This has been in the news lately. Assuming it becomes technically feasible, is it ethical to clone a Neandertal (or a group of Neandertals) to be raised to adulthood?
I’ll add that I believe that, if technically feasible, some laboratory will do it, but I’m unsure about the ethics.
Neanderthals were human. They had music, religion, and a complex society. Cloning them like lab rats would indeed be unethical.
Clearly you never watched The Jersey Shore.
Let’s clone one and ask him / her.
So long as they were treated ethically, and their natural rights protected, I don’t think causing them to be born is unethical. We let people create human life every day, after all.
Yes, but how about (with volunteer surrogates) creating Neandertal embryos, implanting them, raising them as normal children, with occasional visits by the researchers to observe, measure, and report (with no discomfort)? I assume that’s how it would be done.
It would be as ethical as cloning any other person to create a human baby.
Which means, as long as the human baby created by cloning is treated like every other baby created with the aid of every other type of fertility treatment, then there are no ethical issues.
We’ve allowed sperm donation, egg donation, surrogate pregnancy, and IVF, so how exactly is cloning that different?
Just because a baby was created by cloning it wouldn’t make them a slave, or the property of a doctor or corporation. We already have the 13th and 14th Amendments that prohibits slavery and makes everyone born in the United States a US citizen with the same rights as every other citizen. These Amendments don’t include clauses “except for clones, you can enslave them”.
Why am I thinking about Planet of the Apes?
iiandyiiii has a good plan.
(Yeah, I know, famous last words…)
I imagine there would be privacy issues- if it happened, the identities of those involved should be kept secret- which might mean no public pictures.
I don’t understand why cloning would be unethical. Either with H. Sapiens or H. Neanderthalis. Ethics really only gets involved after they’re born (assuming you’re not creating a monster or something).
Treat them well and give them freedom and autonomy and it will be fine. I for one look forward to the day when real Neanderthals can hunt real mammoths out on the tundra, and then head home and play Xbox.
The courts will have to decide whether another species of human counts as “people”. Which hopefully they would. I don’t really believe Neanderthals were inferior to us Cro Magnons, at least not in any way that should matter in politics. But that’s partly what we’d want to study. Get ready for a big civil rights battle.
I don’t think the battle would be that big… I doubt even the researchers would want to deny them civil rights- they would only ask for occasional observations, and probably happily pay for the privelige.
It’s not the researchers I worry about. The same type of people who used to (or currently) believe blacks or gays or Mexicans are inferior would raise a huge outcry. They’d probably say their religious and economic freedom is being infringed unless they can enslave the neanderthals.
I think you underestimate the desire people have to oppress others. It makes them feel superior. For what it’s worth I think the same kind of thing would happen with aliens, regardless of their technological sophistication.
I think this is on par with cloning a person that has Down’s.
I think you’re way off base, here. A “huge” outcry, demanding the enslavement of cloned Neanderthals? No chance.
Meaning what, that both are ethically wrong, or that both are right?
Why? Neandertals weren’t disabled Homo sapiens sapiens, they were fully functional human beings, with brains that had a greater cranial capacity than modern humans.
The courts would first have to decide if it was legal. Cloning a human is illegal, but if the courts don’t decide it’s illegal to clone a Neanderthal, then how can it be considered “human”?
I do think there are ethical problems, but not nearly as much as cloning, say, an H. erectus. We have every reason to believe that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, and probably lived them with them as well. I think we’d have to make it a ward of the state though, just in case it, for whatever reason, was not capable of functioning in society.
Oh, and it’s H. neanderthalensis. Just so everyone knows. 
Hey Cro Magnon,
Who cloned you? How do you feel about it? (Most people I’ve met are Homo sapiens sapiens)