Human Reproductive Cloning  from the Perspective of  the Future by Dr. Nick Bostrom Lecturer, Department of Philosophy,  Yale University Chair,  World Transhumanist Association

Imagine that you are one of the human clones that will be born. (There is no doubt that this will happen sooner or later even if Clonaid's announcement turns out to be a hoax). And imagine yourself listening in to the current arguments for making cloning illegal. You hear people opining that cloning threatens human dignity, that it would be playing God, that it represents a slippery slope towards a dehumanized future, that everybody has a right to a unique genome (except identical twins?) or to an unknown genome, and so forth. How would it make you feel? To hear all these dignified people talking about you as if your very existence were a crime against humanity?

Such an imaginary point-of-view helps us put things in perspective. There is one argument that, as a future clone, you might understand and agree with: concerns about the safety of the procedure. The argument that we ought to wait to try it on humans until we have perfected the method on animals makes some degree of sense. But even so, suppose you were a slightly deformed human clone - would you agree that it was a terrible moral offense to have caused you to come into existence?

Historically, we find that many a great medical breakthrough, now seen as a blessing, was in its own time ferociously condemned by bio-conservative moralists. This was the case with anesthesia during surgery and childbirth - people argued that it was unnatural and that it would weaken our moral fibers. It was also the case with heart transplantations - how yucky to take a living heart of one person and put it in the chest of another! And it was the case with in vitro fertilization - these "test tube babies" would be dehumanized and would be subject to grave psychological abuse. Now of course, anesthesia is taken for granted, heart transplantation is seen as one of medicine's greatest triumphs, and the public approval rate of IVF is up from 15% in the early seventies to over 70% today.

What can we learn from these historical episodes? We can learn that our immediate emotional reactions to medical developments are not a reliable guide to their morality. We can learn that we are prone to prejudice and to narrow-minded failure to appreciate the long-term benefits of technological development. We can learn that the "yuck factor" should be profoundly distrusted and that it should definitely not be glorified (pace Leon Kass, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics) as a "Wisdom of Repugnance".

We all have a moral responsibility to recognize the clone for what she is - a unique human person, with just as much human dignity as those of us who were conceived in other ways.

By the time the first human clone becomes an adult, the moral debates over cloning may already be long forgotten. The present opponents of cloning may have retired or moved on to being outranged about other things. The clone may be spared having witness being referred to by pundits in such derogatory language as we hear today.

In the big scheme of things, cloning will not significantly change the world. Some people will owe their lives to this technology, and some infertile couples will be grateful for having had the chance to raise a child of their own that they would otherwise have lacked. Some people may misguidedly use cloning to try to bring back a lost child or a loved one, not realizing that personal identity is not reducible to genetic identity. Some people may choose to have a child that is a clone of a stranger they admire, perhaps a great scientist, athlete or religious leader; yet if the current level of demand for elite sperm or elite eggs is any indication, the class of people who will choose to do this will be a tiny minority.

Meanwhile, other areas of technology will be advancing fast and furiously, leading to developments that will overshadow cloning. Some of these developments will be truly frightening - genetically engineered biowarfare agents, for example, and new weapons based on molecular nanotechnology. Those prospects deserve our serious attention and concern. Other developments will open up unprecedented opportunities for human growth and flourishing. One day we will find ways of halting and reversing the aging process. We will have the option of extending our intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual capacities far beyond the levels that are possible today. This will be the end of humanity's childhood, and the beginning of a posthuman era. Our descendants, or even you and I if we manage to stay alive until then, will look back on today and today's primitive condition in much the way we look back on our humanoid ancestors before they developed language, learned to use fire, and took up agriculture. Few of us would want to go back to that stage, and in the future few will want to return to the present day.

We have a choice. We can work against the developments that will make us posthuman and join the reactionary forces that decry each new technological breakthrough that changes human nature. Or we can stand by the sidelines and passively watch the future unfold. Or we can actively participate in creating the future that will enable us to reach almost unimaginable levels of human flourishing and well-being through the use of advanced technology to defeat disease and aging and to increase our human capacities to entirely new levels. For those who choose this third option, the World Transhumanist Association offers an opportunity to join others in the effort to make our worthiest dreams come true. Your help is needed. 

Nick Bostrom, PhD
Phone: 203.500.0021
Email: nick@nickbostrom.com
Personal homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
World Transhumanist Association: http://www.transhumanism.org  

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