Читать книгу Bioethics - Группа авторов - Страница 88

A fourth objection applies, not to the cloning of persons in general, but to certain cases – such as where parents clone a child who is suffering from some life‐threatening condition in order to produce another child who can save the first child's life – and the contention is that such cases involve a failure to treat individuals as ends in themselves. Thus Philip Kitcher, referring to such cases, says that “a lingering concern remains,” and he goes on to ask whether such scenarios “can be reconciled with Kant's injunction to 'treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means’” (1997, 61).

What is one to say about this objection? In thinking about it, it seems important to specify what sacrifices the child being produced will have to make to save his or her sibling. Kitcher, in his formulation, assumes that it will be a kidney transplant, which is a very significant sacrifice indeed, since it may have unhappy consequences for that person in the future. Consequently, I think that Kitcher’s case seriously clouds one’s thinking about this general type of case. Let us suppose, instead, then – as in the non‐cloning case to be mentioned later – that the cloned child will instead be the source for a bone marrow transfer that will save the life of a sibling who would otherwise die from leukemia.

In such a case, would there be a violation of Kant's injunction? There could be – if the parents abandoned, or did not really care for the one child, once he or she had provided bone marrow to save the life of the other child. This, however, would surely be a very unlikely occurrence. After all, the history of the human race is the history of largely unplanned children, often born into situations where the parents are anything but well off, and yet typically those children are deeply loved by their parents.

In short, though this type of case is by hypothesis one where the parents have a child with a goal in mind that, in itself, has nothing to do with the well‐being of that child, this is no reason for supposing that they are therefore likely to treat that child merely as a means, and not also as an end in itself. Indeed, surely there is good reason to think, on the contrary, that such a child will be raised in no less loving a way than is normally the case.