This blog post addresses the ethical issues of cloning humans and the use of embryos, and argues against the position of John Harris. Through the Kantian principle, I argue that the existence of cloned humans as a means to an end threatens human dignity and that cloning technology is ethically problematic.
In February 1997, a paper was published in the prestigious biology journal Nature. It soon made headlines around the world and led to a new addition to the bioethics literature. It was the birth of Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Of course, the scientific community had cloned frogs, rabbits, and other animals before Dolly. But Dolly made waves because she was created by transplanting the nucleus of a cell from a mature ewe, making her genetically identical. This meant that nuclear replacement technology could be applied to humans. The possibility of creating a cloned human being has been met with opposition not only from the scientific community on safety issues, but also from the religious community on ethical grounds, and from the general public. However, the British bioethicist John Harris has argued in his articles and books that there is nothing ethically wrong with cloning genes, and by extension, humans. He has demonstrated in his articles and books that many of the traditional arguments against cloning living beings are logically unconvincing. He showed that the Kantian principle does not apply to cloned humans and provided evidence that, from a utilitarian perspective, the existence of cloned humans increases the sum total of happiness.
John Harris is a British bioethicist who has spoken out in favor of human cloning. He argues that cloning technology can be beneficial to humanity, and discusses that ethical objections are not necessarily reasonable. While Harris acknowledged that we should consider the circumstances in which cloning technology might be ethically problematic, he did not believe that there were serious ethical issues that warranted a ban on the technology itself. He was more concerned with the potential benefits that cloning technology could bring.
This paper will refute John Harris’s position that the Kantian principle cannot be applied to cloned organisms because they are both means and ends. It will also apply the Kantian principle to argue that the use of human embryos, which he justified on the grounds of increasing the sum total of happiness, was in fact morally undesirable. Through this careful counterargument and analysis, this paper will show that there is a clear ethical and moral issue that we will be facing in the coming decades. It will show that the ban on human gene cloning is well-founded, and that it is necessary to keep Darwin’s gene pool functioning properly by preventing the willful alteration of human traits and minds that are the result of evolution.
When Dolly’s birth was announced in Nature in 1998, it was met with a lot of negativity. The prominent molecular biologist Axel Kahn found the basis for his opposition to cloning in human dignity. In his commentary in Nature, he leaned on Kantian ethics and appealed to the following “The creation of human clones for the sole purpose of obtaining spare cell lines is, from a philosophical point of view, a clear violation of the principle of human dignity as formulated by Immanuel Kant.” He further argued that creating a child identical to oneself would be wrong because the child would be considered an object.
But applying the Kantian principle to the development of cloned humans is not advisable, Harris says. The Kantian principle is taken for granted and is compelling, but it is also very vague and open to optional interpretation. Kant’s assertion that human beings who are dignified in their own right, that is, rational beings, are “ends in themselves” is valid. However, Harris argues that people do not always treat other people as mere instruments, i.e., if we create a cloned human being to fulfill the means of “giving Bill a sister,” we did not create the sister solely for that purpose. Furthermore, as the example of identical twins shows, even if the clones have identical genomes, it does not affect the autonomy of each individual.
However, I disagree with Harris’s argument that the Kantian principle is not applicable to cloned humans because they are a mixture of ends and means. The Kantian principle is not just about human beings as ends and human beings as means. In his famous Cogito, Kant reveals that the dignity of the individual human being presupposes intersubjectivity, i.e., the traditional concept of subjective freedom is replaced by a concept of intersubjective freedom. This means that self-relationships and other-relationships are mutually constitutive of one’s freedom. In terms of the “universalized other,” this establishes a norm of reciprocity, or formal sameness, as the norm that governs human relations to others: what we expect and assume from others, they have the right and entitlement to expect and assume from us.
However, cloned humans have a different relationship to otherness than normal humans. This is the question of who the social or genetic parents are. Human cloning requires a nucleus donor to provide DNA, an egg donor to provide space for the nucleus to be fertilized and mitochondrial DNA, and someone to carry the cloned embryo in the womb. In this case, most of the cloned human’s DNA is identical to that of the nuclear donor. So, is the mother of the cloned human the woman (or man) who provided most of the DNA? Is it the egg donor? Or is it the woman who nurtures the embryo and fetus in her womb for 10 months? If so, can the cloned child truly call the woman who nurtures it her mother? Also, the mother of a nuclear provider can be a grandmother in that she is the child of her own daughter (or son), but she can also be a mother because she has half her own DNA. The above examples demonstrate that cloned humans, by their very existence, have relationships that fall outside of traditional kinship. These examples are of a different nature than adoption or test-tube babies, which are other cases where the biological parents do not raise them. In the case of IVF, the only recognized cases are those in which sperm from an anonymous third party is used for artificial insemination, and adoption, which mostly involves children of people who are not related to you. However, cloned humans have a different kind of intersubjectivity, in that they inherit their parents’ DNA. They also have a different relationship to society than existing humans. First of all, we don’t yet have a concrete discussion about how to treat cloned humans, whether they should be treated as citizens, how to provide for their welfare, and to what extent human rights apply. Of course, due to the limitations of technology, we have not yet created cloned humans, so no laws have been formed, but there will certainly be discussions on how to formulate laws when cloned humans are actually created. In addition, it is possible that human rights laws that have been developed over a long period of time could be created abruptly in the case of cloned humans within a generation, creating the possibility that cloned humans will live a different life from the laws that apply to other humans. In this case, intersubjectivity would be violated and Kant’s categorical imperative would not hold: since intersubjectivity, the prerequisite for a discussion of human dignity, would be lost, even if the cloned human being had both a means and an end, this would be a violation of Kant’s principle and could be interpreted as ethically undesirable.
