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.This is playing God ifoninganything is, and yet people use the objection that we should Clnot be ‘playing God’ only when they refer to interventions of Onwhich they disapprove.Of course, they would need to explain 106why a particular interference is unjustifiable whereas others are not, and unless they provide such an explanation theirobjection cannot be taken seriously.In short, if it is supposed that we ought not to play God a number of other assumptionsmust be made.The first is that God has a monopoly of the role (or maybe also that there is only one God), the second is that she is doing a good job (or a better one than we would do)and the third is that God’s will is displayed in the operation of‘nature’ unmediated by human interference.All these are big and unwarranted assumptions.17We should not produce ‘designer children’.As just notedit is sometimes argued that deliberate intervention in the natural process of procreation is an unethical interferencewith the process of nature.The claim is that it is ethical to let nature run its course, rather then deliberately deciding which characteristics a human being will have.This claim is often combined with the claim that human beings have a ‘right tochance’, that is, a right to be born ‘out of the blind possibilities of nature’, rather than of the parents’ decisions.A number of philosophers, however, have asked whether it istrue that random chance is certainly and always better thandeliberate choice.18 If the moral superiority of ‘lettingnature run its course’ were to be accepted, no medical intervention, nor any other intervention in the course of nature or the natural world of whatever sort (agriculture, for example), would be justifiable.There is also a paradoxical side to this appeal to the random genetic combinations produced by sexual reproduction.If the genome to be cloned is healthy and it might be proved that the child will be healthy, then would it be responsible to go in for the sort of genetic Russian roulette ety and Dangerinvolved in sexual reproduction when a ‘tried and tested’Safgenome could be utilised with known susceptibilities togenetic illness and good predictive profile as to life107expectancy and future genetically influenced illness?Cloning commodifies children.One of the worries is that if cloning becomes a reproductive option, this would meanthat parents ‘may buy’ their children.This argument, how-ever, is one against commodifying children, rather thanagainst cloning.Besides, having children in other ways, for example adoption, surrogacy and IVF, may also be costly.Ifthe objection against reproductive cloning is that it wouldcost money, then the same objection should be raised against the other reproductive methods just mentioned.However,this raises a larger question as to whether or not there is anything wrong with commodifying children so long as thisis not the only thing done with them.Problems with thisversion of the argument concerning instrumentalisation wereconsidered in the previous chapter.Creating twins a generation apart may have unpredict-ably bad consequences.The psychosocial consequences of introducing cloning among the ways of having children areunpredictable.But unpredictability is inherent in any pro-creation and unless serious irreversible harm for the child, or for all parties, will likely result, the argument of unpredictability is arguably not sufficient to deny a priori the procedure.It is instead a good reason to investigate the likely con-sequences at a psychological and social level, and ‘the best way’ of preparing a child for knowledge about the way inwhich s/he was brought into the world.With ‘reproductive cloning’ someone may create copiesof Hitler or create armies of soldiers to establish a unioningversal dictatorship.This objection is based on the mistaken Clidea, probably spread by fiction, that offspring resulting from Onthe implantation of an embryo derived by CNR would be108identical, in terms of personality, inclinations and values, to the nucleus donor.This view is scientifically unfounded and based on a gross misunderstanding of the way character andpersonality are formed in an individual, and, ultimately, neglects the fundamental importance of environmental factorsand the interplay between such factors and genes in thedevelopment of personal identity.As to using cloning for the creation of subservient armies of soldiers, we need to takeinto consideration this rather fantastic scenario only because it is so often mentioned.19 The utility of CNR for creatingarmies is minimal.First, despots would have to wait tobreed a new army for let us say 16 to 18 years following the initiation of any programme, and despots usually are not that patient.Second, normal breeding will do the job quite aswell without going to the extra expense, risk and trouble of using cloning technology.It might be tempting to believethat all this is worth it given that through cloning the despot will have an army of automatons, but there is no evidence nor any reason to suppose that cloning has any affect on free will or autonomy of individuals.Genetic enhancement.It is sometimes said that cloning could be used for genetic enhancement of human beings, butthis idea rests on a simple mistake.Cloning only repeats an existing genome, and does not enhance it.Contrast normalsexual reproduction, which may enhance the gene poolthrough a lucky accidental combination of genes (or,unlucky, for those who believe genetic enhancement to be abad thing).We will now turn to the one argument that seems to havesome importance and force in urging caution when contem-ety and Dangerplating human reproductive cloningSaf2.SAFETY109Cloning is ‘untested and unsafe’The one decent argument against cloning that does commandrespect is the claim that in the current state of the art cloning would be likely to result in a high failure rate in pregnancy and an unacceptably high rate of birth defects and geneticabnormalities.There are also persistent fears that clones may have a shorter than average life expectancy.For example, in the case of Dolly, the first cloned mammal, only one clonewas successfully produced after 277 attempts.20But embryo wastage per se cannot be an objection toreproductive cloning, at least for anyone who accepts natural reproduction.Approximately 80% of embryos perish in natural reproduction.But not only is natural reproduction inefficient, it is also unsafe.Around 3–5% of babies born havesome abnormality.Natural reproduction not only involves the foreseeable and unavoidable creation of some embryos whichwill die, but also some embryos which will go on to becomevery disabled human beings.Many embryos are created sogenetically abnormal that they cannot survive.They mis-carry or spontaneously abort.But some survive only to die as grossly deformed babies
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