From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Dec 29 2002 - 21:15:09 MST
Brett Paatsch reckons:
> I'm tired of hearing just the same old stale conventional wisdom on
> cloning, (not from this list, but generally - it seems the analysis always
> quits because of the yuck factor and the overwhelming desire of most
> people not to stray too far of the track off the "politically
> correct" kicks in.)
I'd say the single preposterous objection lurking beneath the `revulsion'
etc isn't anything that could be termed `political correctness'; it's
*religious* correctness.
It's the *immaterial soul* and its heavenly salvation that all these
terrible scientific interventions are putting at risk. Even those
anticloning humanists who claim otherwise are caught inside this medieval
trap. My local paper mentioned this morning, in the middle of the usual
bungled report, that the Pope and his theologians teach that `life begins at
conception'. That is felt to be a killer rejoinder (so to speak), and nobody
stands up to say, `Oy, everyone *knows* that *life* (snake, cat, dog, human)
begins at conception--modulo a few details about implantation, etc; but the
salient ethical/moral issue is when *personhood* begins, or can be assessed,
fuzzily, to have begun.' The trouble is that you can't *say* that kind of
thing in available English. We just don't have common words to convey what
is meant by `personhood', other than the sloppy and often misleading term
`human life', usually elided to `life' pure and simple.
True, there are further issues at stake with cloning, even if it works
right: impossibly onerous expectations by the older twin/parent, derision
from peers, the possible erosion of the recognized value of a human being as
an end rather than a means, etc. But those already obtain in many cases of
parents and their kids, or oddball kids and their peers, and so on.
The most gruesomely hilarious element in the current imbroglio is the way
the press babble mockingly about `cults who believe humans were cloned from
aliens' and `little green men' (actually I don't think the Raelians favor
*green* aliens, but hey), and oppose these absurdities with ethical
announcements from the far more sensible people who believe in the virginal
birth of a god-man who later returned from the dead.
Damien Broderick
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