Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
thing not replicable by definition when you pick one parent to clone.
This latter is evidently a small price to pay.
What, then, about embarking on an experimental course that would
likely result in flawed “products”?
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It is convenient to forget that it took
nearly three hundred failed attempts before Dolly the sheep was cloned
successfully. As Leon Kass has noted, the image of failed human clones
leads the soul to shudder. Abandoning what Kass terms “the wisdom of
repugnance,” we embark on a path that constitutes a violation of a very
fundamental sort. Kass calls on us to pay close attention to what we find
“offensive,” “repulsive,” or “distasteful,” for such reactions often point
to deeper realities. He writes that “in this age in which everything is held
to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human
nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded
as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may
be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our
humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
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Kass is arguing that repugnance is not the end of the matter but instead
a beginning. Those philosophies that see in such reactions only the churn-
ings of irrational emotion, misunderstand the nature of human emotions.
Our emotional reactions are complex, laced through and through with
thought. The point is to bring forward such reactions and submit them
to thought.
Would we really want to live in a world in which the sight of anony-
mous corpses piled up elicited no strong revulsion, or a world in which
the sight of a human being's body pierced through and through in dozens
of places and riddled with pieces of metal was something we simply took
for granted? The reaction to the first clearly gestures toward powerful
condemnation of those responsible for creating those mountains of
corpses, and anguish and pity for the tortured and murdered and their
families. In the case of the heavy-metal-pierced person, we may decide
it is a matter of little import and yet ask ourselves why mutilation of the
body that goes much beyond the decorative is now so popular? Does this
tell us anything about how we think about our bodies?
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And so on.
Kass points out that the “technical, liberal, and meliorist approaches
all ignore the deeper anthropological, social and, indeed, ontological
meanings of bringing forth new life. To this more fitting and profound
point of view, cloning shows itself to be a major alteration, indeed, a
