The Ethics of Human Cloning

The Ethics of Human Cloning

I find it very interesting that human cloning has come to be such a controversial topic, when there are no known cases of anyone actually performing the procedure and being successful in it. When I think of human cloning, I think of an overpopulated world filled with these perfectly engineered “clones” that look like and talk like their human counterparts or donors, but don’t quite qualify as humans. Even though they would be classified as “human” clones, I can’t seem to view them as humans at all. They may have all the genes and traits of their donors, but ultimately they are not humans, they are clones. My definition of a human is a person of the homosapien species who has grown and developed with the original nucleus. There should be no enucleating and replacing with a new nucleus of a donor involved. When this occurs, the egg that once had the potential to be a human after fertilization now becomes a clone.

Many people are not happy with the idea of human cloning and forbid it from happening. There are many concerns about the effects it would have on society as well as the effects it would have on the human clones themselves. These many concerns include: the absence of individuality, oppressive conditions, the damage that narcissists and control freaks alike could do, unnecessary burdens, the downfall of genetic engineering, and blurry identities and lineages. Although I am anti-human cloning, I have to stand up for Robert Wachbroit (pro-human cloning), because he raised good points when it came to refuting ethical concerns against human cloning. He argued against the subject of genetic determinism to prove that these concerns are based on factious beliefs about genetic influence. Genetic determinism is the theory that a person’s behavior and character is molded by genetics as opposed to their surrounding environments.

A human clone can be a subject of many definitions. When Wachbroit refers to a human clone, he is referring to...