Harris also argues in his paper that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the ethical status of embryos and the applicability of the Kantian principle. In defense of his argument, he offers the utilitarian opinion that embryos themselves do not have personhood. If the point of personhood is defined in terms of the interests associated with rationality, self-consciousness, and desire, then the question is when the interests of the embryo are formed. The conditions for interests are “the capacity to feel pain” and “the desire to avoid pain,” and so killing a person means interrupting future desires. But an embryo has no future desires, so it cannot be considered a person, and from the perspective of maximizing aggregate individual happiness, which is the goal of utilitarian ethics, killing an embryo does not reduce aggregate happiness.
In conclusion, he argues that the use of embryos that have the potential to become human beings naturally if left alone is a form of assisted reproductive technology. Furthermore, he argues that the use of embryos is equivalent to the use of children as heirs, to preserve genes.
However, I believe that the Kantian principle can be applied to the case of embryos, and I will prove this from a deontological perspective. To prove that the killing of an embryo reduces the sum total of happiness, let’s first show that an embryo is an individual. The mere fact that it is a human being, regardless of its ability to act in any particular way, makes it a person. Biologically, human existence begins at the moment of fertilization, and the stages in the process of human development are merely titles for different periods of time, not breakpoints that separate a human being from a clump of cells, because the development of human life is a continuous process, and there are no meaningful breakpoints that result in qualitative change. In other words, it is not ethically correct to use embryos that, if left alone, would naturally become human beings. Furthermore, recent embryological studies have shown that in mammals, from the moment of fertilization, the sperm and egg make plans to build each organ of the body. This is evidence that the fertilized egg and embryo up to 14 days after fertilization, when the primordial glands are formed, are not just clumps of cells unrelated to the human being.
If you agree with my argument that embryos have personhood, then the problem of excessive embryo sacrifice emerges. In fact, the probability of creating a cloned embryo drops dramatically as you move from mammals to primates to humans. Even when cloning a lower animal, a sheep, it is said that 276 attempts to implant a fertilized egg failed before the 277th fertilized egg was successful and Dolly was born. Cloning a real human being would require much more sacrifice. As Dr. Michael Souls, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on human cloning, “Based on the success rate of cloning sheep, which have three to four times the fertility of humans, it would take 1,000 pregnancies to produce a single cloned human, 999 of which would end in miscarriage, premature birth, stillbirth, or deformity.” Consider the remaining embryos that don’t make it to birth. Applying the Kantian principle, these embryos were merely the means used to achieve successful cloning, and were treated as tools to create a healthy cloned human being. Harris’s argument cannot embrace these embryos, so his argument is self-defeating.
Furthermore, even if technology were to advance to the point where we could create cloned humans without sacrificing other embryos, it is not 100% likely that they would be considered an end rather than a means. The most obvious example is organ harvesting from cloned humans. In his article, Harris takes the position that there is nothing ethically wrong with cloning humans for organ transplants. His rationale is that what some people consider ethically undesirable is really just a matter of personal opinion. However, if the reason for creating cloned humans is to harvest organs from them and transplant them without rejection, then his entire logic is refuted. Cloned humans are created solely as a means to harvest organs. Even if the cloned human is capable of having its own feelings and acting with autonomous purpose, it is still an object, a means to replace the original organ, and its personality is judged afterward. This is a phenomenon that, according to the Kantian principle, is morally undesirable because it is a tool without human autonomy.
So far, this paper has refuted John Harris’s position that human cloning is ethically unproblematic. First, we refuted the argument that cloned humans are both means and ends, so the Kantian principle cannot be applied, and that they have autonomy even if they have the same genome. Specifically, he pointed out that the Kantian principle’s prerequisite is that cloned humans have a different relationship with others than normal humans, which is ethically undesirable. Harris’s second argument, that embryos are not treated as persons and therefore the Kantian principle is inapplicable and always works to increase overall happiness, is also refuted. To support this, we show that embryos can be viewed as persons from a personist perspective and that the Kantian principle is applicable. We also show that the use of cloned humans as tools for organ harvesting is morally undesirable under the Kantian principle.
This paper has shown that the creation of cloned humans, which has been a social issue since the birth of Dolly, is not ethically justified by applying the Kantian principle of human dignity. Furthermore, the ethical study of cloned humans continues to evolve as technology advances, so it requires continued attention.
