Chapter 4 of Ronald Bailey's Liberation Biology is entitled "Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?". The Raelian UFO religious cult figures prominently, so this chapter, obviously, is a must-read. The serious purpose of the chapter is to evaluate the ethical status of human cloning.
The author evaluates and ultimately rejects the following anti-human cloning arguments provided by the bioethical Luddites: human cloning will be used to "replace a dead child or other loved one", human cloning will "undermine the uniqueness of each human being", human clones will be "negatively affected by the fact that they were born by means of cloning", human clones will "be created to provide spare parts, such as organs", human cloning will create "a wave of obsessive cloning of exceptional human beings", and human cloning will allow human pathogens to "adapt and begin to get the upper hand, causing widespread disease".
Bailey, however, does recommend that, for the time being, research on human cloning should proceed, but actual human cloning should not. The current "inefficiency" of human cloning, due to the development of "severe abnormalities", is the given reason. He asserts that the best "benchmark for deciding to proceed with human reproductive cloning would be when researchers are reasonably sure that clones would suffer no more likelihood of birth defects (2 percent) than do children produced by sexual reproduction, either in vitro or by conventional means."
Non-bioethical Luddite comments by bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt are also of interest in this chapter.
FYI, the LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger supports human cloning.
The author evaluates and ultimately rejects the following anti-human cloning arguments provided by the bioethical Luddites: human cloning will be used to "replace a dead child or other loved one", human cloning will "undermine the uniqueness of each human being", human clones will be "negatively affected by the fact that they were born by means of cloning", human clones will "be created to provide spare parts, such as organs", human cloning will create "a wave of obsessive cloning of exceptional human beings", and human cloning will allow human pathogens to "adapt and begin to get the upper hand, causing widespread disease".
Bailey, however, does recommend that, for the time being, research on human cloning should proceed, but actual human cloning should not. The current "inefficiency" of human cloning, due to the development of "severe abnormalities", is the given reason. He asserts that the best "benchmark for deciding to proceed with human reproductive cloning would be when researchers are reasonably sure that clones would suffer no more likelihood of birth defects (2 percent) than do children produced by sexual reproduction, either in vitro or by conventional means."
Non-bioethical Luddite comments by bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt are also of interest in this chapter.
FYI, the LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger supports human cloning.
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