RIGHTS & PRIVILEGES :

Cellular disconnect : Opponents of human cloning are playing with people's lives (Michael Kinsley, April 8, 2002, SLATE.COM)

The opposition to therapeutic cloning among religious conservatives is easy to understand and even easy to respect, in a way. They believe that a microscopic clump of a few dozen cells, as self-aware as a block of wood, has the same human worth and rights as you or me. If that's true, then cloning embryos to extract stem cells would be just like breeding children in order to harvest their organs and body parts. And therefore better to let your mother suffer or die from a potentially curable disease than to create and destroy that clump. A gruesome but courageous position. And if you buy the initial premise, it all makes sense.

Maybe it's just me but that characterization doesn't actually sound respectful. Of course it doesn't accurately reflect the entirety of the religious conservative objection to cloning either. It's easy to get yourself tangled up in knots arguing about the "rights" of cells, embryos, fetuses, brain dead humans, the elderly, criminals, and all the others whose quality of life we place little enough value on that we've contemplated killing or do in fact kill, and it tends not to be very productive. So let's try approaching the question from the opposite angle. From whence derives the imagined "right" of Michael Kinsley or my mother to treat these at least nascent humans as so many blocks of wood?

It may well be the case that after careful consideration, debate, and subjection to the political pressures of the legislative process we will decide as a society that we do want to experiment on embryos and even full clones, that our desire to prolong our own lives outweighs our concerns for what are after all only potential lives. But even should we so decide, it will be important to realize that there will still be no "right" to treat these beings as blocks of wood but rather a state created privilege to do so, one that should and probably will be rather strictly circumscribed. For the default position of a decent society must always be that it is wrong to take a life--there are, of course, exceptions, but they are exceptions (privileges), not the rule (a right).

If we keep sufficient state control over the processes they might not even degenerate into the worst-case scenarios that we religious conservatives so fear. While if we fail to impose some restrictions as quickly as possible we can confidently forecast that scenarios wil be realized that will presumably make even Mr. Kinsley feel uncomfortable.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2002 8:08 AM