blog




  • Essay / Morality of Human Cloning - 1408

    The novel Brave New World presents us with a vision of a future in which human beings are no longer born "naturally", but rather are manufactured in identical batches according to certain specifications. Where concepts like “mother” and “father” are scatological and children are taught only to maintain order and carry out their predetermined occupations. At the end of the novel, Mr. Huxley makes us grateful that such a world is beyond our reach. However, with the successful cloning of a Scottish sheep named Dolly, images of Brave New World have become much closer to reality. Even the word clone can conjure up dark images of lines of identical individuals with barcodes tattooed on their necks walking step by step and it is largely thanks to the creative minds behind the science fiction works that cloning is imagined to be a harbinger of a copacetic and uncaring society where people are manufactured and common morality has been replaced by laws interpreted by machines. It is therefore not surprising that cloning, once carried out today, aroused fear, discrimination and repugnance. Leon Kass argues that our initial repugnance toward cloning is due to an intrinsic desire to preserve natural law. Kass explains that loathing and fear are natural reactions to transgression of the natural order and contain wisdom beyond our immediate understanding. Kass even goes so far as to conclude that only sex-born children can be considered fully human, because any other genesis of a human being is completely unnatural and false. According to Kass, all children are born to a loving couple who have no motivation for having a child other than the joy of children, but simply the fact that the children were born from rape or rape or from a rape. ...a question of cloning and it is therefore a pre-programmed prejudice which highlights the real problem of cloning, that of society. Cloning offers not only a chance for abuse but also great progress. Even the knowledge gained through cloning advances our understanding of genetic information so much that in the future, diseases such as Alzheimer's disease could become what polio is today. Many scientific advances which have known their abuses have also known their glorious triumphs; Where IVF can be misused, it has also allowed couples to have children when they could not in the usual way. In conclusion, I believe that cloning, as it matures, will have the potential to enable people who would not otherwise be able to reproduce, as well as many other applications yet to be seen, provided that we as society, can accept our own prejudices and learn to accept that genetics does not entirely determine our future.