Physician, educator and author LEON RICHARD KASS urges an outright ban of human cloning in ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’, an article published in The New Republic on 2 June 1997. His intervention is prompted by news of a sheep named Dolly, history’s first asexually produced mammal. As Kass explains, a clone is produced by replacing the nucleus of a mature, unfertilised egg with the nucleus of a specialised cell of an adult or fetal organism; the renucleated egg develops into an individual that is genetically identical to the cell donor. The breakthrough of UK scientist Ian Wilmut and his team, Dolly’s creators, was a means of ‘reprogramming the state of the DNA in the donor cells’ in order to restore their ability to generate unlike cells and so form a full organism; the technical term is totipotency. Overcoming this crucial technical hurdle has opened the door to human application. The implications of this biotechnological marvel include ‘father-son’ and ‘mother-daughter’ ‘twins’; a woman’s bearing, birthing and raising a copy of herself or a loved one; the (literal) replacement of dead persons; the creation of genetic copies of oneself for organ-harvesting purposes. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which this technology would pervert human societies, says Kass. Sexual reproduction is the natural ground upon which human cultures and institutions are built. Humans outcompete all other animals in the amount of resources invested in sexual pursuit. Our ‘desire for union’ is ceaseless, not seasonal, as well as ‘self-conscious’ rather than purely instinctual. This not only engenders remarkably nuanced mating rituals; it is also the source of our ‘sociality’, according to Kass, and, one might add, inclines us toward ethical codes of a transactional nature. Sexual reproduction, furthermore, is both a means of overcoming death and of accepting it. By outliving the parents, offspring do offer ‘symbolic immortality’.1 The fact, however, that each parent furnishes only half the genes of the offspring makes each human genetically unique, which means the parent-to-child passing of the baton is not optional. Systems of identity, kinship and community, understandings of parental and personal responsibility, all are culturally and linguistically mediated, diverse and context-specific — but they still arise from the foundational fact of sexual reproduction. Cloning will derail it all, warns Kass. Letting people free to indulge puerile, narcissistic fantasies of ‘perfecting’ themselves and their ‘offspring’ through genetic engineering and access to stores of genetic material — that of, say, celebrity athletes or Nobel laureates — will create a market for ‘superior’ genetic stock. Commercial incentives will lead to innovation that will sufficiently lower the cost of cloning to allow scalability. Under such conditions, it is not difficult to imagine a eugenic ‘arms race’ and the complete subsumption of (re)production into technocracy, which would of course deny the children-to-be any say in the matter of their own ‘specifications’. Individual identity will be an obvious early casualty, since cloning makes the parent/child distinction blurry. Absent the need for a reproductive partner, individuals will no longer have much incentive to uphold social covenants. To the prospect of a world in which human beings are designed and manufactured, rather than begotten, repugnance is the appropriate response, the author declares. And that was indeed the overwhelming sentiment initially expressed by the public. As in the case of incest, murder, cannibalism and inter-species relations, repugnance represents a form of bodily wisdom, hard-wired into us by evolution, and requiring no support from science (or scientism) and rationality. In another era people would have been inclined to give their deep and universally felt intuitions a fair hearing, and polemics of this sort would have been redundant. But in our era, the author laments, our intuitions are no match for the combined forces of prometheanism, market-friendly technocracy and shallow, philosophically-coloured reasoning. A significant number of experts in the field, and in fields adjacent to it, are rather bullish about cloning our way to genetic ‘excellence’ — beauty, intelligence, resistance to disease, physical ability. To them, the value of cloning ought to be judged solely by its ability to deliver on this promise. Some invoke compassionate reasons to pursue the commercialisation of the technology — and quick to deploy the ever-inflatable notion of ‘rights’ — such as providing children to infertile couples or to single individuals or to homosexual couples. The ambient laissez-faireism leads many of those who steward the institutions to frame the issue as one of consumer advocacy, and to propose that ‘informed consent’ suffices as a cautionary measure. Not by accident, utilitarianism typically provides the shared philosophical vocabulary of these experts, commentators and technocrats. Utilitarianism judges the value of a proposition based on whether it increases or decreases overall suffering. This cursory, quasi-algebraic approach might be serviceable as a philosophical esperanto in a market-friendly technocracy, but woefully inadequate as a guide to profound human questions. There is no way to reliably compute the long-term effects of such disruptive technology; any such attempt will inevitably be fraught by cognitive bias, parochialism and presentism. That is why matters of grave consequence must be — and mostly have been — left outside the purview of the market. To protect ourselves from ourselves, Kass proposes, nothing less than a complete ban of human cloning will do. The ramifications of the commercial application of this technology would be so catastrophic, that it would be prudent to put in place crippling restrictions even on the creation of clonal embryos that are intended purely for medical research.
