COMMENSAL ISSUE 96

The eminent biologist Lewis Wolpert has offered a magnum of champagne to anyone who can come up with an ethical dilemma arising from cloning. I offer the following but I'm sure PDG members can raise objections of a greater magnitude than mine.

1. An advantage of cloning is that cloned organs will not be rejected in transplant surgery. A father who was mortally ill might desire the cloned son to save the father's life by offering a removable organ from that son's body. Would that not place the son under unfair pressure and filial obligation?
2. It might well be the desire of the grieving parents of a dying child to replicate and 'perpetuate' that child by cloning. Would that not exemplify "in extremis" the normal situation of the cloned that they were conceived for a purpose other than the propagation of their own life and that their life served an ulterior purpose ?
3. For the same reasons as above, parents may wish to clone a still born child. Would not that cloned child be raised from the dead and be a congenital orphan, both of which might be experienced as traumatic existential dilemmas.
4. If a man who had naturally fathered one child went to the trouble and expense of cloning another son , he could reasonably be expected to favour the product of such trouble and expense, leading to the psychological blight of one sibling and the spoiling of the other.
5. Rebelling against parental authority is essential to the individuation of most offspring. The cloned son would rightly perceive his independence to be incomplete and compromised, thus replacing healthy conflict with moral confusion. The father in turn would see any criticism of his son's character faults as either his own hypocrisy or his own projection.
6. If a woman bore the clone of her mother thus making her daughter to be also her own sister would she be morally entitled to exercise parental rights ?
7. If a mother who bore the clone of her husband was attracted to the son for the same reasons she was once attracted to the now deceased father would intercourse be only natural or would it be incest ?

Roger Farnworth

Roger : I am ignorant of the source of Lewis Wolpert’s rash statement. Ethical dilemmas arise from much less radical situations than cloning (eg. for lottery winners). Presumably it would have to be some new dilemma without parallels elsewhere ? We also need to bear in mind what a dilemma is ! In logic, a dilemma is where either of the only two courses of action available produces the same (not necessarily bad) result. In rhetoric, it is where the only two courses of action available produce a bad (not necessarily the same) result. Or so says the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Also, we should note that there’s no difference, other than lack of contemporaneity, between a clone and an identical twin. With this in mind, I proceed.

1. This dilemma is already apparent in the case of bone-marrow transplants from related individuals. Also, I believe, in examples of kidney donation. Besides, utilitarian considerations would suggest that this is a blessing not a curse. At least the son has the option to help his father. If he wants to, he can, if not he can resist the pressure.
2. There is nothing new about a child being conceived as a replacement for one that has died.
3. Are you serious ? This is just a matter of mind-set. Existentially (or experientially) the cloned child wasn’t raised from the dead - which implies transmission of past experience - it was the identical twin who died. The child would only be an "orphan" if the dead child had been its parent, which it wasn’t. Also, being an "orphan" is only a problem if the child has no natural (or foster) parents to care for it. A clone in this situation is just as loved, and just as genetically related to the parents, as the still-born was.
4. I can’t see why this would be so, nor why there’s anything new in this. Fathers have always had the option of favouring a new-born. There’s nothing new in this context given that Artificial Insemination is already a troublesome and expensive option.
5. There’s nothing exceptional about this. A child is normally genetically and experientially dependent on both his parents, yet somehow they grow into their own individuals. In this case, the child would be genetically dependent on one parent only. Fathers already see themselves in their sons.
6. I’d have thought that her daughter would also be her aunt (her mother’s twin sister). But yes, we’d have to rethink why parents have "rights" over their children. Adoptive parents have rights, in any case, where there is no genetic relationship.
7. Incest was a taboo long before the perils of inbreeding were understood genetically. It has also been waived in just those aristocratic societies in which lineage was most important. The situation you raise is a conundrum rather than a dilemma. It depends on what we mean by "incest" and why we consider it to be wrong, if we do. How would we view a man marrying his foster-mother after the death of his foster-father ? With a raised eye-brow, I suspect.

Theo