Cloning (2)

Does it matter that while cloning needs a human womb, it gives women total control of the reproductive process in that they would no longer need men at all. They would only be involved through the sentimentality or economic needs of women, not through necessity.

If that resulted in a manless society would that count as a bad thing?

It would be surprisingly practical. For example to maintain population would only require just over one child per woman rather than just over two. Even sexual reproduction would likely be possible (but only of women).

Even without going to that extreme the possibilities could be somewhat disruptive.

I can’t help thinking that I have missed the step that restricts the discussion of cloning to treating conventional fertility problems. It seems commonsensical but I didn’t follow the philosophical or liberal grounds for it.

“At this point a concern several people raised becomes pressing. What counts as “otherwise could not have children”? There are (at least) four possibilities.”

This is a very interesting (and difficult!) question… but my first impression is that the real choice is between 2 and 4 (and I personally favour the former), rather than 2 and 3.

The issue at stake seems to be whether adults have a right to parent “a” child, or “their” (biological) child.

If you dismiss the right to have a biological child, then what grounds are there to stop at 3 instead of 4? Clearly the right of “parenthood” (in this sense) is granted through the adoption of a stranger, so there is no need to risk physical harm to a clone.

However, if you grant the right to biological parenthood, then it seems you must stop at 2, rather than 3 – because otherwise you are introducing alien (from a stranger, rather than from its raising “parents”) DNA into the child.

Then again, I suppose one parent gets to contribute genetically via 3, even if it is “corrupted” (from their point of view) by a stranger’s contribution. So I guess an argument could be made here too…

So perhaps one must also differentiate between a (potential) right to full biological parentage, or merely some genetic contribution.

(P.S. How do you insert italics on this board?)

Richard, code for italics is <i>italics</i>

I’ve got no idea why making interworld comparisons of how well off a person is (which I don’t equate with utility, or with any conscious experience) requires that I be some kind of dualist. Does it immediately lead to dualism to say (as Kripke and a disturbing number of contemporary philosophers do) that I would not have existed unless the sperm and the egg that actually formed me formed a person? If so there’s a much quicker argument for dualism than even dualists have been prepared to say. All of the cross-world comparisons make perfect sense given Lewisian materialist counterpart theory (which is always my default position) so I’d need to see a good argument as to why they don’t.

Harry’s points are all interesting and thought-provoking. A quick question in lieu of a response. If considerations from the welfare of (un)adopted children form the basis of a sound argument against cloning, do they also form the basis of a sound argument against all other forms of fertility enhancement? If yes (which I think is the right answer) do we now go ahead and ban all of those, or do we say those considerations do not support banning cloning? (That’s sounds like a rhetorical question now that I wrote it, but it’s really meant to be serious. I think the adoption considerations are a much stronger grounds for anti-cloning arguments than most of the arguments currently in the literature.)

You don’t seem to feel it necessary to argue your premise that to exist with a serious and painful disability is better than not to exist. Unless or until you address this, it’s hard to follow the rest of your reasoning.

Why is it better to exist with a serious and painful disability than not to exist? Why is it better to exist than not under any other circumstances? This is not axiomatic, you know

Would the presumption that new existence is positive, does that we should all be making more babies in general? I think that this claim has radical implications.

Would the presumption that new existence is positive, does that we should all be making more babies in general? I think that this claim has radical implications.

Yes, that’s part of the point I was trying to make above. Or at least, it’s part of what I had in mind. This is very close to Derrik Parfit’s “repugnant conclusion” objection to utilitarianism.

“Why is it better to exist with a serious and painful disability than not to exist? Why is it better to exist than not under any other circumstances? This is not axiomatic, you know.”

No, it’s not. But that’s not the only problem with this formulation. As Jeremy tries to point out, “exist/will not exist” is not equivalent to “exist/no longer exist”. A case can be made for the latter that existence is preferable to the alternative. But “will not exist” is boundless, it is something not directly comparable to existence. It is, I think, a fundamental rational fallacy to make such a comparison.

I suffer from a congenital condition. I don’t in the least regret my birth or existence, nor do I blame my parents for it. (Although they weren’t aware of the problem. But if they were, I still wouldn’t blame them.) Now that I’m here, I’m glad to be here. But my parents probably shouldn’t have had a child had they known, not to mention the fact that my mom was still in high school. I think she should have aborted the fetus that became me. I don’t find that a threat to my existence, because it didn’t happen.

Frankly, I’m not sure whether I will have a child that’s biologically my own. There’s a 50% of passing on this disease. From a utilitarian point of view, I think I very likely shouldn’t have a child. But the one thing I don’t worry about too much is that the child would blame me or regret his/her existence. They might; but, for example, neither I or my sister (who also suffers this disease) feel that way.

BTW, nowadays it is possible to generate spermatozoides for people who can’t. As I understand it we can make a woman spermatozoid if we want. She’ll only get daughters though. If one has some genetic problem, it may be factible to eliminate those spermatozoids that contain this gen, and then get an IVF with the rest of the sperm.

