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 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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