foundation.
Recognising this natural perspective, the ethical judgement on cloning can no longer be reduced to a matter of motives and intentions, of rights and freedoms, of benefits and harms, or even of means and ends. It must be seen primarily as a matter of meaning: Is cloning a way to fully realise human procreation, to establish human relationships? Or, rather, is cloning, as I claim, its very pollution and perversion? In the face of that which defiles and perverts, the appropriate reaction can only be horror and rejection; and, conversely, horror and general rejection are prima facie evidence that something is dirty and violent. The burden of the moral test thus rests entirely on those who wish to demonstrate that the widespread repugnances of mankind are merely a manifestation of timidity and superstition.
On the other hand, repugnance does not need to stand before the court of reason and be judged by it. The wisdom of our horror at human cloning is partly demonstrable, even when we are faced with one of those special situations in which, ultimately, the heart has reasons that reason cannot fully comprehend.
To see cloning in its proper context, we must start not, as I did before, from the techniques of laboratory, but from the anthropology - natural and social - of sexual reproduction.
Sexual reproduction - by which I mean the generation of a new life from (exactly) two complementary elements, one female and one male, (ordinarily) through the conjugal act - is dictated (if that is the right term) not by human decision, culture or tradition. It is the natural mode of mammalian reproduction. By nature, every child has two biological parents. Each child comes from exactly two lineages, and links them. In natural generation, moreover, the exact constitution Genetics of the resulting offspring is determined, not by human design, but by a combination of nature and chance: each child participates in the natural common genotype of the human species, each child is genetically (and equally) related to each of its two parents, and yet each child is different from them and unique.
These biological truths about our origins mean, in turn, profound truths about both our identity and the human condition. Each of us is, for one, equally human, equally embedded in a particular nexus of familial origin, and equally individuated in our trajectory from birth to death - and, if all goes well, equally capable of participating (despite our mortality) with a complementary other in the very renewal of the human family through procreation. Though less important than our common humanity, our individuality Genetics is not humanly trivial. It manifests itself in our distinct appearance through which we are recognised everywhere; it reveals itself in the "signature" marks of our fingerprints and our immune system of self-recognition; it symbolises and foreshadows exactly the unique, never-to-be-repeated character of each human life.
Human societies, virtually everywhere, have structured the responsibility for raising children and have built their identity and relationship systems on the basis of the natural and profound fact of childbearing. The mysterious and yet universal "love of self" is culturally exploited everywhere both to ensure that children are not simply produced, but well cared for, and to create for every human being patent bonds of meaning, belonging and obligation. It is therefore wrong to treat such naturally rooted social practices as if they were mere cultural constructs (as might be driving on the right or the left, or burying or cremating the dead), constructs that can be changed with little cost to humanity. What would kinship be without its natural foundation? We must stand up to those who have begun to refer to sexual reproduction as the "traditional method of reproduction", that is, to those who would have us regard as traditional and, by implication, arbitrary, what is indeed not only natural, but certainly very profound.
Asexual reproduction, that which produces "single-parent" offspring, is a radical departure from the natural human way, introducing confusion into the understanding of the notions of father, mother, sibling, grandparent, etc., and into the nature of the moral relationships attached to them. The deviation would become even more radical if the offspring were result of a clone, derived from a mature adult of whom the clone would be an identical twin; or when a similar result is produced, not by natural accident (as happens in natural twinning), but by deliberate and manipulative design of man; or when the constitution Genetics of the child (or children) is pre-selected by the parent (or by the scientist). Accordingly, as we shall see, cloning is vulnerable to three kinds of concerns or objections, related to these three points: cloning threatens to confuse the concepts of identity and individuality, even in the case of small-scale cloning; cloning constitutes a giant step (though not the first) towards the conversion of procreation into manufacture, that is, towards the increasing depersonalisation of the generative process and towards the "production" of artificial children, products of man's will and of design (what some have called the problem of the bulk production of new lives); and cloning - as well as other forms of eugenic engineering of the next generation - represents a form of despotism of the cloners over the cloned, thus representing (even in benevolent cases) a blatant violation of the inner meaning of parent-child relationships, of what it means to have children, and of what it means to say "yes" to our own demise and "replacement".
