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The Ethics of Human Cloning

By Leon R. Kass and James Q. Wilson

AEI Press, 1998, 101 pages, cloth

$16.95, ISBN 0-8447-4050-0

This little book brings together essays from two distinguished commentators on what may yet be recognized as the seminal issue of our generation. With the announcement from Scotland in February 1997 that "Dolly" had been cloned, this sheep-soon destined for newsmagazine-cover immortality-has haunted the mind of the world. For she declares to humanity that the final link in the chain binding marriage, sexuality and the reproduction of the species has finally been smashed.

The conquests of our generation and its immediate predecessors, in which marriage and sex have been put asunder, and sex and procreation dislocated through the wide diffusion of generally effective contraception, have now come full circle. Not only need sex not issue in issue: issue need not be the fruit of sex.

And our first attempts at breaking the sexual constraints on reproduction, in which first artificial insemination (Al) and then in vitro fertilization (IVF) broke through the ineffective firewall that divides the medicine of the veterinarian from that of the Hippocratic physician, are suddenly revealed as less revolutionary than we thought. These clumsy replications of the sexual process-with gametes united by artifice rather than passionare but deviations from the procreative life of the bedroom.

For something really postmodern, which fractures even our mammalian commonality and threatens to reduce us to the level of asexual reproduction of the starfish, we have had to wait for cloning.

Kass's essay "The Wisdom of Repugnance" takes up well over half the book and offers a devastating critique of the possibility of human cloning. His position is elegantly summed up thus: "This long-awaited yet not quite expected success in cloning a mammal raised immediately the prospect-and the specter-of cloning human beings: 'I a child and Thou a lamb,' despite our differences, have always been equal candidates for creative making, only now, by means of cloning, we may both spring from the hand of man playing at being God."

Kass suggests that "perhaps the most depressing feature of the discussions that immediately followed the news about Dolly was their ironical tone, their genial cynicism, their moral fatigue.... Gone from the scene are the wise and courageous voices of Theodosius Dobzhansky (genetics), Hans Jonas (philosophy), and Paul Ramsey (theology), who, only twenty-five years ago, all made powerful arguments against ever cloning a human being. We are now too sophisticated for such argumentation; we would never be caught in public with a strong moral stance, never mind an absolutist one. We are all, or almost all, postmodernists now."

And, picking up the theme with which we began, "Cloning turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the ruling opinions of our new age. Thanks to the sexual revolution, we are able to deny in practice, and increasingly in thought, the inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself. But, if sex has no intrinsic connection to generating babies, babies need have no necessary connection to sex."

In his shorter piece, James Q. Wilson begins by stating that he shares the instinctive response of many who are not made happy by the prospect of cloning humans. However, we must not respond in haste. "A premature ban on any scientific effort moving in the direction of cloning could well impede useful research on the genetic basis of diseases or on opportunities for improving agriculture."

Even if it is banned in the United States, it will continue elsewhere. "If cloning is illegal in America but legal in Japan or China, Americans will go to those countries as cloning techniques are perfected. Science cannot be stopped. We should have learned that from the way we regulate drug treatments. We can ban a risky but useful drug, but the only effect is to limit its use to those who are willing and able to pay the airfare to Hong Kong."

Wilson would permit cloning but confine its application to married couples, since the crucial issue is not the sexual or asexual character of the origins of the individual, but the family context into which that individual is born.

It is a thousand pities that, on the heels of the Dolly announcement, there was not successful legislative action to end before it started any move toward the cloning of a human being. Such action should have been accompanied with a major international initiative to seek a treaty banning human cloning forever from the face of the earth. The European Convention on Biomedicine and Human Rights, amended last year to ban human cloning, offers a start. It may not be too late to follow suit.

This little volume should be widely read, because it helps clear the ground, for there is little room for doubt that Kass wins the argument.

Mr Cameron, distinguished professor of theology and culture and senior vice president for universit affairs at Trinity International University is also chairman of the Bannockburn Institute and author of The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Mar 26, 1999
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