THE ONLY POST I WILL MAKE ON CLONING: First, if you want my take on it, check the links-list to your left. Second, I’m sure Ramesh Ponnuru will get around to this eventually, but here’s my take on the only actual argument put forward by a pro-cloning blogger so far in this round. (Oh, and before I get there, Virginia Postrel today strongly implies that there’s no point in having these arguments because none of us will change our minds. Well, Ponnuru did–if not in the way she’d prefer. And in general, these “what’s the point?” arguments never get much traction with me, especially on pro-life issues. I co-founded the Yale Pro-Life League. If memory serves, only two out of seven[?] members of its first executive board had come to college pro-life. Four of the seven were atheists. So yeah, it’s worth going over this stuff again. Moreover, I frankly haven’t seen much response to Ponnuru’s excellent points, which rely on reason rather than intuition.)

Anyway. Ananda Gupta raises a few points: 1) “[Ponnuru] trots out the old ‘they can’t draw a defensible line of demarcation as to when killing human beings is wrong’ argument. So what? I can’t draw a defensible line of demarcation as to when people should be allowed to drive, and no one else can either, given the variability of physical capability and hand-eye coordination among humans. It’s arbitrary.”

Uh, right, but if you get the answer wrong, nobody dies. It’s just weird to say that because some line-drawing can rightly be left to a general, intuitive sense–which will be more or less arbitrary–all line-drawing should be arbitrary.

2) “Earlier Ponnuru argued that inarticulate knowledge can be genuine, but now he demands an argument for pro-cloners’ choice of lines to draw. I don’t have one, but I don’t think I need one. All I need is to point out that if we are going to require all public policies and philosophical worldviews to have clearly articulated arguments supporting them, then NR and NRO might as well merge with The Nation and get it over with, because such a requirement is un-conservative at its core.”

Actually, unless I misunderstood his piece, Ponnuru was arguing that just because most people who oppose cloning can’t really explain why, that doesn’t mean there are no good arguments for their position. He was trying to combat the Reason-magazine mentality that all opposition to cloning is motivated by fear of Frankenstein. (And in fact, Postrel and others have recently given at least token credit to the pro-life arguments against cloning, so perhaps Ponnuru’s point here made some impact.)

But more importantly, if Gupta’s really suggesting that “intuitions” are sufficient for political decisions, forget about merging with The Nation–all political magazines should just disappear. These magazines present arguments. Those arguments typically rest on a basis of reason, experience, and shared premises. If somebody argues for any controversial ethical position–the death penalty is wrong; you shouldn’t use Napster; it’s OK to clone; it’s not OK to clone; whatever–I expect some explanation, some reason for the position.

3) “Ponnuru leaves out another major consequence of his anti-cloning (and pro-life generally) intuition, which is that women who have abortions or even negligent miscarriages would have to be treated as murderers — with penalties of life imprisonment or execution. Is Ponnuru willing to flip that switch?”

First, this isn’t relevant to the cloning discussion, since one might believe that a cloned embryo is a human but a woman’s right to bodily integrity trumps that embryo’s right to life. I don’t agree with this, but it is possible to accept the pro-life case against cloning but not the pro-life case against abortion.

Second, and more importantly, there’s a reason that pre-legalization abortion prosecutions didn’t focus on the mother. Everyone understands that abortion is an act often done in desperation. In some cases, the woman may have limited or false information about the nature of her fetus–that’s one reason that pro-lifers have pushed for “right to know” legislation. It’s appropriate to treat a woman who committed a grave evil out of desperation more leniently than the person who profited from her desperation. Basically, this is wrongful killing, but it’s not like every other kind of killing: You can’t see the victim, it’s often impossible to tell by looking that you’re killing a human, and it’s typically sought (especially were it to become illegal) only by women who are in dire straits already. So again, penalties should focus on the abortionist, not the mother. The mother would also rightly face legal penalties–since we do have moral responsibility, even when we’re desperate–but I don’t think they should be simple repetitions of our penalties for infanticide. And, like all laws, they should not be retroactive–women who had abortions last year should not be penalized for them.

4) “What about women who smoke or drink during pregnancy? Do we call in the Department of Social Services?”

Assuming that we’re talking about women who smoke or drink enough to severely endanger their unborn children, we’re talking about child abuse here, or possibly neglect. But like many cases of child neglect, it would be extraordinarily hard to prosecute in a country with (rightly) strong privacy protections. And I’m not sure whether we could really do much about this, frankly–it’s not like standing trial and going to jail would have a positive effect on the kid. However, this is in no way an argument against the pro-life position. First, you figure out whether the embryo is a human life worthy of protection. Then, you worry about cases where protecting that child may be difficult or impossible. You don’t argue, “Sometimes it’ll be difficult to protect an embryo. It may be so difficult that sometimes we shouldn’t do it, because what we’d have to do to protect the embryo is wrong. Therefore, the embryo isn’t a human life!” One reason you shouldn’t argue like that is that the same argument can be made about a three-year-old child. The other reason, though, is that it’s illogical.

All that said, Gupta is one of the few pro-cloning bloggers to really respond to anti-cloning claims. I’m replying to her post at length because I thought it raised difficult and necessary questions. The legal-penalties question, especially, is something I welcome response about (Yaeger?)–but again, I don’t think it’s directly relevant to the issue of embryo-destructive research (the set of which therapeutic/research cloning is a subset).