Before addressing these specific ethical objections, I will allow myself to submit to test my thesis of the depth of the natural mode of procreation by accepting a challenge recently made to me by a friend of mine. What if the given natural mode of reproduction was asexual, and we were now faced with the technological innovation of sexual reproduction? subject That is, what if sexual dimorphism had been artificially induced and life had been produced by fusing complementary gametes, and the inventors of the new sexual reproduction argued that it promised all sorts of advantages, including the vigour of hybrids and the creation of individuality on a previously unknown scale? Would one then be obliged to defend natural asexuality as natural? Could one then say that asexual reproduction carried a profound human meaning?
The answer to this challenge forces us to explore the ontological meaning of sexual reproduction. For it would not be possible, I suppose, that there could be human life - or even higher forms of animal life - without sexuality and sexual reproduction. We find forms of asexual reproduction only in the lowest forms of life: in bacteria, algae, fungi and some invertebrates. Sexuality brings with it a new and rich relationship to the world. Only sexed animals can find other complementary beings with whom to pursue ends that transcend their own existence. For a sexed being, the world is no longer an indifferent and massively homogeneous otherness, partly edible and partly dangerous. The world also contains some very special beings, related and complementary, of the same species but of the other sex, towards whom one tends with special interest and intensity. In the higher birds and mammals, the outward glance is not only to discover food and detect predators, but also to look for possible mates; the glance at the world full of splendour is steeped in the desire for union, the animal antecedent of human love and the germ of sociality. It is no coincidence that the human animal is, of all animals, both the most sexual - whose females do not go into oestrus, but are receptive throughout their estrous cycle and whose males must therefore have the greatest appetite and sexual energy in order to reproduce successfully - and the most ambitious, the most social, the most open and the most intelligent.
The soul-uplifting power of sexuality is rooted, at bottom, in its strange connection with mortality, which man accepts while trying to overcome it. Asexual reproduction can be seen as a mere continuation of self-preservation activities. When an organism divides, by splitting or twinning, to become two, the original being is preserved (duplicated), and nothing dies. Sexuality, which, by contrast, means perishable being, is at the service of renewal; the two that unite to generate another will soon die. Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, thus serves a purpose that is partly hidden from the individual who would seek himself and, ultimately, in conflict with him. Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genital organs in favour of our own death. The salmon that swims upstream to empty its semen and die is telling a universal story: sex is linked to death, to which it offers in procreation a partial response.
Salmon and other animals blindly manifest this truth. Only human beings can understand its meaning. As the story of the Garden of Eden so powerfully teaches us, our humanisation coincides with the self-awareness of sexuality, with the recognition of our sexual nakedness and all that it implies: shame at our needy incompleteness, uneasy self-division and finitude; fear of the eternal; hope for self-transcendence in children and in relationship with God. In the sexually self-conscious animal, mere sexual drive can become infatuation, pleasure can become love. The humanly considered sexual desire is thus sublimated in the aspiration for fulfilment and immortality, proper to the lover, which consciously drives the conjugal act and its generative fruit - as well as all the other higher human possibilities of action, language and song.
Through children, a common good of both husband and wife, man and wife achieve genuine unification (beyond mere sexual "union", which would not achieve this). The two become one when they share their love generously, and not roguishly, in this third being. Flesh of their flesh, the child is the same being of the parents, intermingled and externalised, which has been given a separate and persistent existence. The unification is also reinforced by their shared work of raising the child. Creating an openness to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed, but also our names and our hopes that they will surpass us in goodness and happiness, children are a testimony to our faith in transcendence. Gender duality and sexual desire, which primarily push our love upwards and outwards from us, provide us with a partial overcoming of the confinement and limitation of our perishable corporeality.
Human procreation, in short, is not simply an activity of our rational will. It is a more complete activity precisely because it involves us bodily, erotically and spiritually, as well as rationally. There is a profound wisdom in the mystery of nature in uniting the pleasure of sex, the inarticulate aspiration for union, the speech of the embrace of love and the desire for children; a mystery deeply seated, but only partially expressed in one and the same activity through which we give continuity to the chain of human existence and participate in the renewal of human possibilities. Whether we are aware of it or not, closing the sexual act to procreation, as well as creating life outside the loving and intimate context of the sexual act, are inherently dehumanising, no matter how good the product may seem.
We are now in a position to consider the more specific objections to cloning.
V. The perversities of cloning
To begin with, an important, albeit formal, objection: any attempt to clone a human being would constitute an unethical experiment that offends the potential resulting child. As experiments on animals (amphibians and sheep) indicate, there are significant risks of failure and malformation. Moreover, because of what cloning means, one cannot assume the consent of the future child to be cloned, even if it were to be born healthy. Thus, ethically speaking, we can never know whether human cloning is permissible.
