The President's speech against cloning: Rhetoric rather than reason

Last Monday I had the privilege of joining a group of professors and students for dinner preceding the Bioethics Forum lecture, "When Does Life Begin?" Near the end of the meal, I noticed Professor Peter Singer engaged in an animated discussion with Nigel Cameron, one of the speakers for that evening. My interest having been piqued, I began listening to the conversation and overheard an interesting point made by Dr. Cameron. He noted that despite that ethicists are well divided on issues surrounding genetic engineering and cloning, and despite that they continue "to bash each other's heads together" over those issues, there exists an interesting misconception among the public that bioethics is largely resolved. For instance, because a few vocal "ethicists" have made a point of opposing human cloning, the public, already apprehensive about the technology, are more than happy to accept it as unquestionably immoral and consider the issue closed.

As President Bush fumbled through his address about the ethics of cloning this past Wednesday night, Dr. Cameron's point rang truer than ever before. How disappointing to hear Mr. Bush assert so unequivocally that "anything other than a total ban on cloning would be unethical," as though the issue had in fact been settled. He did not even present well reasoned arguments supporting this conclusion, offering as only ambiguous, ominous warnings: "Advances in biomedical technology must never come at the expense of human conscience," and "As we seek to improve human life, we must always preserve human dignity." In so little as a 12-minute speech, the President dashed the hopes of almost 100,000 patients on organ donation lists, among many others, without even attempting to explain why the human conscience is ethically relevant, or what he means by human dignity. (Even Dr. Cameron, a well-trained ethicist and senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, would have been hard-pressed to offer such clarifications). Mr. Bush recklessly took those ill-supported assertions as license to offer his opinion as the consensus position of ethicists, the inevitable conclusion of thoughtful people: "Anything other than a total ban on cloning would be unethical."

Needless to say, it worked well in the President's favor not to give mention to those of us who are already genetic clones (yours truly included — my twin brother goes to Penn). Despite that Leon Kass, his top bioethics advisor, suggests that individuals without unique genomes lack individuality and true human dignity — a suggestion manifest in Bush's speech — I believe I enjoy just as much "human dignity" as the next person, and I would be glad to go head-to-head with anyone who disagrees. (I would be happier to have a clear definition of "human dignity" first.) It also turns out that my parents' consciences are in no way compromised because they contributed to the birth of sons with identical genomes.

Assuming he does not believe my human dignity has really been imperilled by my twinhood, why then is Bush opposed to cloning? Even considering his ancillary concerns including the creation of an oocyte market and the ending of nascent lives, the American public has been left without a reason. The rampant selling of human eggs, while admittedly a bad thing, seems an issue for regulation, not prohibition, even discounting that human oocytes are not necessary for human cloning. And an objection based upon the destruction of embryos is not an objection to cloning itself. All we have left to conclude is that echoing Kass's famous essay, "The Wisdom of Repugnance," President Bush claimed that cloning is unethical in essence because it is repugnant, or as he put it, "deeply troubling." It seems that Bush, affected by the powerful rhetoric of an amateur ethicist, is in the practice of banning certain technologies because they do not sit well in our stomachs, despite that he himself referred to the Human Genome Project as "one of the most important advances in scientific history." No other sensicle reason that he offered Wednesday night exists to support his claim that cloning is definitionally unethical.

To the contrary, I would argue that to act upon the whims of our visceral compulsions is to carelessly abdicate our duties as rational people. As concerned members of society, we ought to examine our repulsions, not resign to them; otherwise we begin down a more dangerous — and empirically probable — slippery slope than any Huxley novel, as to which a Jew who survived the Holocaust will attest.

At the very least, as a member of a fundamentally pluralistic society, I would have appreciated seeing my President give due consideration to those many of us who believe the potential benefits of research cloning decisively eclipse any mystical appeals to human dignity or repugnance, rather than passing off his own opinion as the final verdict. But I suppose that is politics. Michael Kimberly is an independent major in bioethics from Birmingham, Ala. He can be reached at kimberly@princeton.edu.