DSW

“I would guess that in most cases the psychological and social difficulty of having only one parent would be greater than the difficulty of having a second parent out there somewhere.”

And the same argument has been and continues to be made against mixed-race marriages and consequent children (at least in large parts of the US). That doesn’t mean that miscegenation should be illegal, or socially shunned.

I think this is a very weak basis on which to build an anti-cloning argument.

The ‘fundamental issues’ about cloning, at least as presented here, seem to be a muddle of consumer choices and preferences masquerading as moral arguments.
The straw dogs of hippie superstition and knee-jerk luddism get set up and shot down, and ‘progress’ rolls on full steam ahead.
The ‘how many clones can dance on the head of a pin’ question gets worked and reworked.
But this entire argument takes place against a background, a context that’s loosely defined, if at all.
It’s a simple moral question, cloning — right or wrong?
Moral codes are goal-directed. The problem is we take in those codes so early they seem to be an integral part of the world as it is. As a result, most people’s moral goals are vague, essentially part of the way things are. They disappear in the bright dust of the future, ‘the good of society’ ‘the betterment of all’ ‘the elevation of mankind’ etc etc. There isn’t a moral code in existence that can withstand the solvent of unbiased logic. Bias is everything. Context is an extension of bias.
The arguments that make up most of this discussion are consumer pros and cons. People ‘want’ to have children and can’t. People will ‘need’ organs, or bodies, as their own wear out. There is no ‘should or should not’ because there’s no higher moral goal than consumer satisfaction. This is the logic and morality that have given us the silcone breast.
It’s as though the context is neutral, a growth medium with no moral valence.
My contention is that’s an illusion. My contention is that cloning itself is just one more step in a steady progression toward the achievement of physical immortality by something that, should it accomplish that aim, will no longer be what we call human.
There was a point on the timeline of primate evolution where the seeds, if you will, of the various branches were still one thing. There was another point where they were irrevocably separate. In between was what? What’s the name for that? The individuals involved couldn’t have recognized the changes for what they were. Nor can we.
Cloning by itself has no more moral weight than the electric drill. It’s the context in which it’s applied, by whom, and to what end.

“…should it accomplish that aim, will no longer be what we call human.”

I’m not one of those nutty fetishizing transhumanists, but…so? Why is what we are necessarily better than anything else we’ve ever been, and anything else we ever might be? Merely because you and I are examples of this particular kind of human? This is just chauvinism.

His. His “point about the context-boundedness of moral norms.”
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“Why is what we are necessarily better than anything else we’ve ever been, and anything else we ever might be? ”
It’s hard to get that clearly stated in a few lines. Certainly I don’t mean to say that what we are now is better than anything we might be.
What we might be is why I’m writing.
What we are isn’t really the issue anymore. What we were maybe. The concept of universal human qualities, the shared ‘being human’-ness we supposedly all partake in has led to a lot of current befuddlement.
I’d suggest what it is to be human is simply what it is right now, that what it is to be human pixelates as individual lives wink on and off in their singular binary.
So that over time the essence of what human is changes just as the the morphology changes, gradually enough it’s unnoticable, untraceable except in the fossil record, if there is one.
What we were didn’t lead inevitably to this, anymore than any of our lives led inevitably to what they are now. Our path as a species is as open and mutable as any individual life.
It’s that path that cloning alters fundamentally, not alone, but as one of a constellation of invasive and manipulative technologies. My contention is that that alteration is a tailoring not an enlightened perfecting.
What we were the aboriginal Australians still retain something of, the Inuit, the Kalahari bushmen, the Tarahumara, some few scattered others as well.
These are tropish cliches, yes, but with reason. They are pre-existing long-term healthy adaptations to a fluctuating natural environment.
Most of us older than 30 were raised on a myth of indigenous savagery by victors whose conquest was due entirely to their superior and far more savage power.
That’s the beginning of the suspicions cloning only intensifies.
For me the argument is almost tangential. There’s a line of progress here that’s long enough we can’t get it into perspective. But it is a line. It goes from one point through another, toward still another.
Why context seems important to me, and the naming of it, the clear delineation of the biased context, is that without it there’s only this universal void, the abyss, the big empty grab bag of absolute relativity.
It’s what sends weak minds scurrying for received instruction, moral codes handed down from above, because there’s nothing else there but what you choose and choice is so arbitrary and personal it’s meaningless.
In the vacuum of that dilemma, opportunists and scam artists proliferate.
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“Sometimes immoral activities should not be illegal.” I think that’s a semantic issue there.
The law should refelct morality, and not, as is so common in America especially today, with the dark absurdity of “if it’s not against the law it’s ok”. There’s certainly no need for a law that says you can’t destroy the world. Or the human race. Or the universe.
It’s an act of presumptuous arrogance for anyone to dictate the moral codes of the society in which they live; arrogant, presumptuous, and vitally necessary that someone do it, whether a committee of elder scientists, a mass democratic vote, a circle of women meeting in a handmade tent, or a bunch of grad students in a blog commons. People need that guidance to free up energy, so they can get on with the business of daily life.
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John C. raises most interesting points. Imagine as a contrast case a pharmaceutical discovery that gave profound across-the-board competitive advantages to a minority, and slow death to everyone else, and the only way to find out was to take it. See the critical mass developing? How long til the ultimate losers are themselves the minority?
There’s a rural practice called ‘line-breeding’ which is the 4-H version of (induced, in animals) incest. It’s a crap shoot, but when it pays, it pays big. Desired attributes locked into the genotype. Control.
Incest among humans, with viable offspring, is much more common than the culture is ready to admit.
Arguing against cloning from a ‘technologically infeasible’ position just postpones the inevitable, doesn’t it?
What I’m after is a human morality that is loyal to tradition, that embraces the entire past, and takes more than just contemporary humanity as its own, more than just humanity for that matter.
Too much of contemporary science and scientific philosophy is orphaned and bitter, an abandoned child with a thousand toys, and no direction home.

