Cloning:  A Quintessential Human Act

Cloning reveals the human situation today.

The recent appearance of Dolly, the cloned sheep, as well as both the reports and the debate about cloning humans, provide us glimpses into the quintessential character of the human situation today. We are created co-creators (some will say created by God, others, by nature): creatures of nature who themselves intentionally enter into the process of creating nature in startling ways. We face even the prospect of creating ourselves, in ways that are startling and troubling.

(1) The character of the cloners. 
What is the significance of cloning as revelation of the human situation? In the first place, the scientific knowledge that underlies cloning and the technological ability to clone are no more and no less morally charged than is our basic human nature itself. Cloning is neither unnatural or bizarre. Rather, it is in principle an unsurprising exemplification of what we have known for a long time about ourselves. A creature that can, through genetic engineering, totally rearrange the life-forms that constitute our agricultural enterprises could also, almost predictably, be expected to learn eventually how to make itself. The most significant revelation deriving from Dolly will prove to bewhat it tells us about the cloners, ourselves. In cloning, we are in fact addressing ourselves, and it is about ourselves that we have the greatest questions. We often talk as if to clone is "playing God," when in fact, it is to playing the role of human co-creators, and we have no clear ideas about what that entails. A salutary place to begin would be to ask : What sorts of persons ought to be allowed to control the cloning process? What character and what set of virtues would we want cloners to possess? 

(2) Cloned humans are real persons. 
The life we engineer in the laboratory is really life. Inasmuch as the cloner of humans is itself a natural creature, cloning must be considered to be a process of nature. As such, cloning humans would finally be more like nature's process of creating identical twins than some Frankenstein horror story. A cloned person would grow and develop through the fundamental processes that govern the development of every other person: a genotype giving rise to a phenotype, a person emerging through the interaction with physical environment and culture. Parenting and schooling would continue to be critical in the development of a personal identity, since no human being can survive by genes alone. Those of us who believe that God started this whole process in creation and sustains it from day to day would conclude that this cloned person is, like the rest of us, in the image of God and possesses a soul (given that there are several different theological notions of what it means to have a soul). 

Many persons will have difficulty accepting these ideas, primarily because they are so alienated from nature that they cannot understand their humanity within the parameters of nature as we as know it today. Cloning is another occasion for us to learn that whatever else we may be, we are thoroughly natural creatures. 

(3) What is natural? What is artificial? 
The cloning developments of recent weeks are shown, thereby, to be also revelations of nature, as well as of human beings. Nature is like this, at least on planet earth--it clones sheep and perhaps even humans. Familiar dualisms are empty and unhelpful. The dualism between pristine nature and the nature that bears irretrievably the marks of human intervention is almost fully obsolete. Our concept of "nature" today is closely related to our image of the cyborg--the pristine and the artificial in one reality. Cloned humans are natural persons. Since natural children inherit genes from both a father and a mother, cloned humans are not natural children of those whose cells are cloned, but rather of that person's parents. 

(4) Multiple contexts of morality.
Since being human is intrinsically a moral enterprise, the discussion of cloning must include from the outset questions of motivations, purposes, and consequences. The moral and spiritual issues have to do with why we clone, what interests it serves, and the moral status of those interests. These also include the question of what the purpose of cloning, or of any human life, is, and what the consequences of cloning might be. In the non-human realm, under the assumption that plants and animals exist to serve us, including our need for food, clothing, and medicines and cosmetics, we have concluded, without much public discussion, that all genetic engineering is desirable, if it serves our wellbeing. In other words, plant and animal nature has been defined as commodity or resource for human purposes. What confidence can we have that human cloning will not proceed under the same commodity rubric? 

The practice of human cloning will be marked by a dauntingly complex set of motives and values, in a wide range of contexts: personal contexts (individual motives and values will determine whether people choose to be cloned), professional contexts (medical professionals will administer cloning and legal professionals will argue individual cases and draw up contracts), free market contexts (the biotechnology companies will make cloning profitable), and the government context (regulating or de-regulating cloning for the common good). In all of these contexts, decisions are morally charged, marked by conflict of opinion and clash of competing interests. The complexity arises when any specific cases of cloning come to mind. Think of the difference in how we might regard a wealthy person cloning an offspring as a potential source of transplantable body parts and a childless couple who see good reason to practice cloning as an alternative to in vitro fertilization, or as a form of adoption. 

We are about to enter once again into the whole question of what human life is all about and how it should be conducted--cloning has simply raised the stakes in this discussion. When we consider that the cloning discussion is simultaneous with the discussions of abortion and doctor-assisted death, we sense the enormous burden that our individual and societal psyches must bear in these days.

My Christian tradition offers some very general, but yet pertinent, guidelines for this discussion: (1) all life is a gift of God, including the life that is able to discover how to clone; (2) we are expected to be good stewards of God's gifts, which mean (3) that we are both free and accountable to God and our fellow humans for what we do; we have a vocation from God to be free and accountable; (4) all of this takes place under the conditions of sin--we are finite, fallible, motivated by self-interest that can include greed and desire for power; sin is not an excuse for withdrawing from life, but rather a reminder of what sort of realistic vigilance must accompany our decisions of how to live. My Lutheran tradition asserts that we are saints and sinners at the same time. This describes precisely the condition of humans as cloners of other animals and of themselves.

We should recognize that there is no quick fix to the "cloning question," nor will we ever arrive at a pure or perfect resolution to all the issues that cloning raises. Our public policies governing all non-human cloning should be carefully scrutinized for their motives and consequences. Our policies concerning the cloning of humans should be designed to do the following: (1) allow considerable time for public discussion and reflection before authorizing or financing such cloning; (2) give adequate attention to the complex sets of interests and values that will impinge upon this issue; (3) bring policy to bear in a subtle and multi-faceted manner, appropriate to the situations in which cloning might be carried out; (4) factor into our policy the likelihood that future developments will reveal how little we really know at this time and how fallible even our best judgments are.

Originally published in 1997 at http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/HEFNER2.HTML.