Cloning is one of the most debatable issues in modern medicine and the scientific community dealing with benefits and opportunities of the research and moral arguments against inhuman medical practices. In the article, “The Moral Case against Cloning-for-Biomedical-Research” Kass argues that cloning is immoral because it violates the moral rights of an embryo thus it is really difficult to define the origin of life and consequences of such research. Kass argues that “realization of medical benefits is uncertain”, so researchers should avoid cloning experiments based on embryo cells and samples. Kass underlines that moral arguments against cloning should be based on the issue of suffering and pain often omitted by scientists. Kass is right in stating that cloning is unpredictable and uncertain, thus he values the life of an embryo but does not take into account the sufferings and deaths of millions of people who can be cured because of new medicines and technologies developed by researchers
Cloning is dangerous because people cannot predict its real outcomes and control them. The main problem for modern science is that it has limited information about the beginning of life and the early stages of its development. Kass underlines that: “The cell synthesized by somatic cell nuclear transfer, no less than the fertilized egg, is a human organism in its germinal stage, It is not just a “clump of cells” but an integrated, self-developing whole, capable (if all goes well) of the continued organic development characteristic of human beings” (Kass 2). Thus, if people do not know soothing, it does not mean researchers should and ought to avoid it. Modern ethical and social and legal principles and categories simply cannot cope with the novel issues raised by the manufacture of totally new living organisms by genetic engineering, the creation of human embryos, the manipulation of people’s genetic make-up to remedy certain kinds of disease, and so on. Researchers do not even have the language to talk about the radically new situations and circumstances that the technology of the processes of human life brings about. The main problem is that scientists apply old moral principles and arguments to explain and object cloning, but this area of research demands a new understanding and interpretation of human life. Others have argued that embryo experimentation raises such large and serious issues that the opportunities for such experimentation should be restricted to the very early stage of the embryo’s development.
Taking innocent human life is ethically wrong; destroying an embryo is tantamount to taking innocent human life. However, this kind of reasoning is hardly ever possible in ethical discussion since in very many cases the principle and the description of the particular case are problematic. Thus, the definition of ‘taking a human life’ requires interpretation since there are occasions on which researchers can licitly bring about the death of an innocent human being (for example, some people think that in certain circumstances it would be ethically right to engage in nuclear warfare and so knowingly and intentionally bring about the death of millions of innocent people). Then again, whether or not a twenty-hour-old in vitro embryo is a human being also requires interpretation since it is certainly not obvious, without some kind of argument, that it is a human being in the ordinary sense of that word. On the other hand, it might be argued that the embryo is a human being of some kind and that therefore the principle that innocent human life must be respected applies in this situation. Here researchers have a conflict between two ethical principles and it is not at all clear how the conflict might be resolved.
Some people think that such ethical dilemmas are rare and extraordinary and that if researchers reflect on a situation hard enough and long enough researchers will then be able to see which principle should apply and how the problem should be resolved. But in fact, these kinds of conflicts and dilemmas are endemic to the realm of ethical decision-making. “But this fact still leaves unanswered the question of whether all stages of a human being’s life have equal moral standing” (Kass 2 There is no doubt that this developing organism is a human and not of some other animal species. When does that biologically human entity become a distinctively human being–an individual with a moral status and rights that determine how researchers should treat it? Put in another way, when does the biologically human organism become an individual person with a claim to be treated exactly as researchers treat another human person? Some have said that the human person begins at the moment of fertilization since at that moment a process is initiated which will, all being well, lead to the eventual development of a human person.
Opponents of ESCR are mistaken because they do not apply moral principles and rules to the embryo. Kass says that: “This respect is allegedly demonstrated by limiting such research – and therefore limiting the numbers of embryos that may be created, used, and destroyed – to only the most serious purposes: namely, scientific investigations that hold out the potential for curing diseases or relieving suffering“ (Kass 3). First, it has been supposed by people on both sides of the discussion that researchers can argue directly from biological evidence about the development of the human embryo to a non-biological and non-scientific conclusion about the moral status and rights of the embryo. However, while biological evidence may be more or less relevant, it cannot really tell us conclusively whether an organism is to be given a special status and treated in a special way. One cannot, as a matter of logic, base philosophical and moral conclusions about the human person directly on scientific evidence. No scientific evidence about the human brain can prove or disprove the existence of a human mind (although of course, the mind is dependent for its functioning on the brain), and no scientific evidence about comparative scores can prove or disprove the philosophical and moral point that human beings are equal.
No scientific evidence about the biological development of the human embryo can prove or disprove anything about the status of the human embryo as a person with moral status and rights. In my view then it is a vain hope that researchers will be able to determine when a human person comes into existence simply by inspecting the biological and genetic evidence about the development of the embryo. Thus, even if researchers agree that an individual biological entity emerges only at day fourteen with the formation of a rudimentary nervous system, this does not tell us whether that individual entity is a person with distinctively moral status. The second confusion which has bedeviled the debate about the beginning of human life arises from not attending to the very simple fact that researchers are dealing with a continuum. There are many kinds of continua: an interval of time is a continuum in that each phase precedes and gives way to another in such a way that researchers cannot divide it up into discrete atomic bits. No matter how finely you divide up an interval of time you will always be left with an interval that can be divided still further.
Time is infinitely divisible. Researchers may, of course, for practical purposes divide an interval of time into what researchers call hours, minutes, seconds et cetera, but these are always arbitrary to some extent and there is nothing absolute about them. Some continua are developmental in the sense that while they occur in time each phase prepares for and gives way to a more complex phase. These developmental phases run into each other and you can’t really find a definitive or absolute point in the development process where you can say, for example, this is now no longer an acorn but an oak tree, or this is now no longer a collection of living cells but an animal.
I would say to Kass that his agreements and ideas are important for modern medicine but all of them are based on old moral principles and norms derived from religious piety and ethics. Thinking about cloning, researchers should take into account those people (millions of people) who will be cured because of new medicines. Many researchers value the rights and sufferings of an embryo but they deprive adults and children of a chance for further life and health. Many diseases are thought to result from the defective functioning of a gene or a set of genes and if it were possible to identify the location or site of each gene on a chromosome, it might also be possible to replace the defective gene with gene therapy or gene manipulation. Cloning will help to save millions of people and relieve their suffering. The new forms of biotechnology–genetic engineering, genome analysis, and cloning all promise great human benefits.
Works Cited
Kass, The Moral Case against Cloning-for-Biomedical-Research. 2003. Web.