It is merely that those who claim some sort of moral high ground in reality don’t have much of it to stand on here.
Why must there be a serious scientific reason to ban human cloning?
Aren’t a lack of utility or obvious profit potential, and the desire to limit political activism by the moralizers sufficient reasons to not start cloning people?
I’m not sure it’s wholly pointless to avoid human cloning. If embryonic stem (ES) cell therapy proves to be more promising than induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell research, we’re going to need to be cloning people and keeping personal ES cell lines. As it is, cloning is a pretty inefficient enterprise. Any improvements in that technology are going to be welcome from an ease-of-use and financial standpoint.
Then again there’s obvious reasons to avoid it–namely the convenience of not having the scrutiny that comes with that sort of research. For individual researchers as the benefits of performing human cloning (in terms of achieving funding, stature, satisfaction of scientific advancement etc.) exceed the risks (protests, auditing, violence against involved researchers), I suspect they will begin performing those experiments. Probably a number of researchers would be willing to do it immediately if they were allowed.
It’s worth noting that a number of scientists are able to justify their use of ES cell lines derived from blastocysts because those blastocysts are slated for destruction anyway.
Many people are unaware of the fact that the tissue from aborted fetuses is sometimes made available for studies of prenatal gene expression. Most scientists are comfortable with this because the aborted fetuses are a consequence of the normal operations of abortion clinics. That is–the tissue otherwise goes to waste, if it can be used for good, why shouldn’t it be? It becomes a different matter entirely if a woman becomes pregnant and aborts her fetus for the purposes of research.
Really? I can think of a few posters who just might argue that.
Yes, those are absolutely sufficient reasons.
But those reasons don’t seem to jibe with the rationale offered for the other decision at issue: that it reverses the “false choice” betweeen sound science and moral values.
Why?
Oh, let the Chinese do the experimentation, their leaders don’t give a shit about human life.
How much research begins with obvious utility and profit potential? As for the moralizers, I can think of plenty of other research that would offend them - Masters and Johnson, Kinsey, even research into the historical veracity of the Bible. So these don’t seem like really good reasons.
Isn’t this the point Obama is making? Human cloning would require a choice between science and morality. But if you reject the premise that conducting stem cell research is immoral, then there’s no need to have to make a choice. You can conduct the science without being immoral. So claiming that stem cell research requires a choice between sound science and moral values would indeed be a false choice.
I haven’t heard a more pointed moral dilemma associated with cloning, and that is a bit bothersome: to me getting a text message on my porta phone is more irritating than growing up in the shadow of someone else. We all do it. Well, most of us. I’m kinda surprised that there isn’t a more pointed problem involved with cloning. As a practical matter the health of a clone is going to be miserable using current cloning techniques, so I’d object for that reason. But if that can be fixed, what are the serious problems? A world full of narcissists having clones instead of babies and the gene pool not getting mixed up? Clone wars? Me leaving everything to my much younger clone rather than my grandchildren?
We are a bunch of cranky malcontents. Frankly, we can do better than this.
Why do you imagine that many people would choose to have a clone baby instead of a regular baby?
Even if we imagine that cloning becomes safe it will still be at least as intrusive as IVF. How many people are going to go through IVF so they can have a cloned baby rather than reproduce the old fashioned way?
Yes, I see that. I am arguing that cloning also fits in that category – that there’s no scientifically-based reason to accept that cloning is immoral while believing that embryonic stem cell harvesting is not.
The problem I see is that Obama himself has closed off human-cloning research himself, instead of letting scientists make that decision themselves. This directly acts against his policy of letting science direct research rather than politicians. Since he needs to distance himself from human cloning politically, to remain consistent, he should have booted the problem to a scientific advisory board.
It doesn’t matter whether or not human cloning is useful scientific research, Obama is acting just like Bush when he forbids a line of research he finds distasteful.
Correct. Bush’s decisions were much less palatable to many people. But it amuses me no end to see the defense of this policy on the same type of grounds as the stem cell research ban was defended: it’s icky and/or immoral. Neither of those are principled bases for rejection. Honest commentators have acknowledged it’s a political necessity… but even then, when Bush was in, no one seemed to acknowledge the exact same dynamic existed. Bush was apparently expected to abandon his political necessity and bravely do the right thing… if it ruined his support among religious conservatives, good! But Obama’s response to similar political pressures is excused without much thought; of course, of course he has to say this, we all understand.
Top Republican urges Obama to review stem cell move
OTOH, other top Republicans, notably Eric Cantor, say this stem cell thing is just an attempt to distract from the economy:
Unsurprising, but it will go nowhere. Elections have consequences. The viewpoint that it’s OK to harvest embryonic stem cells is the one that will hold sway for the next four years.
That’s nonsense from Cantor. It supposes that if the economy were peachy, President Obama wouldn’t do this? Bull. This move is consistent with what he’s stood for all along. It makes perfect sense. (Except, as I say, for the part about claiming that cloning is always wrong).
I suppose because the intent is different.
Let’s deal with two cases, and to be needlessly inflammatory I’ll try and make my points in the context of this abortion hypothetical.
A 23-year old graduate student becomes pregnant. The father skips town. She doesn’t make enough money to raise the baby properly, and her immediate family is estranged. She decides, after great consideration, to abort the pregnancy.
A 23-year old graduate student takes a position in a developmental biology lab studying prenatal expression of neurogenic transcription factors–an interesting question with potential therapeutic applications. She intentionally gets pregnant and aborts the fetus in the second trimester and then studies the abortus as part of her dissertation.
In the former case, the girl’s intent was never to create life. She accidentally kicks off that process by becoming pregnant. She later terminates the pregnancy, in consonance with her original intentions.
In the latter case, the girl intends to create life so that it might be later destroyed and used for scientific purposes. While her motives may or may not be ethical (and I’m honestly not sure whether I find her actions acceptable or not), they are very different from the motives of the girl in the former case. It is hard for me to not consider these to be two very different scenarios, ethically speaking.
Cantor and Boehner both sound like idiots. I think most of the country is in favor of lifting this restriction, and people are unable to put off their Parkinson’s disease just because there’s a recession. 
Obama made it clear during the campaign that he was going to do this.
I can’t see why the intent of a pregnancy matters. A fetus is a fetus and is not aware of the circumstances that lead to its creation. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with your second scenario. I think it makes people uncomfortable because they think it devalues human life (by suggesting even a mother might not care), but I don’t see the importance.
Again, I’m not certain whether I approve or disapprove of the second girl’s actions. I do, however, view them as being different ethical scenarios.
Intent matters in murder and manslaughter cases. But the body is just as dead either way. Should we dispose of this distinction as well?
No, I think it’s a useful one because it involves the risk the crime will happen again. It’s not a crime to get pregnant or have an abortion, and it shouldn’t be. Neither one is wrong, so the intent behind the actions doesn’t matter.