Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President's Council on Bioethics
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With a Foreward by Leon R. Kass, M.D., Chairman.
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Public Affairs,
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352 pages, $14 paper
On the cover
of Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President's
Council on Bioethics is the image of a fingerprint. It's an inspired choice,
for the fingerprint, as the Council's Chairman, Leon Kass, explains in the Foreword,
“has rich biological and moral significance.” The fingerprint is at once emblematic
of our common humanity and our individual uniqueness. No two are alike; even
identical twins have distinct fingerprints. Presumably a cloned human being
also, as a sort of delayed-entry twin, would not be a perfect repeat, at least
not all the way down to the tips of his fingers.
DNA is not the
whole of our nature. It is, however, a good deal of it, and the question raised
by recent scientific developments is whether and how much we ought to stick
our fingers in it. Ought we to put our own impress upon the means by which human
beings come to be? As Kass points out, fingerprints are the marks left by our
grasp on things-a grasp that is sometimes illicit. This is why the police know
as much about fingerprints as scientists do. And it is why the decisions to
be made about cloning are properly political decisions. It belongs to citizens
and legislators to police the bounds of the human grasp, to determine what may
be manipulated, manhandled, and doctored, and in what ways. While the liberty
of the mind is by right absolute, actions may, with justification, be restricted
or forbidden.
Let me suggest
another metaphoric image that comes to mind while reading the Report:
not the fingerprint but the navel, and especially the exercise referred to as
“contemplating your navel.” I intend the expression rather unidiomatically.
“Contemplating your navel” usually means to relax and withdraw from the world
in favor of self-absorption, to zone out, waste time, and daydream. This isn't
what I mean. I mean, rather, that the Bioethics Council has performed a true
omphaloskepsis: it has meditated on the human core and deepened our self-understanding
by reflecting on matters often overlooked. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,
the inhabitants of the World State are “hatched” and “decanted” rather than
born; I surmise that Huxley's Betas, Deltas, and Epsilons, manufactured in uniform
batches by “Bokanovsky's process,” are entirely without belly buttons. So,
while we still have them, we might do well to contemplate them.
In effect, that
is what the Report does. It explores the meaning of procreation and the
human significance of sexual reproduction. It articulates the links between
sexual reproduction and the ground and purpose of the human family, the continuity
of the generations, the formation of individual identity, and the bearing of
our freedom and our mortality. The Report enables us to understand all
that is at stake in the advent of asexual reproduction. Cloning is a form of
generation that would confound the generations-a woman who had herself cloned
would be both mother and identical twin sister to her clone. She would in effect
have become the mother of herself.
To aim to be
the mother of oneself is the height of hubris and despotism. It is the crime
of incest-the begetting of one's own upon one's own-scientifically perfected.
The cloning of human beings would be the triumph of the Machiavellian project
to conquer fortune and bring everything within the power of human choice and
calculation. By raising serious doubts about that modern project, the Report
offers a vindication of the element of chance in human life. It shows how human
dignity is bound up with the lottery of nature and how the ground of human dignity
could be imperiled by the attempt to extend human control over the human essence.
The counsel of wisdom and prudence is to stick with our old-fashioned, erotic,
and happy-go-lucky mode of generation rather than embracing the new science
of solitary self-genesis. We should remain true to the belly button-the belly
button which reminds us of our indebtedness to our origins, but which also bespeaks
our directedness toward a self-standing existence.
In its combination
of profound reflection on human nature with immediate policy concerns and decisions,
the Report is reminiscent of The Federalist Papers, a work that
Jefferson judged to be “the best commentary on the principles of government
which ever was written.” I predict a similar authoritative status for the Report
in the sphere of bioethics. In a sense, the Report is even more remarkable
than The Federalist Papers, inasmuch as the latter had a partisan, and
even propagandistic, purpose. Imagine if we instead had a document called The
Constitution Papers, a joint product of Federalists and Anti-Federalists,
laying out for the citizenry the full panoply of argument and counterargument.
That is what the Report is like. Even when it gives expression to the
Council's unanimous opposition to cloning-to-produce-children, it details the
arguments that might be mustered in support of such cloning. But especially
when the topic is cloning-for-biomedical-research, where the Council was itself
split, the Report, with a united voice, carefully delineates both the
majority and minority views, and seeks to bring them into conversation with
one another. This dialectical approach is so rare one hardly knows how to respond.
Certainly, one
comes away with new respect for the potential of reasoned discourse within a
democracy. Moreover, I, at least, came away with the conviction that if one
were, with an open mind, to read the whole of the Report, including the
appendix of personal statements, one would be persuaded of the rightness of
banning all human cloning, whether for the purpose of children or research.
