treatment of infertility is not a reasonable practice due to extremely
low cloning effectiveness : the process of cloning is not fully understood
and the failure rate, at around 97%, is enormous. Most clones die before
birth. Dolly took nearly 300 attempts, the new kitten in the US, 86 previously
implanted embryos. Recently, cloned mice in Tokyo showed weakened immune
systems and other profound physical problems, and died early. Dolly herself
appeared to be totally healthy, even producing numerous offspring, but
just as she might have looked forward to spending more time with the lambs,
she re-entered the international spotlight this year with the news she
has early onset arthritis.
potential to undermine our sense of self or personal psychological
(not numerical) identity
undermine our sense of individuality or uniqueness, not actually
our full individuality, but just genetic individuality. There is
no reason to believe that any form of genetic determinism is true : we
know from experice with homozygous twins, as well as from the science of
human development, that possessing identical genomes will not lead to qualitatively
identical individuals.
undermine the value or worth we place on, and our respect for, each
human life because it would lead to persons being viewed as replaceable
or able to be manufactured, instead of the product of sexual reproduction.
But it would not make individals replaceable or of any less moral worth.
It is the nature of a being, not how it is created, that is the source
of its value and makes it worthy of respect : children created by assisted
reproductive technologies do not have less moral value. A more subtle route
by which the value we place on each individual human life might be diminished
could come from the use of human cloning with the aim of creating a child
with a particular genome, either the genome of another individual expecially
meaningful to those doing the cloning or an individual with exceptional
talents, abilities, and accomplishements. The child might then be valued
only for its genome, or at least for its genome's expected phenotypic expression,
and no longer be recognized as having the equal intrinsic moral value of
all persons, simply as persons. Everyone would lose their moral standing
as full and equal member of the moral community, replaced by their different
instrumental value to others. It would be a mistake and a confusion to
conflate the 2 kinds of value and respect, but it is a mistake that is
often made.
undermine a clone's "freedom" or autonomy to construct his or her own
life by the presence of an earlier twin. Although contemporaneous twins
begin their lives with the same genetic inheritance, they also begin their
lives or biographies at the same time, and so in ignorance of what the
twin will by her choices make of her life. Ignorance of the effect of one's
genome one's future is necessary for the spontaneous, free, and authentic
construction of alife and self, that is, for being autonomous and living
an autonomous life. A later twin might even grant that she is not determined
to follow in her earlier twin's footsteps, but nevertheless the earlier
twin's life might always haunt her, standing as an undue influence on her
life, and shaping it in ways to which others' lives are not vulnerable.
Anyway the belief that his future is already detemined is false and supported
only by the crudest genetic determinism
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