Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that freedom means doing things in “any way one likes” now prevails
as a cultural desideratum.
31
It is, therefore, unsurprising that the
New
York Times
describes a “slow acceptance” of the idea of cloning in the
scientific community that took just six months to go from shock and
queasiness to acquiescence and widespread approval. The article con-
cludes that “some experts said the real question was not whether cloning
is ethical but whether it is legal.” And one doctor is quoted in the piece:
“The fact is that, in America, cloning may be bad but telling people how
they should reproduce is worse. . . . In the end . . . America is not ruled
by ethics. It is ruled by law.” The implication of this view is that no
ethical norm, standard, commitment, or insight can or should be brought
to bear on whether to criticize, caution against, or checkmate statutory
laws should they be unjust or unwise. The point is that with each new
development that is presented to us in the name of a radical and benign
extension of human freedom and powers, we pave additional miles on
the fast track toward the eradication of any real integrity to the category
of
the human
. Debate and discourse about such matters in the public
square has turned into a routine in which a few religious spokespeople
are brought on board to fret a bit and everything marches on.
32
That the prospect of human cloning is fueled by narcissistic fantasies
of radical sameness, that it represents fear of the different and the unpre-
dictable, and that it speaks to a yearning for a world of guaranteed self-
replication, matters not; indeed, such concerns are rarely named, save by
those speaking from the point of view of theological anthropology. As
the Pontifical Academy noted in a statement on human cloning issued
June 25, 1997,
Human cloning belongs to the eugenics project and is thus subject to all the
ethical and juridical observations that have amply condemned it. As Hans Jonas
has already written, it is “both in method the most despotic and in aim the most
slavish form of genetic manipulation; its objective is not an arbitrary modifica-
tion of the hereditary material but precisely its equally arbitrary fixation in con-
trast to the dominant strategy of nature.”
33
Dreams of strong, wholesale self-possession grounded in attaining full
control over human “reproductive material” lie at the heart of the eugen-
ics project, despite the risk of damaging biogenetic uniformity, since
much of the basic genetic information that goes into the creation of a
child from two parents emerges as a result of sexual reproduction, some-