I understand, of course, the philosophical difficulty of trying to compare a flawed life with a non-existence. Several bioethicists, proud of their philosophical acumen, use this conundrum to make it difficult for those who say that one can harm a child at conception, because it is precisely thanks to the inculpated conception that the child lives to denounce it. But common sense tells us that there is no reason to fear such philosophies. For we know for certain that people can harm and even mutilate children in the very act of conceiving them, as happens, for example, in the vertical transmission of the AIDS virus, in the maternal transmission of heroin dependence, or even by conceiving them as bastards or when one is unable or unwilling to care for them properly. And we believe that to do these things deliberately, or negligently, is inexcusable and clearly unethical.
The objection about the impossibility of presuming consent may even go beyond the obvious and sufficient point that a clone, if asked later, might rightly regret having been so originated. At stake then are not only harms and benefits, but also doubts about the independence needed to give adequate (and even retroactive) consent, i.e. not only the ability to choose, but also the willingness and ability to choose freely and well. It is not entirely clear to what extent a clone can be a moral agent. For, as we shall see below, in the very act of cloning and raising it as a clone, its makers subvert the independence of the cloned child, starting with that aspect that comes from knowing that one is a surprise and a gift to the world, rather than being the calculated result of another's ingenious project .
Cloning creates serious issues of identity and individuality. The cloned person may experience concerns about their distinct individuality, not only because they will be identical in genotype and appearance to another human being, but because, in their case, they may also be a twin of the person who, if we can call them that, is their "father" or "mother". What are the psychic burdens of being the "child" or the "parent" of one's own twin? The cloned individual, moreover, will be burdened with a genotype that has already been lived. He can no longer be a complete surprise to himself or to the world. People will tend to compare their achievements in life with those of their alter ego. True, their Education and the circumstances of their life will be different; and it is true that genotype is not exactly destiny. And yet one can expect that the parent or others will strive to conform the clone's life to that of the original - or, at least, that the clone will always be seen with the original image in mind. Why else would they clone the basketball star, the mathematician or the beauty pageant queen, or even the old dead parent in the first place?
Since Dolly's birth, there has been much ambiguity when talking about identity Genetics. Experts have been quick to reassure the public that the clone would in no way be the same person or that identity conflicts could be provoked: as noted above, they liked to say that Mel Gibson's clone would not be Mel Gibson. From agreement. But one is dwarfing the truth by emphasising the additional importance of the intrauterine environment, the circumstances of Education or the social environment: genotype matters a great deal anyway. Genotype is, after all, the only reason to clone, whether humans or sheep. The chances of Ronaldo's clones playing football are, it seems, infinitely higher than those of Julian Marias' clones.
Interestingly, this conclusion is inadvertently reinforced by an ethical point that friends of cloning insist on: no cloning without donor consent. Although this is an objection coming from the most orthodox liberalism, it is intriguing that it comes from people (such as Ruth Macklin) who also insist strongly that genotype does not mean identity or individuality and who deny that a child could rightly complain about being made as a copy Genetics of someone else. If Mel Gibson's clone was not like Mel Gibson, how could Mel Gibson have reason to object to someone being made as his clone? Today, scientists are allowed to use blood and tissue samples in research projects that bring no benefit to those who provided them: my shed hair, my expectoration, even my biopsied tissues, are no longer me, and they are not mine either. The courts have ruled that the profits from the uses and applications that scientists can make from my excised tissues do not legally belong to me. Why, then, no cloning without consent - including, I suppose, no cloning from the cells of someone who has already died? What harm can be done to the donor, if the genotype is not "himself"? To tell the truth, the only strong justification for objecting is that genotype really does have something to do with identity, and everyone knows it. If not, on what basis could Michael Jordan object to someone cloning "him" from, say, cells taken from a small piece of his skin? The insistence on donor consent clearly reveals that all cloning is about identity.
Being genetically different not only symbolises the uniqueness of each human life and the independence from parents that each child is entitled to. It is also an important support for living a dignified and dignified life. This argument applies with great force to any attempt at large-scale production of identical human beings. But it is enough, in my view, to reject even the first attempts to clone a human being. It must never be forgotten that it is on cloned human beings that our eugenic or mere power fantasies are projected.
