From: Max More (maxmore@globalpac.com)
Date: Sun Oct 25 1998 - 21:42:46 MST
On Saturday, I attended the Southern California Philosophy Conference. The
session I enjoyed most (while being frustrated) was the debate on human
cloning. Prof. Michael Shapiro of the USC Law School made sensible points
in favor of the proposition that human cloning should be legal, and that
the burden of proof should be on those who want to ban it. Prof. Shapiro
(for whom I had the pleasure of doing research while I was a graduate
student at USC) noted that usually intelligent people make terribly
arguments poor arguments when the issue is human cloning.
His opposing discussant, Francis Pizulli, an attorney who helped draft the
anti-cloning legislation, illustrated Shapiro's contention quite nicely.
(Though Shapiro noted that Pizulli has written the best stuff on his side
of the issue.) The most reasonable of his arguments was that cloning might
lead to shorter lives for the clones due to telomere shortening. Every
other argument he presented, I found either laughable, annoying or both.
For instance:
* Cloning involves no sexual contact, no mixing of the parents. It's bad to
produce children without sex. (Pizulli is Catholic, by the way...)
* Everyone has a right to a unique genetic identity.
* Why allow a procedure that causes so much repugnance?
* We don't need ore means of having children when we are overpopulated. [A
particularly odd thing for a Catholic to say!]
* If cloning is allowed, we won't be able to draw a line and will end up
producing legless people to go into space or four-legged people to go to
Jupiter. [He really said this.]
* Cloning violates the second formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative
("treat people only as ends, not merely as means").
* "America doesn't want cloning". Cloning will produce an aristocracy and
America is all about doing away with aristocracies.
If smart people like Pizulli and the other intellectuals who have written
in opposition to cloning become so irrational when dealing with an issue
like human cloning, we'd better watch out for their response when we're
talking about altering human nature and making technological changes far
more interesting and far-reaching that copying a person's genes.
Onward
Max
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Max More, Ph.D.
more@extropy.org (soon also: <max@maxmore.com>)
http://www.maxmore.com
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