Five distinguished panelists--Leon R. Kass, Diana Schaub, Charles Murray, William A. Galston, and J. Bottum--debate the report of the President's Council on Bioethics, its recommendations, and the questions it raises about the moral and social implications of new biotechnologies.

The Public's Stake
Leon R. Kass

For the first six months of this year, the President's Council on Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise President Bush on the subject. The council's report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, was issued in July, and a paperback edition has just been published by Public Affairs.†

Among the charges to the President's Council on Bioethics were the following: to provide a forum for the national discussion of bioethical issues and to facilitate a greater understanding of these issues. Our report, in addition to providing policy recommendations, was intended to serve both of these purposes.

The commercial publication of this volume and the convening of this book forum are intended to help us to perform our mission. I am very grateful to Paul Golob of Public Affairs, to Chris DeMuth of the American Enterprise Institute, and to my fellow panelists for helping us in this work.

I want to summarize the content of the report in five points: First, the council sought to examine the subject of human cloning in full by considering the human goods that cloning might serve or endanger--not just whether the technique is feasible or safe. We sought also to assess the impact of growing biotechnical powers over human life and their effect on human procreation, on the goals and limits of biomedical science, and on the meaning of the activity of healing. It was of primary importance to put cloning in its proper place, both humanly speaking and also in the context of other biotechnical powers now gathering for manipulating the human body and mind.

Second, the council strived to formulate fair and accurate terminology. Human cloning is a subject that has been bedeviled by confusing and manipulative speech. Our goal was to clarify the terminology, beginning with the idea of human cloning itself. Whatever the purpose for which human cloning is undertaken, the act that produces the genetic replica is the creation of an embryonic clone. Accordingly, the council has insisted that what we mean by human cloning is the production of cloned human embryos, the earliest stage of developing human life. This act of cloning may be undertaken with the intention of either transferring these embryos to a uterus to initiate a pregnancy or taking them apart in order to obtain stem cells for research.

In popular discussion, the first use has been called "reproductive cloning" or just "cloning." The second has come to be called "therapeutic cloning," "research cloning," or "nuclear transfer for stem cell research." The council, instead, chose to call these uses respectively "cloning-to-produce-children" and "cloning-for-biomedical-research." These terms are accurate. And they allow us to debate the moral questions without euphemistic distortion or Orwellian speech. Whether one favors or opposes cloning-to-produce-children, whether one favors or opposes cloning-for-biomedical-research, the council insists that we must acknowledge that both uses of cloning begin with the same act, the production of cloned human embryos.

The third point taken up by the council was the ethics of cloning-to-produce-children. Regarding cloning-to-produce- children, the council is in agreement with majority opinion both in America and the Congress. The council was unanimous, in fact, that cloning-to-produce-children should be opposed, both morally and legally. Not only is the technique demonstrably unsafe, but it can never be safely attempted. And the council opposes this practice not only because it is unsafe, but because it would imperil the freedom and dignity of the cloned child, the cloning parents, and the entire society. In its report, the council also argues that by enabling parents for the first time to predetermine the entire genetic makeup of their children, we would be taking a major step toward turning procreation into manufacturing. Cloning-to-produce-children would also confound family relations and personal identity, create new stresses between parents and offspring, and might open the door to a new eugenics where parents or society could replicate the genomes of individuals whom they deem to be superior.

The fourth area taken up by the council was the ethics of cloning-for-biomedical-research. And here the council, like the nation, was divided. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the research offers the prospect, though speculative at the moment, of gaining valuable knowledge and treatments for many diseases. On the other hand, this practice would require the exploitation and destruction of nascent human life created solely for the purpose of research.

Individual council members weighed these moral concerns differently. Yet all members of the council--and I am delighted about this--agreed that each side in this debate had something vital to defend, not only for itself but for all of us. Each side understood that we cannot afford to be casual about human suffering, to be cavalier regarding how we treat nascent human life, or to be indifferent about how we decide amongst the alternatives. Each side recognized that we must face up to the moral burden of either approving or disapproving this research, namely, on the one hand, that some who might be healed more rapidly might not be; and on the other hand, that we will become a society that creates and uses some human lives in the service of others.

Finally, the council offered two policy recommendations, each of them distinct from the most prominent legislative proposals considered in Congress. Both recommendations called for a permanent ban on cloning-to-produce-children, thus giving public force to the nation's strong ethical verdict against this practice. Where the council differed was on how to approach cloning-for-biomedical-research.

A minority of the council recommended that we proceed now with such potentially crucial research, but only with significant regulations in place, including federal licensing, oversight, and strict limits on how long cloned embryos may be allowed to develop. A majority of the council, myself included, recommended that no human cloning of any kind be permitted at this time. We proposed that Congress enact a ban on all attempts at cloning-to-produce-children and a four-year federal moratorium on cloning-for-biomedical-research, beginning with the act of the production of cloned human embryos.

We argued for this moratorium on a number of grounds. It would provide more time to debate whether we should cross this crucial moral boundary--that of creating human life solely as a resource for research. A moratorium would allow time for other areas of stem cell research, both adult and embryonic, to proceed. It would allow time for those who believe that cloning-for-biomedical-research can never ethically be pursued to make their case, and for those who disagree to design a responsible system of regulation and public oversight.

A national moratorium would also allow the debate on the question of research on cloned embryos to be taken up in the larger context, where it belongs, the context of embryo research generally, and of the future possibilities of genetic engineering of human life. Pending such debate, the majority of the council held that no law should now be enacted that approves or authorizes any human cloning.

