Therapeutic and reproductive cloning: Designer babies.

What is true of sex selection is even more applicable to human genetic enhancement or cloning. Though both these practices will almost certainly be introduced to us in forms susceptible to medical justification and the compassionate perception of need, the line between necessary treatment and willful enhancement is another fragile boundary that will be difficult to police. Eventually a child will, one imagines, be designed for increased physical attractiveness and, like the problems that face the sex-selected child who fails to fulfil his or her gender role, such a child is likely to be a source of considerable parental displeasure if it finds intimacy difficult, is acutely shy or shows no interest in sexual relationships. A child selected or manipulated to grow to a generous height may be deeply flawed in the eyes of its parents if it fails to corroborate the well-known link between tallness and economic success, preferring to work with the homeless or hang around on the dole.

The point is that the desire for genetically enhanced babies is unlikely to be a simple wish to bestow one's children with advantageous biological attributes. It is more likely, given the self-evident costs and risks of scientifically mediated human reproduction, that adults who invest in these technologies will aim to produce offspring who will follow a specific life-plan—children who will exploit their chosen biological assets in an acceptable manner, and live out the future that is expected of them. Despite the claims of some sociobiologists, there is no possibility of delivering this degree of social control and predictability by simply altering the human genome.

Of course one may conclude from this that the experimental cloning and genetic manipulation of humans will, through its practical results, finally put paid to the ideology of genetic determinism. But this assumes that the protagonists of these experiments are disinterested observers rather than people with deep economic and emotional investments. The real danger is that by gratifying people's desire to predetermine the genetic inheritance of their children, reproductive science will legitimise and dignify the prejudices of biological determinism without which such desires would be fleeting and inconsequential. By stamping the instinct for parental despotism with the ratifying mark of scientific neutrality, these biotechnologies will, when the product falls short of expectations, inevitably result in attempts to programme and control those variables which genetics leaves untouched. As Hans Jonas wrote, in one of the first major philosophical reflections on the ethical dangers of human cloning:

"Note that it does not matter one jot whether the genotype is really, by its own force, a person's fate: it is made his fate by the very assumptions in cloning him, which by their imposition on all concerned become a force themselves. It does not matter whether replication of genotype really entails repetition of life performance: the donor has been chosen with some such idea, and that idea is tyrannical in effect. It does not matter what the real relation of ‘nature and nurture’, of genetic premise and contingent environment is in forming a person and his possibilities: their interplay has been falsified by both the subject and the environment having been ‘primed’…[E]xistentially significant is what the cloned individual thinks—is compelled to think—of himself, not what he ‘is’ in the substance-sense of being. In brief, he is antecedently robbed of the freedom which only under the protection of ignorance can thrive; and to rob a human-to-be of that freedom deliberately is an inexpiable crime that must not be committed even once. ([Jona (1974)], his emphasis)"