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I heard the news that Texas scientists had produced a cloned
pet cat, my first thought was, "Yuck — first we'll
clone cats, then the next thing you know we won't think twice about
cloning people." However, my next thought was of my late dog,
Gina. We got Gina when I was in third grade, and she lived a long
life — until my second year in graduate school. Objectively,
Gina was a bad dog, always getting into the garbage and jumping
onto sofas. In our hearts, though, she was the best dog imaginable,
loving, playful, and irreplaceable — or so we had assumed.
What the copycat
news made me realize is that if given the chance, I probably would
have cloned Gina. And in this realization is the silver lining for
those of us opposed to human cloning: The very harmlessness of cloning
pets throws into sharp relief the evils of cloning children.
Why not clone
my old dog? I always regret that my wife never got to meet Gina,
having heard so much about her from my family and me. Now she could
not only meet her, we could raise her together. When we have kids,
they could have the same joy of living with Gina, growing up with
Gina, that my brother and I had. Even better: Since I know already
know Gina's temperament, and since I have some idea of the mistakes
we made with her as a puppy, I could have a second chance to correct
those mistakes. Once she'd grown up, I always regretted that we
hadn't been firm enough when we taught her to "heel."
No such mistakes with Gina II!
My plans for
Gina II may strike you as creepy, but it's hard to describe them
as immoral. After all, we accept that dogs and cats are our property,
and that we are their masters. (Cat owners may insist that their
pets have no master, but when you're holding the laser pointer,
and the cat is chasing the red dot around the room, it's pretty
clear who's in charge.)
A pet lives
for our pleasure. We can do everything short of beat and starve
our cats and dogs, with no fear for legal consequences. And heaven
help the lower vertebrates, which live in constant danger of being
flushed down the toilet. We love our pets, but we still control
them; cloning a dog is not terribly different from putting a leash
on it.
Our relationship
with our children is different. At least in modern Western cultures
(and I suspect this attitude is more universal), we view our control
over our offspring as necessarily transient and incomplete: Children
need to be supervised and kept out of trouble when they are too
young to know better, but as they grow older they will assume increasing
moral autonomy, eventually becoming adults like their parents. Most
of us wrinkle our noses at the sight of toddlers literally leashed
to their parents, just as we insist that a teenager who commits
a crime is more culpable than an eight year old who does so.
In a recently
published 1951 letter, Isaiah
Berlindiscussed the problem of reconciling our insistence on
human autonomy with the necessity of educating and raising children:
. . . all
"moulding" is evil, and . . . if human beings at birth
had the power of choice and the means of understanding the world,
it would be criminal; since they have not, we temporarily enslave
them, for fear that, otherwise, they will suffer worse misfortunes
from nature and from men, and this "temporary enslavement"
is a necessary evil until such time as they are able to choose
for themselves — the "enslavement" having as its
purpose not an inculcation of obedience but its contrary, the
development of power of free judgment and choice; still, evil
it remains, even if necessary.
This gets at
the heart of why so many Americans find human cloning so repugnant,
in spite of their ambiguity (to say the least) about the rights
of embryos, and their inability to imagine Brave New World-type
dystopias. A cloned child, made rather than begotten, is a pet:
His or her "breed" picked out for its "unique characteristics"
just as a border collie is chosen for its intelligence and a poodle
because it doesn't shed much hair.
Our children
do not live for our pleasure. They are not pets, and we are not
their masters. In addition to warming the hearts of their owners,
cloned pets may serve as living, breathing reminders that the bonds
of family life are not simply psychological leashes.
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