Cloning

Imagine that you are one of the human clones that will be born. There is no doubt that this will happen sooner or later even if Clonaid's (a human cloning company) announcement turns out to be a hoax. And imagine yourself listening in to the current arguments for making cloning illegal. You hear people opining that cloning threatens human dignity, that it would be playing God, that it represents a slippery slope towards a dehumanized future, that everybody has a right to a unique or to an unknown genome, and so forth. How would it make you feel? To hear all these dignified people talking about you as if your very existence were a crime against humanity?
This “what-if” scenario helps you put things in perspective. There is one argument that, as a future clone, you might understand and agree with: concerns about the safety of the procedure. The argument that we should wait to try it on humans until we have perfected the method on animals makes some degree of sense. But even so,...