Attack of the Clones

Many people in the debate about cloning curiously assume that “reproductive” cloning is monstrous and immoral, while “therapeutic” cloning is perfectly fine, or at least less morally objectionable than reproductive cloning. I say “curiously” because it seems to me that the truth of the matter is almost exactly the reverse.

Think about it. Reproductive cloning, whatever else might be said about it, would, in theory, produce a human being with all the dignity and rights that you and I enjoy. Why should the act of bringing a human being into existence, no matter however extraordinary the means, be thought immoral? I think part of the reason is the “ick” factor – the shudder most normal people have at the thought of a person being created in such an artificial way. More substantively, it appears that the process of cloning, which is far from perfected, would have a high failure rate – that is, there would likely be several short-lived and/or deformed early models before we were able to clone a healthy, normal human being. This alone would seem to rule it out.

But suppose we did have a fail-safe method of cloning. Imagine a cloning machine where a person could step into a chamber and their clone would appear in an adjoining chamber (I’m imagining something like the matter transporter in Star Trek). Would it still be immoral to clone?

Now, you might say that having a clone of yourself running around the world could have all kinds of weird psychological effects on both you and him. Fair enough. So imagine that somehow you are unaware of the clone’s existence and he’s unaware of yours. Is there anything immoral per se in the mere act of bringing a human being into existence in this way? As I said, we all assume (rightly) that once a clone exists he or she would have all the same rights as anyone else. Biologically, psychologically, spiritually, etc. he would be indistinguishable from a non-cloned human. So, it’s hard (though perhaps not impossible) to come up with a compelling reason why it’s wrong to bring this person into existence.

On the other hand, so-called therapeutic cloning involves the creation of nascent human life solely for the purposes of exploitation. Proponents actually trumpet the fact that cloned embryos will never be brought to term. Rather, they will be harvested and destroyed long before they ever get to that point.

And this is supposed to be reassuring? It just reaffirms that therapeutic cloning is the creation of life that exists solely as a means to the well-being of others, not as an end in itself. Whatever we think about reproductive cloning, at least the person produced would still have to be treated as an end in himself. In the case of therapeutic cloning we are facing the prospect of turning human life into a mere commodity that can be bought, sold, experimented on and destroyed at will.

If reproductive cloning is wrong, it seems to only be wrong contingently. That is, it’s wrong only because there’s no way to do it that wouldn’t entail morally unacceptable risks. But we can imagine a method that avoided these risks, thus making it permissible. Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, appears to be wrong in itself.

The obvious rejoinder here is that the cloned embryo is not a “person” and therefore doesn’t merit moral consideration. But this, I think, misses the point. Even if you are pro-choice on abortion, there are still good reasons to worry about human embryos (cloned or otherwise) being turned into a commodity.

Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall puts it this way:

Unlike abortion, ESCR [embryonic stem cell research] involves neither a conflict between two physically interconnected lives nor the rare, unplanned and deeply regrettable destruction of incipient human life. When advocates of ESCR rhetorically evoke prior debates on abortion by presenting ESCR as a choice between a living person and an early human embryo, we are distracted from the broader context of ESCR.

A multimillion-dollar medical industry surrounds the supposedly simple “which of these two entities matters more?” approach. Endorsing ESCR means endorsing an elaborate, systematic, routine industry of embryo production and destruction, an industry not likely to limit itself to therapies for chronic disease. To suggest that we will not also see the emergence of more generally applicable, and more widely lucrative, products defies common sense.

I think even those who support abortion rights would balk at saying that nascent human life (and that’s indisputably what an embryo is) has no moral worth whatsoever. But if it has any worth whatsoever, then surely that is a reason for saying that we can’t simply do whatever we like with it. Otherwise, what does it mean to say that it has moral worth?

And if embryos have no moral worth, then there would properly be no limits to what we could do with them. Suppose we found that human embryos could be used to make a face cream that would get rid of wrinkles. Botox without the injection! Would there be anything wrong with that?

Therapeutic cloning is ultimately about reducing human life to its scientific, research and market value. This makes it far more morally questionable than merely bringing a new life into existence by unusual means.