The Challenges of Public Ethics: Reflections on NBAC's Report

Abstract

These reflections build on my participation in the commission, but I do not profess to speak for the commission in my attempt to illuminate its discourse, deliberations, and conclusions about cloning humans. Others inside and outside the commission may have quite different interpretations. NBAC's report, Cloning Human Beings, recommended continuing the moratorium on the use of federal funds for human cloning to create children, continuing the call for a voluntary private moratorium, and passing federal legislation to prohibit somatic cell nuclear transfer to create children. (When I use the phrases "human cloning" or "cloning humans" I am referring to somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning to create children, unless otherwise indicated.) NBAC concluded that "at this time it is morally unacceptable for anyone ... to attempt to create a child using somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning ... because current scientific information indicates that this technique is not safe to use in humans at this time." In light of the available scientific evidence, NBAC reached a moral conclusion, based on the ethical obligation not to harm, or impose serious risks of harm on, fetuses and/or potential children. Safety is a fundamental ethical consideration. It is not merely a scientific consideration, even though it obviously requires scientific evidence. Any procedure that creates a substantial risk of harm to children is morally problematic. To be sure, other important ethical issues also arise from the prospect of human cloning, and these require careful, thoughtful, and imaginative reflection over time so that society will be ready to respond appropriately to human cloning if the technique appears to be safe. Hence, NBAC recommended a sunset clause in federal legislation, review by "an appropriate oversight body" prior to the expiration of the sunset period, and "widespread and continuing [public] deliberation"--in short, a national dialogue--on the whole range of ethical and social issues so that society can formulate appropriate long-term policies regarding human cloning if the safety concerns are adequately addressed. And it attempted to identify, at least in a preliminary way, some of these issues and to start to build a framework in which to address them. However, it did not attempt to resolve--nor is it likely that it could have resolved--these other ethical and social issues that emerge once the safety threshold is crossed. Is human cloning intrinsically wrong or does it depend on the circumstances? There is disagreement in this society and possibly also in NBAC about whether any conceivable acts of human cloning could ever be justified if the technique were safe for the children so created. On the one hand, some thinkers, especially but not only in the Roman Catholic tradition, hold that cloning humans is wrong in and of itself (intrinsically wrong), and that it would thus be wrong under any conceivable circumstances. Any use would violate human dignity, the natural law, the natural order, or some other fundamental principle or value, perception of this violation often being expressed, as Leon Kass suggests, in the language of repugnance and revulsion. On the other hand, many hold that human cloning would be wrong in some, perhaps most, circumstances but not in others that could be imagined. Although there are numerous variations, a number of Protestant and Jewish thinkers, along with many secular thinkers, take this second position and worry about inappropriate uses or abuses of human cloning rather than about every single use. Some who take this second position view human cloning as a morally "neutral" technology, as Rabbi Elliot Dorff does, while others, such as Protestant ethicist Nancy Duff, view it as morally problematic but not intrinsically wrong (both in testimony to NBAC, 13 and 14 March 1997). Several scenarios are considered--cloning because of problems of infertility; cloning to provide a compatible source of biological material, such as bone marrow, for treatment; cloning a dying child; cloning to prevent genetic diseases. …