With the Senate, now in recess, having failed to act on the cloning legislation, we find these questions still before us and likely to return for legislative consideration. Yet, even as we speak, Italian embryologist Severino Antinori claims that a clonal pregnancy is in the works and that the first cloned child may be born soon.

I think it behooves us as human beings and citizens to step forward and urge our legislative representatives to act when they next convene, and to continue to think about the deepest human and social implications of the biotechnology revolution now underway. 

Leon R. Kass is the Hertog Fellow at AEI, professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Slavery plus Abortion
Diana Schaub

On the cover of Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President's Council on Bioethics is the image of a fingerprint. It's an inspired choice, for the fingerprint, as Leon Kass's "Foreword" says, "has rich biological and moral significance." The fingerprint is at once emblematic of our common humanity and our individual uniqueness. No two are alike; even identical twins have distinct fingerprints. Presumably a cloned human being also, as a sort of delayed-entry twin, would not be a perfect repeat, at least not all the way down to the tips of her fingers. DNA is not the whole of our nature. It is, however, a good deal of it, and the question raised by recent scientific developments is whether and how much we ought to stick our fingers in it. Ought we to put our own impress upon the means by which human beings come to be? As Kass points out, fingerprints are the marks left by our grasp on things--a grasp that is sometimes illicit. This is why the police know as much about fingerprints as scientists do. And it is why the decisions to be made about cloning are properly political decisions. It belongs to citizens and legislators to police the bounds of the human grasp, to determine what may be manipulated, manhandled, and doctored, and in what ways. While the liberty of the mind is by right absolute, actions may, with justification, be restricted or forbidden.

Let me suggest another metaphoric image that came to mind while reading the report: not the fingerprint but the navel and especially the exercise referred to as "contemplating your navel." Now before anyone mistakes this for a criticism, uncivilly expressed, let me hasten to say that I am using the expression rather unidiomatically. "Contemplating your navel" usually means to relax and withdraw from the world, to zone out, waste time, and daydream. I don't mean that. I mean that the council has meditated on the human core and that it has deepened our self-understanding by reflecting on matters often overlooked. In Brave New World, the inhabitants of the World State are "hatched" and "decanted" rather than born; I surmise that Huxley's Betas, Deltas, and Epsilons, manufactured in uniform batches by "Bokanovsky's process," are entirely without bellybuttons. So, while we still have them, we might do well to contemplate them.

In effect, that is what the council's report does. It explores the meaning of procreation and the human significance of sexual reproduction. It articulates the links between sexual reproduction and the ground and purpose of the human family, the continuity of the generations, the formation of individual identity, and the bearing of our freedom and our mortality. The report enables us to understand all that is at stake in the advent of asexual reproduction. Cloning is a form of generation that would confound the generations--a woman who had herself cloned would be both mother and identical twin sister to her clone. She would in effect have become the mother of herself. To aim to be the mother of oneself is the height of hubris and despotism. It is the crime of incest--the begetting of one's own upon one's own--scientifically perfected. The cloning of human beings would be the triumph of the Machiavellian project to conquer fortune and bring everything within the power of human choice and calculation.

By raising serious doubts about that modern project, Human Cloning and Human Dignity offers a vindication of the element of chance in human life. It shows how human dignity is bound up with the lottery of nature and how the ground of human dignity could be imperiled by the attempt to extend human control over the human essence. The counsel of wisdom and prudence is to stick with our old-fashioned, erotic, and happy-go-lucky mode of generation rather than embracing the new science of solitary self-genesis. We should remain true to the bellybutton--the bellybutton that reminds us of our indebtedness to our origins, but that also bespeaks our directedness toward a self-standing existence.

In its combination of profound reflection on human nature with immediate policy concerns and decisions, the council's report is reminiscent of The Federalist Papers, a work which Jefferson--himself no Federalist--judged to be "the best commentary on the principles of government, which ever was written." I predict a similar authoritative status for this publication in the sphere of bioethics. In a sense, the council's report is even more remarkable than The Federalist Papers, inasmuch as The Federalist Papers had a partisan, and even propagandistic, purpose. Imagine if we instead had a document called The Constitution Papers, a joint product of Federalists and Anti-Federalists, laying out for the citizenry the full panoply of argument and counter-argument. That is what this report is like. Even when it gives expression to the council's unanimous opposition to cloning-to-produce-children, it details the arguments that might be mustered in support of such cloning. More especially when the topic is cloning-for-biomedical-research, where the council was itself split, the report, with a united voice, carefully delineates both the majority and minority views, and seeks to bring them into conversation with one another. This dialectical approach is so rare one hardly knows how to respond.

Certainly, one comes away with new respect for the potential of reasoned discourse within a democracy. Moreover, I at least came away with the conviction that if one were, with an open mind, to read the whole of the book, including the appendix of personal statements, one would be persuaded of the rightness of banning all human cloning, whether for the purpose of children or research. In the pageant of arguments, some of them looked distinctly thin and weak. And yet, dampening one's hope that truth will emerge the winner is the fact that the participants themselves, despite their respectful listening to one another, did not achieve agreement. Well, they did and they didn't. On the question of cloning-to-produce-children, there was welcome unanimity. However, on the question of cloning-for-biomedical-research, there was a deadlock, with seven members for permitting it, seven for banning it, and three in the middle in favor of a moratorium. For the rest of my time, I would like to talk about the meaning of that deadlock and what it portends for the future.