The psychic identity disorder (feeling copied), based on the obvious identity Genetics (being the same) will tend to be aggravated by the chaos that cloning creates in social identity and family ties. For, as already mentioned, cloning causes tremendous confusion in kinship and social relations. Bioethicist James Nelson has noted that a child cloned from her "mother" may develop a desire to know and relate to her "father", so she might understandably seek to identify the father of her "mother", who is, after all, her biological twin. Would the "grandfather", who thought his parental duties were already fulfilled, be pleased to discover that the cloned child sought him out for the attention and support expected of a father?
Social identity and social bonds of relationship and responsibility are to a large extent connected to and rely on biological kinship. Universal social taboos against incest (and adultery) serve to make it clear who is related to whom (and especially which children belong to which parents), as well as to avoid the social identity of parent-child (or brother-sister) with the social identity of boyfriends, husbands or fathers. It is true that social identity is changed by adoption (but as a matter in the best interests of living children: children are not deliberately produced for adoption). It is also true that artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation with donor sperm, or embryo donation, are in some ways forms of "prenatal adoption" - but they are also practices that are fraught with serious moral problems. But there are in these cases (as in all other cases of sexual reproduction) gamete providers who are known - there is a genetic father and a mother Genetics- who can be found if searched for (as adopted children often are): it is possible to know who is genetically with whom.
In the case of cloning, however, there is only one "parent". Here, the status, ordinarily so sad, of the "child with only one parent" is deliberately planned, and with a vengeance. In the case of self-cloning, the offspring is, in addition, a twin of itself; and the much-feared result of incest - being the father of one's own mother's child - is here deliberately provoked, although without incestuous sexual intercourse. What does it mean to be a father, grandfather, uncle, cousin, sister? Who can bear these titles and their associated burdens? What social identity subject will someone have who has excluded an entire family branch - that of the "father" or that of the "mother"? It is no good to say that our society, with its high incidence of divorce, remarriage, adoption, children out of wedlock and the like, has created so much confusion in kinship and social relations that responsibility for children (and for others) has been diluted. It is no good to say that, unless one wishes to argue that this state of affairs is good for the children.
Human cloning could also represent a giant step in the transformation from begetting to producing, from procreation to manufacturing (literally, "making by hand"), a process that has already begun with in vitro fertilisation and genetic diagnosis of embryos. With cloning, not only is the entire process in hand, but the entire genetic blueprint of the cloned individual is selected and determined by human "craftsmen". Of course, the subsequent development will be carried out in the natural way and the resulting children will be recognised as human beings. But we are taking a decisive step towards making man himself one more of the things that man makes. Human nature thus becomes the last redoubt of nature that succumbs to the technological project , project that turns all things into subject raw materials at man's disposal, to be homogenised and reconstituted by our rational technique, according to fashionable subjective prejudices.
How does begetting differ from making? In natural procreation, two human beings meet, complementarily male and female, to give existence to another being, which is formed, exactly as we are and by virtue of what we are: living and therefore perishable, and therefore inspiringly loving human beings. In cloned reproduction, by contrast, and in the more advanced forms of manufacture to which it leads, we give existence to a being not by virtue of what we are, but by virtue of what we intend and design. As with any other product of our hands, no matter how excellent, the maker is above the thing made: he is never an equal to the thing made, but a superior who transcends it by virtue of his will to power and his creative skill . Scientists who clone animals make it perfectly clear that they are engaged in instrumental production; animals are, from the beginning, designed as means to serve the rational purposes imposed on them by man. In human cloning, scientists and "prospective" parents adopt the same technocratic mentality towards children: the artefacts they produce turn out to be children.
Such a status is profoundly dehumanising, regardless of how good the product is. Large-scale cloning of the same individual sample makes this point vividly, but the violation of human equality, freedom and dignity is also the case for a single planned human cloning. And dehumanised procreation in manufacturing is further degraded by commodification, an almost inevitable development if the production of children is allowed to go ahead under the banner of commerce. Biotech companies Genetics and reproductive biotech companies are already growth industries, but will enter the orbit of commerce when the project Human Genome is completed. Supply will create enormous demand. Even before human cloning can be practised, existing companies will have invested heavily in developing oocyte harvesting from autopsied ovaries or ovarian surgery, will have practised embryo modification Genetics , and will have begun to store tissue for future transplantation. Through womb rental services and the purchase and sale of tissues and embryos, the price of which will be proportionate to the merits of the donors, the commercialisation of nascent human life will not be prevented.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the internship of human cloning by means of nuclear transfer - as well as other already imagined forms of next generation engineering Genetics- will enshrine and aggravate a profound and perverse misunderstanding of what it means to have children and what the relationship between parents and children is. Now, when a couple decides to procreate, man and woman are saying yes to the emergence of new life in their own newness, they are saying yes not only to having a child, but also and tacitly to having the child that comes, however it turns out to be. By accepting our finitude and thus opening ourselves to our generational substitution, we are tacitly confessing the limits of our power. In this universal way of nature, embracing the future through procreation means precisely that we give up rigidly fixing our contribution to what we hope will be the immortality of life and of the human species. This means that our children are not ours, that is, they are not our property or our possession. They are supposed to live, not our life or anyone else's, but their own. True, we will try to guide them on their way, giving them not only life but also Education, love and a way of life; true, in them is centred our hope that they will live beautiful and fulfilling lives, and that they will enable us to transcend to some extent our own limitations. Moreover, their distinctiveness Genetics and their independence are the natural foreshadowing of the profound truth that they have a life of their own never before lived by another. They come from a known past, but no one has mapped the path they will follow into their future.