In the pageant of arguments, some of them look distinctly thin and weak. And
yet, dampening one's hope that truth will emerge the winner from the staging
of such a pageant is the fact that the participants themselves, despite their
respectful listening to one another, did not achieve agreement. Well, they did
and they didn't. On the question of cloning-to-produce-children, there was welcome
unanimity. However, on the question of cloning-for-biomedical-research, there
was a deadlock, with seven members in favor of permitting it, seven for banning
it, and three in the middle in favor of a moratorium. What does this deadlock
portend for the future?
In the end, the
seven in favor of a permanent ban were willing to join with the three in favor
of a temporary ban in order to produce a majority recommending a moratorium.
From what we have seen so far in Congress, the deadlock is being repeated there.
Indeed, the deadlock over cloning-for-biomedical-research may actually make
any sort of legislative action unlikely, even a ban on cloning-to-produce-children
(and this despite the near universal opposition to such cloning). The division
over cloning-for-biomedical-research is a division not so much over cloning
as over the status of the human embryo, cloned or not. Until that larger issue-with
its implications for embryo research in general, as well as for the current
practice of in vitro fertilization, and of course abortion-is resolved, we risk
ending up with a laissez-faire policy on cloning that very few Americans want.
It is heartening
that the split within the Council was not between scientists and humanists.
For instance, four of the six M.D.s voted for the moratorium on research cloning,
and in some cases clearly favored strengthening that to a ban. It seemed, indeed,
that those who knew most about embryology spoke most persuasively about the
unsustainability of the claim that fourteen-day-old and younger embryos might
be treated with less than full human respect-because less than fully human.
Dr. William B. Hurlbut, for instance, both in his detailed responses on the
subjects of gastrulation and twinning, and in his general explanation of potentiality
and organismal unity, shows how the evidence of science supports the claim that
the early embryo has an inviolable moral status.
Kass reminds
us in his Foreword that “reasonable and morally serious people can differ about
fundamental issues,” but I take it that this unique experiment in clarifying
the differences is undertaken in the hope that such clarification will lead
to the concord of truth. In other words, this is not a matter about which we
can just agree to disagree. There is an imperative to continue reasoning with
one another, which implies, I think, that there is reason with a capital R out
there somewhere, and that reasonable people, were they perfectly reasonable,
or even just sufficiently reasonable to the occasion, would arrive at it. As
Lincoln said of the slavery controversy, “Whenever the issue can be distinctly
made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real
difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it
will be done peaceably too.”
Now maybe the
cloning controversy is not like the slavery controversy. Certainly, we hope
there is no looming prospect of civil war should the division of opinion continue.
Kass suggests there is another difference as well. He writes that
with slavery or despotism, it is easy to identify evil as evil, and
the challenge is rather to figure out how best to combat it. But in the realm
of bioethics, the evils we face (if indeed they are evils) are intertwined with
the goods we so keenly seek: cures for disease, relief of suffering, and preservation
of life. When good and bad are so intermixed, distinguishing between them is
often extremely difficult.
In talking of
the complexity and difficulty of the bioethical enterprise, Kass was perhaps
being diplomatic. This remark would be in the same vein as the “reasonable people
can differ” statement, inasmuch as it gives further reason for why they might
differ.
And yet, for
all that is admirable and impressive in the Report, I do have some misgivings.
I would point out, for example, that it was not at all easy to bring men to
see slavery as evil, particularly not once the practice of slavery was well-established
in the life of the nation. Moreover, in the controversy over slavery, as Lincoln
himself admitted, there were legitimate goods at stake for the slaveholding
South-among them security, self-preservation, and the preservation of their
way of life, states' rights, specific constitutional guarantees, and I suppose
a certain kind of honor. Yet Lincoln's acknowledgment of the weightiness of
the South's legitimate concerns didn't stop him for a moment from declaring
slavery an evil and insisting that one cannot attain those real human goods
by the route of perpetuating slavery. There is a difference between granting
credence to the goods sought by one's opponents and granting credence to their
arguments or plans.
Armed as we are
now with this invaluable Report, it seems to me time to frame the issue
more sharply. Cloning is an evil, and cloning for the purpose of research actually
exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human
life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized
and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater
power. It is slavery plus abortion.
Is it, then, either incorrect or misleading or unhelpful to see the dispute
over cloning as of a piece with the slavery crisis and the abortion debate?
And further, if the example of Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral
complexity and the intertwinedness of good and evil and the intractability of
the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and more likely that we will
end up in Brave New World, where despotism masquerades as a conception of the
good? The motto of the World State with which Huxley's novel opens is “community,
identity, stability.” I suspect our own path to biomedical despotism will be
guided by the words “progress, compassion, and choice.”
Diana Schaub is Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political
Science at Loyola College in Maryland.