In the end, the seven in favor of a permanent ban were willing to join with the three in favor of a temporary ban in order to produce a majority recommending a moratorium. From what we have seen so far in Congress, the deadlock is being repeated there, though with less prospect of a policy compromise emerging. Indeed, the deadlock over cloning-for-biomedical-research may make any sort of legislative action unlikely, even a ban on cloning-to-produce-children (despite the near universal opposition to such cloning). The division over cloning-for-biomedical-research is a division not so much over cloning as over the status of the human embryo, cloned or not. Until that larger issue--with its implications for embryo research in general, as well as for the current practice of in vitro fertilization, and of course for abortion--is resolved, we risk ending up with a laissez-faire policy on cloning that very few Americans want.

I did find it tremendously heartening that the split within the council was not between scientists and humanists. For instance, four of the six M.D.s voted for the moratorium on research cloning, and in some cases clearly favored strengthening that to a ban. It seemed, indeed, that those who knew most about embryology spoke most persuasively about the unsustainability of the claim that 14-day-old and younger embryos might be treated with less than full human respect--because less than fully human. Stanford University biologist William Hurlbut, for instance, both in his detailed responses on the subjects of gastrulation and twinning, and in his general explanation of potentiality and organismal unity, showed how the evidence of science supports the claim that the early embryo has an inviolable moral status.

Kass reminds us in the "Foreword" that "reasonable and morally serious people can differ about fundamental issues," but I take it that this unique experiment in clarifying the differences is undertaken in the hope that such clarification will lead to the concord of truth. In other words, this is not a matter about which we can just agree to disagree. There is an imperative to continue reasoning with one another, which implies, I think, that there is reason with a capital R out there somewhere, and that reasonable people, were they perfectly reasonable, or even just sufficiently reasonable to the occasion, would arrive at it. As Lincoln said of the slavery controversy: "Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably too."

Now, maybe the cloning controversy is not like the slavery controversy. Certainly, there is no looming prospect of civil war should the division of opinion continue. Kass suggests there is another difference as well. In the "Foreword," he says that with slavery or despotism, it is easy to identify evil as evil, and the challenge is rather to figure out how best to combat it. But in the realm of bioethics, the evils we face (if indeed they are evils) are intertwined with the goods we so keenly seek: cures for disease, relief of suffering, and preservation of life. When good and bad are so intermixed, distinguishing between them is often extremely difficult. In talking of the complexity and difficulty of the bioethical enterprise, Kass was perhaps being diplomatic. This remark could be in the same vein as the "reasonable people can differ" statement, inasmuch as it gives further reason for why they might differ.

Nonetheless, with considerable trepidation, I feel I must take issue with the statement. The trepidation arises because Leon Kass was my teacher at the University of Chicago and because I believe the nation at large is now blessed in having him as a teacher. At the risk both of seeming ungrateful, and of being wrong, I would only point out that it was not at all easy to bring men to see slavery as evil, particularly not once the practice of slavery was well-established in the life of the nation. Moreover, in the controversy over slavery, as Lincoln himself admitted, there were legitimate goods at stake for the slaveholding South, among them security, self-preservation and the preservation of their way of life, states' rights, specific constitutional guarantees, and a certain kind of honor. Lincoln's acknowledgement, however, of the weightiness of the South's legitimate concerns didn't stop him from declaring slavery an evil and insisting that one cannot attain those real human goods by the route of perpetuating slavery. There is a difference between granting credence to the goods sought by one's opponents and granting credence to their arguments or plans.

We are armed now with this invaluable report, and so the time has come to frame the issue more sharply. Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion.

Of my teacher I would ask: Is it either incorrect or misleading or unhelpful to see the dispute over cloning as of a piece with the slavery crisis and the abortion debate? And further, if the example of Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral complexity and the intertwinedness of good and evil and the intractability of the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and more likely that we will end up in Brave New World, where despotism masquerades as a conception of the good? The motto of the World State with which Huxley's novel opens is "community, identity, stability." I suspect our own path to biomedical despotism will be guided by the words "progress, compassion, and choice." 

Diana Schaub is associate professor of political science at Loyola College in Maryland and author of Erotic Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). 

An Opportunity Lost
Charles Murray

It is customary when making critical remarks to start out by saying nice things about the person one is criticizing, and I want to do that now, but not pro forma. The report of the President's Council on Bioethics is superb. It embodies the kind of reasoned discourse that you wish were used for all public issues and almost never is. Furthermore, Leon Kass was the best possible person to head up this effort. I can think of no one else who brings to this difficult subject such moral seriousness, power of intellect, and generosity of spirit.

It is then a wonderful document, but also I believe profoundly misguided. Here is how I wish the report had begun: As students of the history of science, we understand that it is not within our power or the power of the United States to have one iota of effect on what is going to happen with human cloning. This technology will develop at its own pace, and to an extent that will be dictated by what can be done, not by what we wish would be done.

We understand the folly of trying to imitate King Canute. But we are also students of the problems of being human and the problems of human institutions. And we see in this arising technology ways in which these institutions are placed at risk, especially that core institution of the family. We see ways in which our understanding of what it means to be human could easily be compromised in ways that would leave us spiritually poorer and bereft of many of the sources of human fulfillment that we now enjoy.

Therefore, our task is not to propose new regulations or laws, for we understand their futility, but to engage in dialogue with those who are doing this research so that we may manage it with as little harm and as much good as possible. That is what I wish the council's report had said.

