Posted on 11/28/2001 2:26:58 AM PST by billorites
CLONING HUMAN embryos is wrong, as President George W. Bush said Tuesday. But why?
To be sure, advocates of human cloning use appealing arguments. Who doesn’t want to end disease and help people with failing organs? Their case for cloning is simple: breeding babies for the purpose of growing cells and tissue will advance the battle against all sorts of medical afflictions and allow for the stockpiling of replacement organs and body parts. But this argument ultimately falls short. In the end, the (more complex) argument against human cloning is the most compelling.
First and foremost, as the President said on Tuesday, “We should not as a society grow life to destroy it.” This simple but not simplistic statement is pregnant with deeper meaning.
Bush was saying that the creation of human life must remain an end in itself and not a means to satisfy our own selfish purposes. When human life is created, that new human being has its own individual moral worth that cannot be superseded by others’ desires for a more pleasant or painless life.
Those who support human cloning for medical purposes (such as U.S. Rep. Charles Bass) intellectually demote one category of human beings to the status of slaves. Their argument that we should breed humans for the sole purpose of “harvesting” their cells and organs is an argument that requires us to separate human life into two categories: those with intrinsic moral value and those with only utilitarian value.
This is precisely the same intellectual distinction made by slave traders to separate whites and blacks, Nazis to separate Gentiles and Jews, and Communists to separate true believers from “enemies of the revolution.” Kudos to Sen. Bob Smith, Sen. Judd Gregg and Rep. John E. Sununu for understanding this.
Do we really want American doctors to violate the Hippocratic oath and begin viewing some lives as more morally worthy than others? Whom will we designate to decide which lives have moral worth and which can be ended for the benefit of others? And how will we stop the concept from spreading into other contexts? If it’s morally justified to kill human embryos for scientific research, why is it morally wrong to kill babies, the retarded, the disabled or the permanently brain damaged for the same purposes?
This case against human cloning is not, as some cloning advocates have claimed, entirely a slippery slope argument. If we allow the intellectual separation of humans into these two categories, we will have already reached the bottom of the slope. From thence forward it’s only a matter of time before American scientists are farming humans (in embryonic form at first, but other forms later) for utilitarian purposes, as the Nazis did and the Chinese do.
Ending disease and having a plentiful supply of replacement organs are nice goals, but they can never justify the slaughter of living humans. Such creepy utilitarian arguments will only harm society in the long run as they will enable and even encourage us to view others as tools for satisfying our own needs. And other humans, including embryos, are not tools. They are humans with the same rights and moral worth as the rest of us. Humanity will never be the same should we as a society ever forget that.
You are right, it is emotional. The human distaste for sycphants has always been emotional.
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