File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 560


Date: 	Tue, 16 Dec 1997 12:47:34 -0800
From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Fly-paper and cloning



"The simplistic message of this is that we tamper with nature at our peril-
those who play Prometheus end up getting their livers pecked out, we really
ought to know our place in the world and shouldn't take reckless risks. All
standard green fodder."

Russ, what about cloning? It's not that experiments in cloning are
necessarily immoral; anways, identical twins share more genes than clones
do, as Richard Lewontin has noted in a recent New York Review of Books.
Cloning brings nothing new into the world.  The problem is the
"reductionist" understanding that leads people to believe that identical
genotype-->identical phenotype. The fear that cloning will lead to the
"pearsonian" mass standardized reproduction of superior persons is
ungrounded. Playing Prometheus here will  yield results in contradiction to
intentions.  I would think the problem with human cloning is the burden the
clone would  carry because she would be expected to be behaviorally
phenotypically identical to the "cloner" or that she would be made to feel
that she owes her life to the cloner and thus the debt to "instaniate" her.
All the risks to autonomy and personhood would only be assumed by the
clone.

If human cloning were to become possible, I would oppose it. One could
argue that mass cloning should be allowed because it would be an experiment
to test the hypothesis of the importance of genes in the determination of
physical and behavioral phenotypes. But life has already provided such
experimentation and Cyril Burt's infamous interpretation. One could argue
that anti-cloning reflects a anti-experimental point of view, but this
would be to ignore the question of whether twin studies as the means by
which to determine the importance of genes  are really methodologically
sound in the first place. That clones are diachronic twins, instead of
synchronic ones, would seem not to diminish the problems of how similar
environoments and social treatment of twins are; moreover, there will be
the problem of how much the clone begins to replicate the behavior and
interests of the cloner who brought her into existence for that very
reason.  We could replicate the experiment a million times and do so in the
name of science and knowledge without ever having had answered the
criticism of the limits of such studies in the first place.

Yes, we need an a Promethean experimental ethos, but experiment needs to be
theoretically guided and moral in its construct. Cloning is based on bad
biology (persons don't become identical because of identical genetic
inheritance) and poses great risk to the autonomy of the clone. Or would
you dismiss opposition to it as green fear?
Rakesh




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