John C. Halasz—
“… to give us understanding of the natural constraints we are under, rather than to explode those constraints, …the slowly/rapidly unfolding environmental/ecological crisis. This is not directly a moral enterprise.”
Overall I agree with your description, as I take its meaning, an idealized science is no more nor less than perceptive apparatus, and ideally delivers understanding.
But your first paragraph also reveals a stance that, while currently almost universal, is I think recent enough to be called modern. The idea of individual death being an unfortunate by-product of the seemingly random and certainly plan-less chaos of biological evolution.
Submission to the mortality of human living, reluctant submission, fiercely reluctant submission, is a traditional virtue. The ability to inhabit that paradox, to live within it as a complete individual is I think one of the greatest human accomplishments, and I find that view echoed in virtually all great religious traditional teachings, as distinct from their current practices and practitioners.
That stance is critical, because it bears the entire argument on its back.
That all innocent death is wrong, all sickness, all ‘handicap’, all infirmity, is itself a perfect example of what you term the ‘romanticized traditional’. I think as a part of the philosophy of medicine it’s true, yes, but we aren’t all doctors of medicine.That view of things comes from a time when we lived at the mercy of the world, and had to struggle for each day. A hundred and fifty years ago the birth to adult-child ratio was very different than it is now.
The problem here is an overly successful strategy, and it is paralleled in many contemporary dilemmas. We fought the law and we won. And we cling to the old way of seeing even as we transform the entire planet, however accidentally. All death is not wrong.
An interesting analogy, in english at least, is the word ‘day’ and its two meanings. Ask the man on the street how long a ‘day’ is and he’ll tell you ‘24 hours’. Ask another what the opposite of ‘day’ is, and he’ll tell you ‘night’. It’s the same with life. In a very real sense we’re the victims of semantic confusion. Night and day make one thing. Death and life do also.
In addition it’s a chillingly consistent mantra of technophilic journalism that some new Frankenstein procedure will have the not-ever-to-be-questioned benefit of producing new medicines or food supplies.
To take the other side of that argument is to be confronted with the satanic uniforms of eugenic bureacracy, and all that that entails. That seems clearly to me to be a false duality, artificially applied to circumstances that are themselves the result of complex manipulation. That we have thrown off the seemingly heartless cull and winnow of natural process, without replacing it with anything but random death by car crash (still the single most prevalent cause of under-30 mortality, which is surely at least equally heartless in its randomness) is to the point here.
Wolves are generally viewed, by people whose lives and livelihoods aren’t directly threatened by them, as beautiful examples of mammalian grace. There is a natural eugenic at work there.
Yet we can’t just throw up our hands and go back to running after herbivores with sharp sticks. Nor can we leave it to any human agency to decide who the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit’ are. Nor can we continue to allow the fire of technological advancement to proliferate on its own, with no moral governor, no limit but the pedal-to-the-metal acceleration of greed and reputational testosterone.
The confusion of pure science with the application of its results may have given me an excuse to rant overlong here. The original discussion was about the morality of reproductive cloning. Pure science will never exist in a moral vacuum, not until the society it inhabits is equally pure. Any discussion of reproductive cloning in a moral context must perforce be about its application, and to be morally accurate must take in the societal effects of its application in total, not just in the immediate moment and circumstance.
Midwives were once central to the birth process, a process as yet still central to us all. These were the women held up when I was young as ‘old wives’ with their tales and superstitions. The best of them worked within lines of tradition that wove the sacred with the necessary, in a reverent pragmatism. But in the Age of Science they were judged, scorned, and ridiculed by their worst.
It will seem archaic now, these women with their secret knowledge of teratology and joy, though our presence alone must be at least partial testimony of their success; archaic mostly because that way of living has been beaten into non-existence, not because its adherents failed. Unless the inability to withstand the assaults of a culture so inhumanly vicious that it countenances the obscenity of ‘primate research’ and knows no moral constraint on any of its own impulses can be called failure.
Science is not the handmaiden, but the midwife of technology. Though it seems, with the rest of us, a helpless witness to the outcome of its labor.