Much harm is done by parents who try to live vicariously in their children. Children are sometimes coerced into fulfilling the failed dreams of their unhappy parents; the burden of having to live up to their predecessor is placed on the shoulders of So-and-so jr. or Thingy III. If most parents have hopes for their children, cloning parents have much more definite plans for their clones. By cloning, these domineering parents take, already at the beginning, a decisive step that contradicts the whole meaning of parent-child relationships, which are always free and open to the future. The cloned child receives a genotype that has already been lived: its life is built according to the architectural plan of a previous life that controls the life to come. Cloning is therefore inherently despotic, because it seeks to make one's own child (or the child of another) in one's own image (or in the image of one's chosen clone), and to make its future of agreement with one's own will. In some cases, such despotism may be mild and benevolent. In other cases, it will be malign and overtly tyrannical. But it will inevitably be despotism, i.e. control of another by agreement with one's will.
VI. Response to some objections
Cloning advocates, of course, are not conscious promoters of tyranny. They see themselves as friends of freedom: of the freedom of individuals to reproduce, of the freedom of scientists and inventors to discover and further "progress" in science and technology from Genetics. They only accept large-scale cloning for animals, but want cloning to be accessible as another human choice in the exercise of our "right to reproduce" - our right to have children with "desirable genes". As Professor John Robertson says, under the banner of our "right to reproduce" we already practice early forms of unnatural, artificial or extramarital reproduction, and we also practice elementary forms of eugenic selection. Against this background, human cloning will not be problematic.
This is a perfect example of slippery slope logic and the slippery way in which such logic is already operating in the field of artificial reproduction. Only a few years ago, the slippery slope argument was used to oppose artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation with heterologous sperm. It was said then that the principles on the basis of which these practices were being justified would later be used to justify more artificial and more eugenic practices, including cloning. Not at all, said the supporters of artificial reproduction at the time, for we can always make the necessary legal distinctions. And now, without even the slightest hint of a distinction, they themselves consider the continuation of one practice with another to be justified in itself.
The principle of reproductive freedom as enunciated by the proponents of cloning logically encompasses the ethical acceptability of letting oneself go all the way down the slippery slope - to ectogenically develop children from fertilisation to term (if that were possible), to produce children whose endowment Genetics were result of complete and perfect eugenic planning. If reproductive freedom means having the child of one's choice and by whatever means, then that freedom knows no limits and accepts none.
However, far from considering them legitimised by virtue of a "right to reproduce", the emergence of assisted reproduction and engineering techniques Genetics should push us to reconsider the meaning and limits of this alleged right. Indeed, the "right to reproduce" has always been a peculiar and problematic concept. Rights generally belong to individuals, but this is a right that (before cloning) could not be exercised by a single person. Does the right, then, belong only to couples? Is it a right (of the woman) to conceive and bear, or a right (of one or more parents) to raise and educate? Is there a right to have one's own biological child? Is there a right to simply attempt reproduction, or is there also a right to achieve reproductive success? Is there a right to acquire the baby of one's choice?
Claiming a negative "right to reproduction" certainly makes sense if one is claiming protection against state interference with procreative freedom, as would be the case, for example, with a compulsory sterilisation programme. But surely such a right cannot support a claim for harm against nature if it proves impossible to have children, nor a right to correct reproductive deficiency through technology if efforts to have children naturally fail. Some insist that the right to reproduction also includes the right against state interference with the free use of all technological means of obtaining children. But such a position is untenable: for reasons to do with the means employed, any community can legally prohibit surrogacy, polygamy or the sale of children to infertile couples without violating the basic human right to reproduce. When the exercise of a previously innocuous freedom involves disruptive practices that were never intended to be included in the original freedom, it is necessary to reconsider whether it is justified to include such conflicting practices in that freedom.
