Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) used by tens of thousands of
people, in over 200 clinics
In vitro fertilization ("test tube babies")
Embryo manipulation
Embryo donation
Surrogate pregnancy
Cloning
Question: If cloning is opposed, must we oppose these other ART too?
CLONING AND CONSERVATIVE FAMILY VALUES
Kass ties objections to cloning to a host of traditional, conservative,
so-called "family values"
Shift away from traditional, conservative"family values" makes it
harder to explain why cloning is wrong
Cultural changes make it hard to express a common and respectful
understanding of:
Sexuality, procreation, new life, family, meaning of
mother/fatherhood
Changes include:
Legality and widespread use of abortion
Sexual revolution brought on by pill and other birth control
Reproductive rights of single women, homosexual men and
lesbians
SPECIFIC FAMILY VALUES THREATENED
One: Monogamous marriage threatened by new repro tech:
Is monogamous marriage a good thing? (Kass: yes)
Defenders of stable monogomous marriage give offence to
those living in new family forms and to those children who
(even w/o assist repro) have 3 or 4 parents or none at all
If accept divorce and out of wedlock birth, then stable
monogamous marriage as ideal home for procreation is no longer
agreed upon cultural norm
Clone is the ultimate "single parent child"
ARTs "undermine the justification and support that biological
parenthood gives to the monogamous marriage"
If having children is possible only in monogamous
marriage, this encourages such marriage
If you support monogamous marriage, should oppose
cloning (and other ARTs)?
Two: Cloning helps divorce sexuality and procreation (and
traditionalists want these tied)
"If sex has no intrinsic connection to generating babies (birth
control, sex for enjoyment), babies need have no necessary
connection to sex" (ARTs, including cloning)
Three: Babies W/o sex confuse normal kin relations
Who is the mother?
Egg donor, surrogate who carries and delivers, one who
rears
Isn't there a good case for saying it is the last?
Applies to cloning but also other ART
What about adoption? Same questions?Same objections?
Four: Cloning undermines heterosexuality
Kass objects to seeing "natural heterosexual difference" as a
matter of "cultural construction"
If male/female not complementary (normatively-in terms of
values) or generatively significant, babies need not come from
male-female complementarity
WORRISOME CLONING SCENARIOS
Nucleus (DNA) banking (like sperm banks)
Famous athletes and other celebrities market their DNA as they
now do autographs and about everything else
Embryo and germline genetic testing and manipulation in order to
obtain "better" babies
People genetic testing now to avoid deformed babies
Cloning to "upgrade" the gene pool and replicate superior types
DIMENSIONS OF CLONING PEOPLE FIND REPULSIVE
Mass production of human beings,
Clone look-alikes
Compromised in their individuality
Are identical twins "compromised" in this way?
Perhaps if they were mass produced?
Mother-daughter, father-son twins
Why is this repulsive if sibling twins are not?
Does it depend on idea that earlier twin did cloning?
With identical twins you don't have one twin creating the
other
Needn't happen this way
"Bizarre prospect of woman giving birth to and rearing a genetic copy
of herself, or her deceased father/mother"
"Grotesqueness of conceiving child as exact replacement for another
who died"
"Creating embryonic genetic duplicates of onself to be used for tissue
and organ transplantation"
Is this gross or a good idea?
"Narcissism (excessive self-love) of those who clone themselves"
"Arrogance of those who think know who deserves to be cloned, which
genotype a child-to-be would be thrilled to receive"
Is it arrogant to think that some human traits are better than
others?
"Frankenstein hubris of creating and controlling destiny of a human
life; man playing God"
Overstatement of power of this technology?How does the cloner
control the destiny of the clone's life?
INSIGHT OF STRONG EMOTIONAL REACTIONS WITHOUT
FULL REASONS: "WISDOM OF REPUGNANCE"
Cloning is: Offensive, grotesque, revolting, repugnant, repulsive
These are not arguments and things we have found repugnant in past
are often calmly accepted today (though this is not always good)
"Man gets used to everything-the beast!"
Sometimes repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom,
beyond reason's ability to articulate it
No argument can fully explains the horror of:
Father-daughter incest (even with consent and contraception)
Sex with animals
Mutilating a corpse
Eating human flesh
Raping/murdering another human
A person's inability to give a full rational justification for why these
are revolting does not make that revulsion ethically suspect;
We know they are wrong even if we can't say why
Is it true that we can't explain why?
Is he right? Shouldn't strong negative emotions that are not
backed by reasons be seen as questionable?
Repugnance toward human cloning in this category
We intuit and feel, immediately and w/o argument, violation of
things we rightfully hold dear
Repugnance revolts against human excesses that transgress
something unspeakably profound
Wisdom of repugnance: "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten
how to shudder"
Repugnance only voice left that speaks up to defend central core
of humanity in an age in which everything is thought to be
permissible as long as it is freely done and our given human
nature no longer commands respect.
