Ethical Impact of Cloning
The practice of cloning should not be continued because of the possibility of human dignity being destroyed. As the American physician Leon Kass said, “But we here would be taking a major step into making man himself simply another one of the man-made things” (Kass, 1997). This shows that if we were to be cloned, it would make humans just another man made thing in the world. How can we say that we have pride in living if we are creating ourselves? There are already so many man made things in the world, and we are tearing down natural objects like rain forests to make more room for man made objects like neighborhoods, houses, and malls. There are so many people against this, so why shouldn’t they be against cloning? If in a million years after mankind has started cloning themselves, there are no natural humans left in the world, only clones, then that would be one less natural object in the world. Also, cloning calls into mind the dignity of humans. As the popular freelance writer and web consultant designer Andra Picincu said, “In discussing ethics, the inherent dignity of the individual should be made important since part of human dignity is the uniqueness of that human. Cloning will remove this uniqueness of the human being thus at the same time, violate the inherent dignity of humans” (Picincu, 2008). This means that a person’s dignity is directly connected to his or hers uniqueness or individuality. If a person makes an identical clone of themselves, that takes away a lot of their uniqueness, and therefor strips away some of their dignity. One reason that people give that are pro cloning is that it could solve the problem of infertility. Cloning can solve the problem of infertility because the embryo can be directly implanted into the mother, which scientists say will drastically improve their chances of giving birth to a child. Although there is a viable chance that cloning could solve the problem of infertility, only 14% of people world wide are infertile, which is not a big enough population to condone the experimentation of cloning when there are other solutions such as adoption or a surrogate mother. In conclusion, the negative impact on the dignity of mankind is too much to consider continuing the process of cloning.