It is simply not serious to think that the U.S. government can pronounce on what is going to happen with this technology. It can't. In no past instance has anybody been able to put a lid on scientific inquiry and its progress, and we won't this time, especially because biotechnology is so attractive to so many people.

If in 1939, when we already had the physics for the atom bomb, we didn't yet have a Hitler, it is quite possible that many physicists would have said, "Take this cup from our lips. We don't want to spend the next five years building an atom bomb." Yet biotechnology is different. The scientists in the field do not see themselves as engaged in the work of the devil; they see themselves as bringing incalculable benefits to mankind. They do not see Leon Kass and other members of the President's Council as people who are trying to hold back and ponder at greater lengths extremely difficult moral questions. They see them as troglodytes.

Furthermore, hundreds of billions of dollars are to be made in biotechnology. If you take a group of scientists who think they are doing the Lord's work (even if most of them are not religious) and if there are hundreds of billions of dollars to be made, I promise you, it will happen. It may not happen in the United States if we pass certain laws, but it will happen.

In this respect, there are a variety of ways in which the council's report, much as I admire its tone and spirit, represents a missed opportunity. For once we realize that the development of this technology is inevitable, then our approach becomes quite different from the council's. Most importantly, we would take steps to make sure that the United States remains the center of this research, that the top scientists in the world are socialized here, and that the best graduate students come here to learn how to do it. At least then the science would develop within an ethos of moral responsibility. Such will not happen if the center of research is in China, or if it is done under cover in Barbados.

The council's report exacerbates a number of problems. First, it gets in the way of a meaningful dialogue with the scientific community. My impression from conversations with scientists is that the Jesse Helms syndrome has set in, whereby if Helms favors a position, you can be sure that nobody in academia will admit to supporting it. We now have a situation in which the difficult moral issues posed by cloning are raised mainly by conservative Republicans. This is bad. It makes it that much harder to gain the sympathetic attention of the scientists who do the research.

A second problem concerns the portability of this science. I said a few minutes ago that China's laboratories will do the research if we don't. The report largely ignores this issue, noting only that strict laws against certain kinds of work have been passed in Michigan and in Germany, and yet their biogenetic industries seem to be doing just fine. I'm sorry, but that is not good enough.

We are at the very early days of a very big business, and the portability of science has increased enormously. You don't have to be on a Cal Tech campus to consult with people at Cal Tech, nor within the continental limits of the United States to interact with our scientists. The Internet has seen to that. You don't need to be in a university setting in order to have the state-of-the-art laboratories required for bioengineering. All you need is money, and there is going to be lots of money for this kind of work. I am not worried that many scientists would actually leave the United States to engage in this research. What concerns me is that the United States will not be at the center of a promising new technology, and that the scientists who do the research will be socialized elsewhere.

To continue this gloomy forecast, let me bring up a few additional topics people just don't want to think about. I have already mentioned China. Biotechnology within a fairly short period of time will open up all sorts of possibilities; some of them are awful. I don't think China is going to blink at any of them. While the use of this technology as a weapon is not nearly as direct as the use of atomic energy as a weapon, we cannot overlook the ways in which that could happen, too.

I imagine that there are a variety of questions that people might reasonably ask me, such as, "Is this man completely indifferent to the question of simply doing the right thing?" No, I am not. I am probably as troubled by this technology as Leon Kass. I may see more promise in the up side, but I certainly am worried by the down side. However, when one is making moral decisions not just for oneself but for large groups of people, a utilitarian calculus must enter in. Moreover, if I am right in arguing that we cannot stop the science from proceeding at least somewhere, then the council's report amounts to an empty moral gesture.

In the course of talking about these things, I have tended to sound more apocalyptic than I really feel about the council's recommendations. A four-year moratorium is in fact very modest. Great damage will not be done to the position of the United States if this narrow recommendation is adopted. My concern is rather for the increased probability of a wide variety of things going wrong in the future.

We are in the position of scientists in 1939. The science is in place. A moral person can say that human beings should not have this technology. I am willing to grant that if it were within our power to prevent human beings from having this, there would be a good moral case for taking government action. Yet if that cannot be done--and it cannot--one must face the fact that human beings will have this capacity eventually. The question then is: What can we do to minimize the damage and to enhance the benefits?

In closing, let me say that one thing gives me comfort, and it is that on the President's Council are a number of people, Leon Kass included, whose intellect and judgment I respect enormously. That such men and women disagree with me gives me some hope that I am wrong. 

Charles Murray is a senior fellow at AEI and coauthor of The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994).

The Danger of Absolutes
William A. Galston

Despite my disagreement with some of its specific conclusions and recommendations, I have come to praise the report of the President's Council on Bioethics, not to bury it. The report is distinguished by an extraordinary civility of tone, by which I mean not just mutually respectful language among the council members but something more, a model of how scholarly expertise can contribute to democratic deliberation and debate.

The report offers--so far as the son of a biologist who is not himself a biologist can judge--sound science, accessibly and impartially presented, in the service of reflection on policy and morality, the sort of reflection in which citizens and their representatives must engage. The contrast between the council's report and the prevailing tone of our public discourse is painful.

Beyond this civility of tone is something that I will call civility of substance. In this respect, I applaud as true what Diana Schaub condemned as base. In the report, the proponents of the different positions do not argue that all of the relevant reasons, principles, and human goods are on their side. To say, as they do, that the balance or preponderance of goods point in one direction, rather than another, is to give moral substance to the view that others of good will and intelligence can legitimately arrive at different conclusions. Indeed--and I think this is a very important insight--the overall thrust of the report is that vitally important goods and principles are not only at stake in the cloning debate but are also at odds with one another. The choice is not so much between good and evil as between good and good. As the report insists, "Each side in the debate has something vital to defend, not only for itself but for everyone."