Strong emotional reactions might not be "unspeakably profound" but
deeply prejudicial?
Eg: Some still find kissing someone of another race repugnant
NATURALNESS OF SEXUAL REPRODUCTION AND
UNNATURALNESS OF CLONING
Sexual reproduction (genesis of new life from two complementary
elements, one male, one female via coitus) is "established" not by
human decision, culture or tradition, but by nature
Natural way of mammalian reproduction
It is the way nature has given us to reproduce
Precise genetic constitution of offspring determined by
combination of nature and chance, not by human design
There is human design in sense of choosing partner
Natural here means:
(Relative) absence of human design (not absence of human
involvement)
Achieving results in the way nature has designed us to achieve
them
But even if cloning is clearly unnatural in this sense, that doesn't by
itself show it is wrong
Things might be unnatural and right
Like other ARTs(e.g., birth by c-section) or medicine (fighting natural disease)
Need further argument
THREE TYPES OF CONCERNS/OBJECTIONS TO CLONING
One: Threatens to confuse identity/individuality
Even small scale cloning does this
Our genetic individuality is not humanly trivial
It gives us our distinctive appearance by which all
recognize us
It foreshadow the unique never to be repeated character of
each human life.
What about natural identical twins? Though they are genetically
identical, they have a unique never to be repeated character
Two: Cloning represents a giant step (though not first one) toward
transforming procreation into manufacture
Toward increasing depersonalization of process of generation
Toward production of human children as artifacts--products of
human will and design
Problem of "commodification" of new life
Assumption here is that procreation should be significantly natural
(significantly undesigned by humans)
That this is an area of human life that should not come under the
(complete? too much? ) province of human engineering, design,
technology
Just as for those who intrinsically value wild nature, the natural
world should not be manufactured and turned into an artifact by
humans, so too human beings should not be turned into human
artifacts
Of course cloning a person is not to design him/her from scratch (as
would be genetically engineering each of their genes and then totally
controlling their environment)
It does give us a kind of control over genes of our offspring we have
never had before.
Three: Cloning misunderstands nature of parenting (which
involves giving up significant control)
Cloning tries to keep control (hence is despotism)
Couples who choose to procreate, say yes to emergence of new
life in its novelty, say yes not only to having a child, but to
having whatever child this child turns out to be
Some truth to this, but aren't there limits here?
Suggests that abortion of severely deformed fetuses-e.g.,
without brains--is unacceptable
What if your child turns out to be a drug addict and
murderer?
Four: Cloning is despotism
Embracing the future by procreating means we are relinquishing
our grip, even as we take our share in what we hope will be
immortality of human species
Thus we confess the limits of our control
Our children are not our possessions/property
Children are not supposed to live our lives for us, or anyone's
else's lives but their own
Much harm done by parents who try to live vicariously
through their children
Children compelled to fulfil broken dreams of unhappy
parents.
Cloning parents will have expectations for their children (not just
the hopes ordinary parents do)
Cloning parents will be overbearing parents
Child given a genotype that has already lived
Will be full expectation that this past blueprint ought to
control life that is to come
Thus, cloning is inherently despotic
Seeks to make children after ones own image or after an image of
one's choosing and their future according to one's will
But all parents try to make their children have the traits parents
think are good ones
Doesn't this conceive of the cloner as having more power than
she really does?
Cloning is a step on the road to eugenics (improving the
human breed)
Choosing the perfect baby
Instead of cloning your child you could choose a donor nucleus
Not a child of your own, but of your own choosing
Look through catalog of cloning donors: pictures, health records
and accomplishments of those whose tissues are in deep freeze
Eugenics
Right to be born with sound heritage based on sound genotype
To do this with quality control, human conceptions/gestation will
have to be
"Brought into the bright light of the lab: fertilized
nourished, pruned, weeded, watched, inspected, prodded, pinched
cajoled, injected, tested, rated, graded, approved, stamped,
wrapped, sealed, and delivered"
KASS ON PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY
Tech imperative: If it can be done it must be done.
Argues against technological fix mentality for technologies that
deeply affect humans
Confidence in our ability to fix unwelcome outcomes of tech
advance, usually by means of still newer and better techs
Questions how successful we can continue to be in such after-the-fact repairing
With technology used on human body and mind, that will surely effect
fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature, relationships,
and meaning of being human
We should not be willing to risk everything in naive hope that if
things go wrong we can later set them right.
Will we be slaves of unregulated progress and ultimately its artifacts
or remain free humans who guide our techniques to enhance human
dignity.