Certainly, negative screening Genetics is already practised by some through genetic screening and prenatal diagnosis. However, these practices must be governed by a health rule . The aim is to prevent, through preconception genetic committee , the birth of children suffering from known serious genetic diseases. If and when gene therapy becomes possible, such diseases could be treated, in utero and even before implantation, I have, in principle, no moral objection to such a possibility (although I am not without some practical concerns), precisely because it would serve the medical purpose of curing existing individuals. But therapy, to be therapy, does not only imply an existing individual. It also implies a health rule . In this sense, even germline gene therapy, even if practised not only on a human individual, but on a sperm or an oocyte, would be less radical than cloning, for cloning in no sense is therapeutic. But once the distinction between health promotion and genetic enhancement, between so-called negative and positive eugenics, is blurred, the door is opened to all eugenic projects of the future.
"To ensure that a child is healthy and has good opportunities in life": this is Robertson's principle which, because of its last clause, becomes an elastic and limitless principle. Being over six feet tall may provide very good opportunities in life, and so will having the looks of Marilyn Monroe or the intelligence of a genius.
Proponents of cloning believe that there are legitimate uses of cloning and that these can be distinguished from illegitimate uses. But, according to their own principles, there is no way to establish such limits at agreement . Nor is there any way to impose such hypothetical limits on . Nor is there any way to impose such hypothetical limits on internship. Reproductive freedom, as they understand it, is governed exclusively by the subjective wishes of the prospective parents (as long as bodily harm to the child is avoided). The sentimentally touching case of the married, infertile couple is, for that very reason, indistinguishable from the case of an individual (married or not) who has the desire to clone someone famous or talented, living or dead. Moreover, the above principle justifies not only cloning, but certainly all future attempts to artificially create (manufacture) "perfect" children.
A concrete example will show how, on the internship and not only in theory, the so-called innocent case is hopelessly continued with the most worrying cases. On internship, the couple eagerly desiring that child of theirs will necessarily have to submit to the tyranny of the experts. Let us consider a sterile couple, she without ovaries and he azoospermic, who want a child (genetically) of their own and who propose to clone either the husband or the wife. The doctor (who is also not only a scientist, but also co-owner of a cloning company business ) points out some possible difficulties involved in cloning one of the partners - the cloned child will not necessarily be the genetic child of both of them, but only the child of one of them; that this one-sidedness Genetics can create tensions in the couple; that the child could suffer from identity problems; that sterility can be perpetuated in the child; and other difficulties - and points out how much more advantageous it will be to choose a donor of nuclei. Much better than having a child that belongs to only one of them would be to have a child chosen by both of them. Showing his expertise in the selection of healthy and valuable donors, the doctor sample gives the couple his latest catalogue of donors, showing photographs, health reports, and the achievements of his "stable" of potential clones, of which tissue samples are kept frozen at his laboratory. Why not take the opportunity to have a more perfect child?
The "perfect child", of course, is a project, not so much of infertility doctors, but of eugenics scientists and their supporters. For them, the priority right is not the so-called right to reproduce, but what the biologist Bentley Glass described, a quarter of a century ago, as "the right of every child to be born with a robust physical and mental constitution, based on a robust genotype ..., the inalienable right to a robust inheritance". But, to secure that right and to satisfy the requirements of quality control over human life, the conception and gestation of human beings needs to be transferred to the brilliant atmosphere of laboratory, within which human life can be fertilised, nurtured, pruned, purified, inspected, stimulated, flattered, injected, examined, graded, quality graded, approved, guaranteed, priced, sealed, packaged and dispatched. There is no other way to produce perfect children.
And yet the proponents of cloning push us to forget the scenarios of manufactured life at laboratory and large-scale cloning, to look only at the home cases of infertile couples exercising their reproductive rights. But if the isolated cases are so innocent, why, when their issue multiplies, are they so repugnant? (Similarly, why do others object that people can make money by exploiting this internship, if internship itself seems perfectly acceptable to them?) If we were to follow the sound ethical principle of universalising our decisions - wouldn't it be right that everyone should want to clone (with their consent, of course) Raul? Wouldn't it be right for everyone to choose to practice asexual reproduction - we would discover how ethically wrong such seemingly innocent cases are. The "science-fiction" cases vividly reveal the true meaning of what is deceptively presented to us as benign and acceptable.