Yet another reason that I admire the council's report is for the breadth of the moral reflection in which it engages. Its inquiry is not conducted in the spirit of cost-benefit utilitarianism or fashionable rights talk. Instead, it emphasizes broad and deep reflection on what is good for human beings, not only as individuals but as social beings imbedded in a network of familial, social, and political relations. Furthermore, this report offers not just the well-worn, though important and, indeed, unavoidable debate about the status of the human embryo, but also innovative lines of inquiry into the nature of good lives and of good societies.

The council's report should also be praised for being quietly but boldly counter-cultural. What do I mean by that? The report dares to suggest that our characteristic American predilections and strengths--our orientation toward life and freedom, innovation and compassion, and faith and progress--which have brought us such blessings, can also be the source of moral blindness and even hubris. It dares to suggest that on occasion there are things more important than life--namely, in the old Aristotelian term for these things, the good life. And it suggests that in the case of the clash between lives and good lives, it's not always clear which way to go. Even more counter-culturally, the report dares to suggest that there are things even more important than the relief of suffering. This is an amazingly bold proposition.

To give you some idea of its daring, I quote from three widely separated portions of the report. From the beginning: "Easing suffering is not our only moral obligation." From the middle: "Suffering should not be opposed by any means possible." And, toward the end, the report candidly states that if a moratorium on cloning for biomedical research is enacted, "It is possible that some might suffer in the future because research proceeded more slowly. We cannot suppose that the moral life comes without cost."

Another thing I admire about the council's report is its scrambling of conventional ideological categories. For example, I note with interest that two of the best-known conservatives on the council, Charles Krauthammer and James Q. Wilson, disagree with many other conservatives (while agreeing with one another) in denying the human embryo the status of full personhood. They nonetheless manage to disagree with one another concerning the most contested policy issue before the council, namely cloning-for-biomedical-research. I cannot imagine a more instructive lesson in what I will approvingly call anti-dogmatism.

Let me also note a very important feature of the language of this report--that it is moral but not theological. For while various members of the council are well known for their religious views, and while the council as a body insists that religion has a valid and important role to play in the public square, the report is remarkable for what appears to be its deliberate effort to find a public language accessible to individuals of differing faiths or of no faith at all. There is no reference to specific doctrinal or theological positions and, perhaps with a single exception, no mention of God.

Having praised the report in due measure, I turn now to the second part of my remarks, which consists of four mild criticisms and a concluding partisan jab. My first mild criticism is that in the report's moral language I find two discernibly different and conflicting moral traditions represented.

One, which can be traced back to Aristotle, imagines a moral universe in which there is a multiplicity of human and social goods, and argues for balance and prudential deliberation to establish what is most important and needful with regard to particular issues and situations. The second tradition, which can be traced to Kant, focuses on human dignity and respect and yields moral principles that are true, or held to be true, categorically, without exception. Frequently, these principles consist in absolute prohibitions of certain kinds of conduct, whatever the consequences of adhering to the prohibition may be. But are these two moral traditions compatible? Do they lead to the same kind of moral analysis or to the same conclusions? And what happens when they don't?

To bring this analysis down to earth, let me offer an example. In a remarkable passage of the report, the council, which unanimously opposed what is commonly known as reproductive cloning, states, "We are willing to grant that there may be exceptional cases in which cloning-to-produce-children is morally defensible." The council then states, "Such cases do not justify the harmful experiments and social problems that might be entailed by engaging in human cloning. Hard cases make bad law."

It is easy to defend a legislative ban on cloning on the basis of an absolute moral prohibition, assuming one exists. It becomes harder, however, to defend an absolute legislative ban when the underlying morality, though inclining strongly in one direction, is less than absolute. The council wants to combine an Aristotelian stance toward prudential judgments with a Kantian stance on blanket prohibitions. It is not clear that the two can be brought together coherently.

The council's report asks whether discovering new cures for the sick is "a moral imperative that should trump all other goods and values." That's a good question. Along with the authors, I believe that the answer is no. But I must then ask, is there any moral imperative that should trump all other goods and values in all circumstances? My answer to that wider qustion is also no. Would the council's majority agree with me?

Second mild criticism: I must note one point on which I disagree with the entire council. The report asserts at one point that if society accepts, that is, fails to prohibit, a practice, then society may be said not only to endorse but to engage in that practice. I think that that is just plain wrong. In a liberal democratic polity with a limited government marked by multiple sources of legitimate authority, public law will of necessity permit many individual, associational, and religious practices that it cannot be said to endorse, let alone to participate in. To think otherwise is implicitly to affirm a conception of public authority as all responsible and all powerful. I cannot imagine that the council really means to say that.

Now for the third mild criticism. The report distinguishes between two understandings of parents' relations to their children: that of children as gifts and blessings who we learn to accept as gratefully as we can; and that of children as products of our wills whom we try to shape in accordance with our desires. The council's report unequivocally endorses the first understanding.

I don't think it's so simple. Much of parenting is a matter of striking a difficult balance between shaping, on the one hand, and accepting, on the other. I don't think we are morally obliged to refrain from, let us say, prenatal genetic therapy to remedy defects in fetuses, which medical science now enables us to do. We do not have to learn gratefully to accept those defects if we can do something morally permissible to remedy them. I think the council, in its understandable desire to chasten our tendency toward scientific hubris, leans too far in the direction of a kind of principled passivity that contradicts its quest for moral balance.

