Читать книгу Bioethics - Группа авторов - Страница 86

Brock mentions a second argument for the view that cloning aimed at producing persons is intrinsically wrong (1998, 153–4). The argument is based upon ideas put forward by Joel Feinberg, who speaks of a right to an open future (1980), and by Hans Jonas, who refers to a right to ignorance of a certain sort (1974) – an idea that has since been enthusiastically endorsed by George Annas (1998, 124) – and the argument is essentially as follows. One's genetic makeup may very well determine to some extent what possibilities are open to one, and thus may constrain the future course of one's life. If no one else has the same genetic makeup, or if someone does, but either one is unaware of that, or else that person is one's contemporary, or someone who is younger, then one will be unable to observe the previous course of the life of someone with the same genetic makeup as oneself. But what if one knows of a genetically identical person whose life precedes one's own? Then one could have knowledge that one might well view as showing that certain possibilities were not really open to one, so one would have less of a sense of being able to choose the course of one's life.

To evaluate this argument, one needs to consider what type of conclusion one might draw as a result of observing the earlier life of someone with the same genetic makeup as oneself. Suppose that one had observed someone striving very hard, over a long stretch of time, to achieve some goal and failing to get anywhere near it. Perhaps the earlier, genetically identical individual wanted to be the first person to run the marathon in under two hours, and after several years of intense and well‐designed training, attention to diet, etc., never got below two and a half hours. Surely one would then be justified in viewing that particular goal as not really open to one. But would that knowledge be a bad thing, as Jonas seems to be suggesting? Would not such knowledge, on the contrary, be valuable, by making it easier to choose goals that one could successfully pursue?

A very different possibility is that, observing the life of the genetically identical individual, one concludes that no life significantly different from that life could really be open to one. Then one would certainly feel that one's life was constrained to a very unwelcome extent. That conclusion, however, would be one that is unsupported by the evidence; indeed, one that there is excellent evidence against.

First of all, although identical twins can be very similar in some striking ways, they can also have lives that are quite different. Secondly, as Pinker points out (1997, 35), one’s genes do not contain sufficient information to fix the wiring in one’s brain, and the differences may be very important with regard to the traits one develops. Thirdly, as was noted earlier, it is a well‐established scientific fact that the traits of identical twins display a correlation of only about 50%, so the scope for a different life is very significant – even more so with clones than with identical twins, given that a clone develops inside a different womb, and then is raised by a different family, and belongs to a different peer group. The belief that the course of a clone’s life would be seriously constrained is, therefore, not a defensible belief.

In conclusion, then, it seems that this second argument for the view that cloning with the goal of producing persons is intrinsically wrong is unsound.