Cloning, I think, is important because it represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture, sometimes referred to as "designer babies," in which parents and scientists work their private eugenic visions on the child-to-be and impose it on members of the next generation.A child, therefore, ceases to be welcomed as a gift, as a mysterious stranger whose genetic independence from the parents is an emblem of the kind of independence that all of our children are raised to acquire and instead becomes a being to work out the particular vision that the parents have.
And so, it seems to me, part of the reason that this bothers people is that it strikes them as a kind of degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
Thoughts?
There are also questions about identity and individuality that come really from the fact that the clone, while not a perfect copy of the original, is at least brought into being out of a desire to produce something like a replica of the original.Our natural genetic distinctiveness is also a kind of emblem of the unique, never before to have lived and never to be repeated again trajectory of an individuated human life from birth to death.
But in cloning, a blueprint of a life that has already lived is somehow supposed to be reenacted once again. People find it hard to articulate their concerns in these ways, but they sense that what we're really talking about are efforts to redesign what a human being shall be.
Or, "reconstruction" as the callow Hillary called it.