Fourth, let me offer some reflections on the role of moral sentiments. Taking their bearings from James Q. Wilson, the council members who favor regulated cloning for the purpose of biomedical research argue that our moral sentiments point toward a distinction between young embryos and infants. This distinction is expressed, for example, in the different levels, kinds, and durations of our mourning when catastrophe befalls one or the other.

Wilson asks rhetorically, "Do we assign the same moral blame to harvesting organs from a newborn infant and from a seven-day-old blastocyst?" A majority of the American people clearly would not. The question then becomes, what is the moral force of our instinctive or natural responses to morally latent phenomena? The council's majority argues that we must shape, or in this case reshape, our emotional responses in light of our moral obligations as revealed by reason. That is true, as far as it goes. But we must go on to investigate the role that moral sentiments ought to play in defining the content of our rational obligations. This is a question on which the chairman of the council, who has written a famous article entitled "The Wisdom of Repugnance," is especially well qualified to shed some additional light.

Finally, the partisan jab. The council's majority declares, "How we respond to the weakest among us, to those who are nowhere near the zenith of human flourishing, says much about our willingness to envision the boundaries of humanity expansively and inclusively. It challenges the depth of our commitment to equality." Hubert Humphrey couldn't have put it better. This proposition, which the council puts forward as a truth not confined to the question of cloning, leads in the direction of a robust social policy oriented toward the most vulnerable in our society. I'm not confident that the conservative readers of this report, who will tend to applaud the thrust of its majority conclusions on the matter at hand, will be willing to accept the broader implications of its animating principles. 

William A. Galston is a professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs and author of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

The Horror
J. Bottum

There are three directions in which we might take a discussion of the report of the President's Council on Bioethics. We might first talk about the issue of cloning itself. Then again, we might turn to the deliberations of the President's Council, as presented in this book, and talk about the divisions and insights of the council's members. Finally, we might take this discussion to be about politics--which is to say, the impact and the importance, in the real world, of the policy recommendations made by the President's Council. About all three of these, I have enormous amounts to say--more than could ever be fit into the time we have. But here are a few first thoughts.

Among the finest features of the report is the perfect civility of its thoughtful deliberations. And yet, that civility comes at a cost, which I am not sure we have fully reckoned. While I applaud nearly all of its work, the council's report does not, for example, sufficiently express the horror and repugnance that the idea of cloning arouses in me.

Perhaps an analogy will help make that feeling clear. I once tried to write a poem about an attractive young woman I had seen walking along the street. I suppose she was not beautiful, per se, but then I have reached the age at which youth itself begins to seem beautiful. Those of you who are still young may not understand what I am talking about. But for those of us growing old, there is a lure in youthfulness--the tautness of it, the glow.

And there is also a crime: to act upon that lure, to seek one's own youth restored by leeching on the youthfulness of others. This is the mockable widower seeking a young bride in Molière's comedies; it is the sexual sickness expressed by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby when the aged Arthur Gride drools over the young Madeleine after using her father's debts to force her into his power.

But I have in mind something more than putting an armful of warm girl in an old man's cold bed. Behind this stands the fantasy of age, that would sacrifice the young to buy its way back from the aches and diseases that age is prone to. There is, for instance, the old witch who wants to fatten up Hansel and Gretel before she bakes them in her oven and devours their youth. And then there is Elizabeth Bathory--the seventeenth-century Hungarian countess and perhaps the most famous figure to come out of Transylvania since Vlad the Impaler. Her trial records estimate that she slaughtered 600 young virgins in a decade, in order to bathe in their youth-restoring blood.

Let me bring this analogy home. It seems to me that the proponents of much of the biotech revolution--the supporters and enablers of the Brave New World of eugenic biotechnology--are forced into the uncomfortable position of insisting that the Countess Bathory was absolutely right, at least about her goals. She merely chose the wrong means.

I mean that not quite in the provocative sense in which I phrased it. She was obviously wrong about the effects of virgins' blood, and she lacked the help of Advanced Cell Technology's laboratories in Massachusetts. But she also chose the wrong means when she used living, conscious human beings. The proponents of cloning-for-biomedical-research insist that the objects upon which modern laboratories work are not living human beings but cells--or biological accidents, or bits of human beings--which, because of ancient prejudices, must be spoken of in reverential ways, but which need not be treated any differently than a fingernail clipping or, in that great euphemism of abortionists, "the product of conception."

But I want to think about this in terms of human motivation. Indeed, when the President's Council distinguishes "cloning-for-biomedical-research" from "cloning-to-produce-children," it invites us to notice that the primary distinction between them is, in fact, a matter of human motivation--namely, the purpose for which the biotechnologist created the clone.

Much has been made, by Francis Fukuyama and others, about the recent efforts of scientists to complete the Baconian project--the great vision of Francis Bacon that science will finally ameliorate the human condition, so that we will all be happy, diseaseless, and nigh on immortal. I think it is right to notice this impending fulfillment of the promise that Bacon made centuries ago. But there is something else to notice as well--namely, that Bacon required for his dream that we dismiss all notion of purpose and goal for the objects of science. Indeed, Bacon's New Organon is filled with attacks upon the Aristotelian idea of final causation, a natural purpose or aim for things.

