Human Cloning
The announcement of the birth of the cloned ewe, Dolly, in 1997 by scientists at the Roslin Institute, was a shock for the entire world. Up until that point, the issue of the morality and ethics of cloning had been relegated to discussions of purely theoretical nature. Because of the conceptual simplicity of the process used, in which an enucleated egg is implanted with the genetic material from a somatic cell, many people immediately saw that the actual instantiation of cloning a human being was a distinct possibility and a potential moral and ethical danger zone. We had not, as a species, ever truly considered the likelihood that human reproduction would fall so fully under the hand of technology. Though there are many detractors to the application of cloning technology to humans, I believe that human cloning technology can be used with responsibility to achieve a number of improvements to human experience. Consequently, I oppose the proposal to ban research into the cloning of human beings because the arguments used to support such a ban do not bear the weight of critical inspection, though the arguments themselves are also important to human advancement.
Opposition
The arguments in support of a ban on human cloning are numerous and varied they are, in fact, too varied to cover them all in a single paper. Nonetheless, there are a number of arguments that appear with relative frequency and can be grouped under general headings that seem to express natural fears and misgivings about human cloning and humanitys relationship to the process of cloning in a moral sense. All these arguments are refuted below. The general summation of these arguments seems to present itself in a single statement as presented below Cloning should be banned because it fosters the treatment of people as means, not ends, provides no clear benefits in exchange for risks, fosters the further ambiguation of kinship structures, and compromises the...
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