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Reproductive Cloning |
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Human Reproductive Cloning
from the Perspective of the Future
Nick Bostrom
Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University
Chair, World Transhumanist Association
27 December 2002
Slightly revised 5 April 2004
Imagine that you are one of the human clones that will be born (there is
little doubt that this will happen sooner or later). And imagine
yourself listening in to the current arguments for
making cloning illegal. You hear people opining
that cloning threatens human dignity, that it would be
playing God, that it represents a slippery slope towards a
dehumanized future, that everybody has a right to
a unique genome (except identical twins?) or to an
unknown genome, and so forth. How would it make you feel?
To hear all these dignified people talking about you as if your very
existence were a crime against humanity?
Such an imaginary point-of-view can help us put things in perspective. There
is one argument that, as a future clone, you might understand and
agree with: concerns about the safety of the
procedure. The argument that we ought to postpone
human cloning until we have perfected the method in animals
makes some degree of sense. (Even so, suppose you were a slightly
deformed human clone - would you agree that it was
a terrible moral offense to have caused you to
come into existence?)
Historically, we find that many a great medical breakthrough, now rightly
seen as a blessing, was in its own time condemned by bioconservative
moralists. This was the case with anesthesia during surgery and
childbirth. People argued that it was unnatural
and that it would weaken our moral fiber. It was
also the case with heart transplantations. How yucky to take a
living heart out of one person and put it in the chest of another!
And it was the case with in vitro
fertilization. These "test tube babies" would be
dehumanized and would be suffer grave psychological harm. Today, of
course, anesthesia is taken for
granted; heart transplantation is seen as one of
medicine's glories; and the public approval rate of IVF is up from
15% in the early seventies to over 70% today.
I think we can learn something from these historical episodes. One lesson is
that our immediate emotional reactions to medical developments are an
unreliable indicator of their morality. We are prone to prejudice and
to narrow-minded underestimatation of the
long-term benefits of technological development.
The "yuck factor" needs to be treated with a great deal of
skepticism, and, pace Leon Kass, we should be wary of viewing it as
embodying a great "Wisdom of Repugnance", especially for the purposes
of making public policy.
We all have a moral responsibility to recognize the clone for what she is -
a unique human person, with just as much human dignity as those of us
who
were conceived in more traditional ways.
By the time the first human clone becomes an adult, the moral debates over
cloning will probably be long forgotten. The present opponents of
cloning may have retired or moved on to being
outraged about other things. The clone will
hopefully be descibed in more welcoming language than that used by many
current commentators.
In the big scheme of things, cloning will not significantly change the
world. Some people will owe their lives to this technology, and some
infertile couples will be grateful for having had the chance to raise
a child of their own. Some people may misguidedly
use cloning to try to bring back a lost child or a
loved one, not realizing that personal identity is
not reducible to genetic identity. Some people may choose to have a child
that is a clone of a stranger they admire,
perhaps a great scientist, athlete or religious
leader; yet if the current level of demand for elite
sperm or elite eggs is any indication, the people who choose this
option will be in a tiny minority.
Meanwhile, other areas of technology will be advancing fast and furiously,
leading to developments that will overshadow cloning. Some of these
developments will be truly frightening - genetically engineered
biowarfare agents, for example, and new weapons
based on molecular nanotechnology. Those prospects
deserve our serious attention and concern. Other
developments will open up unprecedented opportunities for human growth and
flourishing. One day we will find ways of halting and reversing the
aging process. We will have the option of
extending our intellectual, physical, emotional,
and spiritual capacities beyond the levels that are possible
today. This will be the end of humanity's childhood, and the
beginning of what one might call a "posthuman"
era. Our descendants, or even you and I if we
manage to stay alive until then, will look back on today and today's
primitive condition in much the way we now look back on our humanoid
ancestors before they developed language, learned to use fire, and
took up agriculture. Few of us would want to go
back to that stage, and in the future few would
wish to return to the present day.
We have a choice. We can work against the developments that will make us
"posthuman" and join the reactionary forces that decry each new
technological breakthrough that changes human nature. Or we can stand
by the sidelines and passively watch the future
unfold. Or - and this is I think is the best
alternative - we can actively participate in creating a future that
will eventually enable us all to reach nearly unimaginable levels of
human flourishing and well-being through the use
of advanced technology to defeat disease and aging
and to increase our human emotional, cognitive, and
physical capacities. This doesn't mean that we should subordinate
ourselves to some grand technological imperative.
Ethical sensibility and a broad conception of
human flourishing is as important than ever - in fact, even
more so. It does mean, however, is that we should not automatically
reject opportunities for growth merely because
they would change our current human nature in some
way. We should strive to be humane rather than just human.
Source:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/views/cloning.html
Nick Bostrom, PhD
Homepage:
http://www.nickbostrom.com
ABOUT THE WTA
The World Transhumanist Association is a democratic, nonprofit organization,
which advocates the ethical use of technology to enhance human
capacities
and well-being, and to extend the healthy human lifespan.
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