But goals don't actually go away just because we want them to. In the space opened up by the dismissal of final cause from science, there entered the malleability of things to the human will. We give things their purpose; we give them their final cause. The human act is conceived to be the only thing in the universe that has motive, purpose, goal, or aim--and those motives will eventually eat up the reality of everything else.

In fact, they have already eaten up reality. There are serious political questions that might be raised about the council's report. But think about this: The council was unanimous in wanting to prohibit forever cloning-to-produce-children, and could only by the barest majority reach the compromise of a temporary moratorium on cloning-for-biomedical-research. This seems to me exactly backwards. However much cloning-to-produce-children proceeds along defective means, it still aims at the natural cause of procreation. It wants to make babies.

Cloning-for-biomedical-research, on the other hand, has abandoned the goal. Embryos, fetuses, blastocysts, activated eggs, products of SCNT, whatever euphemism is floating around this week--cloning-for-biomedical-research takes those objects and makes them plastic playthings for the human will. What is worse, it is the human will traveling down a line of motivation that is inherently suspect--if we remember Molière, and Dickens, and the old, old stories. We are becoming the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against.

Now, Francis Bacon's scientific vision of modernity is not the only one. There is also a literary vision of modernity. And from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the literary imagination has not pictured the prospect of manufactured human beings with much joy. From Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, the literary imagination has not been much taken with scientists who manipulate the deep things of life just because they can.

The truth is, after reading these authors, I worry about people who reach into the stuff of life and twist it to their will. I worry about people who act simply because they can. If they lived in crumbling castles--their hair standing up on end and their voices howling in maniacal laughter--we'd know them to be mad scientists. But they wear nice white lab coats, and their pleasant-looking chief executive appears on television to assure us that they are really acting for the best of medical motives and, besides, there is a great deal of money to made in biotech and pharmaceutical stocks.

Sometimes the disingenuousness is unbearable. Evading the regulations in France, the French company Clonaid recently opened a laboratory in Ivory Coast, and its spokeswoman announced that they had done so in response to the great demand for cloning in sub-Saharan Africa. Ah, yes, my wife suggested: Those poor, starving Africans, desperate for food, drinking water, and the latest fads in biotechnology.

But Clonaid's move to Africa seems to me a final proof of the dangerousness of unlimited human will. The people who say that this technology can be regulated are simply ignorant of human nature. If you were to put up a lever with a sign that said, "Don't touch or the world will be destroyed," the paint wouldn't even be dry before someone's last words were, "I just wanted to see what would happen."

We have to applaud the seriousness that Leon Kass has brought to Washington, the tone and tenor of the deliberations, and the report that issued from the President's Council on Bioethics. But I think we must also raise questions about the civility that is the report's finest feature. 

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of the Weekly Standard and author of The Fall & Other Poems (St. Augustine's Press, 2001). 

A Reply
Leon R. Kass

These were deeply searching, very thoughtful, very well-considered comments. I regard these remarks from the four of you as an enormous gift to our enterprise.

One way to join comments made by Diana Schaub, Charles Murray, and Bill Galston is to raise a question. Bill Galston raised it very nicely when he asked whether we are dealing in a moral realm of prudence or in one of absolutes and categorical imperatives. Are we in a realm without inflexible "Thou shalt nots" or are we in one where there really are abominations like slavery? If we are dealing with moral abominations, then to say "on the one hand, on the other" is, as Jody Bottum suggests, to lend countenance and cover to genuine evil. The report's ambiguity on this question is not solely due to the chairman's uncertainty but is I think a genuine perplexity. Is cloning human embryos for research really like slavery?

The people who have argued against abortion have also drawn an analogy to slavery, the difference being that the youngest amongst us don't look enough like us to gain our empathy. Without lawyers and unable to speak for themselves, unborn children do not gain our support, and the evil perpetrated against them is too easily overlooked. In this view, there can be no compromise with a deep violation of principle, no matter how noble the end. On the other hand, if we really are in the situation of choosing between competing goods, as Bill Galston suggests, then it is a question of calculation, presumably in the name of not just safety and efficacy but larger things. This is the realm of prudence, not principle.

I go back and forth on this. It does seem to me that the moral life has to be lived somehow as a combination of principle and prudence. There must be some boundary conditions of "Thou shalt nots." And only thanks to the fact that there are certain firm and nonnegotiable limits do we have a safe moral realm in which prudence can govern.

I am inclined to say that creating nascent life for the sole purpose of exploitation and research involving its necessary destruction would transgress a moral boundary of that indispensable sort. However, though I am sympathetic to the arguments of Jody Bottum and Diana Schaub, and despite the fact that I regard the embryo as somehow mysterious, I don't believe that it is fully "one of us" (here I speak for myself, not for the council as a whole). The challenge that James Q. Wilson posed is a good one. We do not treat the demise of the five-day-old embryo as we do the death of a child, and we don't react with the same kind of horror--though maybe we should--at the dismemberment of 100 cells for the sake of saving lives as we would if we killed a two-year-old child to remove his kidneys so another child might be saved.

Yet it may very well be that such moral sentiments are a poor guide here. So let me shift to that question and take it up directly. I think repugnance is not an absolutely firm guide in these matters, but it is a warning. The deepest things especially are very hard to capture in precise and rational speech. We cannot rationally articulate the horror that is father-daughter incest. If we tried to make the argument, we would imperil our conviction that this is an abomination. I don't think we can fully make an argument as to what is wrong with rape or murder or cannibalism. Our revulsion at these things is a guide that we are defending something that runs very deep. Argument can come to our aid, especially in a culture where the endless chatter of self-styled "rationalists" tends to undermine our intuitions about these things.