Judging by the urgent tone and sheer length of the piece, Kass must suspect that his brand of (bio)ethics is facing extinction, at least in the upper social and cultural echelons. Any casual student of modernity will recognise that techno-optimism and neomania are among its defining features. And individuals and collectives alike may profess traditional values but when they acquire the technical means to achieve something, coming up with rational justifications for trampling on those professed values is often revealed to be trivially easy.2 Our species seems to be continuing on that course with the latest information-technology-driven variant of techno-optimism. The new IT billionaires, who tend to cluster in entrepreneurial hubs such as Silicon Valley, command both cultural prestige and virtually unlimited resources in the early twenty-first century. Many of them seem hell-bent on enacting science-fiction-derived fantasies, apparently unconcerned with long- or even short-term consequences. To them, Kassian rhetoric must sound like the quaint ramblings of an old fogey, as obsolete as a computer operating system from 1997 — especially against the reassuring voices of credentialed commentators who maintain that no problem could arise that could not be solved by the application of intelligence and rationality.3 The seeds of procreative techno-optimism, in fact, were planted rather earlier (as Kass notes). When reliable contraceptive methods and various forms of reproductive assistance made their debut in the second half of the twentieth century, they effectively decoupled sex and procreation. Once repugnant, such practices are now routine, and filed under ‘reproductive rights’. Very importantly, they have brought about a monumental shift in our social psychology: procreation at last began to yield to human intention and design. Much, if not most, of the social and political ground gained by women and sexual minorities during the past few decades is attributable to the decoupling of sex and procreation. These constituencies are likely to read Kass’s recoupling effort as little more than naked reaction: the familiar call for women to return to the kitchen and for sexual minorities to reenter the closet — with scholarly references sprinkled here and there. Indeed, most individuals and groups of a progressive persuasion can be expected to dismiss Kass reflexively, since the overriding of bodily impulses in judgement and decision making and the perfectibility of humans and their social arrangements are both cornerstones of progressive thought. Nor does it help Kass’s case that the force most vociferously opposed to this branch of science is the religious right; even though his case is not explicitly theological, it does have an undeniably Judeo-Christian undertone. His proposed regulatory framework on clonal-embryo research, for example, is so tight as to appear callous — medical advance, in the minds of many, tramps ideological commitment. Quotidian politics, finally, is likely to be inhospitable to Kass. The incentive structure of electoral politics — particularly the continuous search for the next economic magic bullet — makes the calculations of politicians almost by necessity myopic and short-termist. In short, some of the mightiest forces in contemporary opinion making seem disposed to form an anti-Kass coalition, and rather indisposed to contend with his core argument about dehumanisation. Kass’s main contribution to posterity looks set to be his pitch-perfect sample of conservative thinking: forgone gains are preferrable to losses; the old preferrable to the new; wisdom preferrable to rationality; nature, for all its apparent aloofness and cruelty, preferrable to unrestrained human aspiration. It is not often that a worldview is captured in print with such clarity and coherence. ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ will no doubt spare intellectual historians of the future untold labour hours. The entire dispute, of course, might baffle them as much as Europe’s Wars of Religion baffle us.
See post no. 22, ‘Knowledge’s Burden’.
JON ASKONAS has argued in a recent essay in the online magazine Compact that modern technology and traditional conservative values do not mix. See post no. 34, ‘If You Want It, Build It’.
STEVEN PINKER is perhaps the most prominent exponent of this line; he has taken Kass to task in the pages of The New Republic and elsewhere.