And if one lives in an age without a shared sense of what is seemly and what is abominable, and everything is up for grabs, perhaps nothing is left but to get Jody Bottum out on the political stump. But public discourse cannot, I think, conduct itself on the basis of Jody's unique rhetorical and prophetic brilliance.

So where are we? There is no denying that the questions about cloning-for-biomedical-research are in a way bound up with the abortion controversy. Jody Bottum argues that it is far worse to create nascent human life to destroy it for the use of the living than it is to start down the road of baby manufacture and working our will on living children. I am not sure about that. It seems to me that death and destruction--horrible though they be--are old matters. What is really new is not the immorality of the means that we use to gain our new powers but the things that these new powers make possible. In the future, we will be able to work our will upon untold future generations to turn them into creatures after our own image. That I think is really something novel and worth arguing about, independent of the question of the destruction of nascent life.

On the other hand, though I cannot believe that destroying an embryo is tantamount to murder, I am always impressed with the people who bear witness on this subject--even if they are going to lose in the end. They have a deep reverence for what our humanity is in its earliest form and have risen to defend it. I can't persuade myself that they are not right.

But to respond briefly to Diana Schaub, nor can I persuade myself that cloning is akin to slavery. Yes, new lives would be created, and on a mass scale, purely to serve other people's purposes. And, yes, such innocent, nascent lives would be willfully exploited and destroyed. And I even agree with Diana Schaub that the path to biomedical despotism and degradation can be guided by the words "progress, compassion, and choice." But I am not sufficiently confident about the ontological or moral status of a five-day-old embryo to speak in such abolitionist terms. At the same time, however, I am inclined to give the embryo the benefit of the doubt, refusing to corrupt myself into thinking that we can use with impunity the seeds of the next generation to save our own. Otherwise we will have hardened our hearts, becoming incapable of resisting when the compassionate healers want the boundary of permissible exploitation moved from five days to five weeks or even five months.

In the view of Charles Murray, the council's enterprise is futile. But my interest in the subject of cloning goes beyond whether or not we should engage in it. My interest is also in whether human beings through their political institutions can exercise at least some control over where biotechnology is taking us. Cloning is an occasion to see whether the community can exercise the will and discipline to make its moral voice heard, and to be a teacher of what can and can't be allowed.

Cloning-for-biomedical-research has, alas, confounded the question, for it is really a small piece of embryo research in general. We should be arguing about cloning-for-biomedical-research in the context of all embryo research. Certainly, it would be no victory for the pro-life movement to ban the creation of cloned embryos for research, while allowing the creation of embryos for research by in vitro fertilization in the private sector to continue without any limits.

So let's just talk about cloning for baby-making. This is an opportunity to shift the burden of proof from the opponents to the proponents of cloning, to those who would challenge what makes us human. Let's say to the people who want to produce cloned children, "Show us why this is a necessity." The proponents have the obligation to explain why this is not just a whim but something society should countenance. A legislative ban in this country would shift the burden of proof, even if, in fact, there are renegade scientists elsewhere in the world who would practice it.

Charles Murray may be right that an opportunity to engage the scientific community was missed. Perhaps we should follow the British model and directly involve the biotech companies and their scientists, and design some kind of regulatory scheme. We could set a boundary of seven or ten days beyond which embryo research would not be allowed. We would let the scientists do some things that may make us uncomfortable in the hope that the worst disasters could be prevented.

Yet such prudential boundary lines will always be moveable. Today, the focus is on stem cells. Five years from now we may discover that by putting these little embryos into a pig uterus and growing them to two months, their kidneys and primordial livers are even more valuable than the stem cells. We will find that the line we have drawn around stem cells will not hold, and we will live to regret our earlier desire to be "reasonable" and "prudent" when crossing important moral boundaries.

I am not quite so nihilistic as Charles Murray about the possibility of effective intervention. True, there is little precedent for the control of scientific progress. On the other hand, we have refused to allow the buying and selling of organs for transplant, even though markets in organs would yield more organs. This is a proscription that might not last, but it has managed to hold, at least for the time being.

Many nations have enacted bans on all cloning, and, in fact, there is a convention under deliberation in the United Nations right now on whether to ban cloning. The French and the Germans want to restrict the international ban to cloning-to-produce-children only because they already have embryo laws in place in their own nations. The United States is leading a coalition to produce the kind of ban that President Bush favors. I don't see any reason why we should shrink from this effort. Certainly, much of biotechnology is wonderful, but the scientific community should understand (and it is in its best interest to do so) that progress must proceed within moral boundaries set by the norms of the international community.

Moreover, it is simply not true that this research can't progress within certain moral boundaries, providing that the boundaries are not too severe. And it seems to me that the United States should be a leader in determining what should and should not be done, rather than playing catch-up, as we have been to this point.

The United States is unlikely, unless we step forward in this matter, to remain the center of ethical biotechnology. Yes, the Chinese might be less restrictive, but because we are Americans, because we believe in progress, and that if something can be done, it will be done, because we believe in the freedom of entrepreneurs, of scientists, of users, because we believe in compassionate humanitarianism--for all of these reasons, we will have a very difficult time being the moral teacher of the world in these matters. The fact is that the moral principles that govern us--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--are not sufficient to defend human dignity from biotechnology's onslaught.

Notes

† U. S. Government Printing Office; Public Affairs. 400 pp. $14.00.