What Are the Ethics of Cloning?
Once the purview of science fiction, cloning is rapidly becoming a reality in the scientific world. Mankind already possesses the capacity to clone sheep and other animals, and the practice promises to provide medical miracles, such as cloned replacement organs. Cloning presents several substantial ethical issues, however, particularly with regard to human cloning. Since human cloning remains largely academic as of 2011, no ethical consensus has, as yet emerged, regarding the potential practice.
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Religious Questions
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Most major religions, including Christianity and Islam, express serious reservations about the prospect of cloning humans. They maintain that creation is a right reserved for God, and that cloning an entire human being subverts God's will. Judaism offers no specific laws pertaining to human cloning, though it expresses ethical concerns about the potential quality of life of a clone. The central question becomes one of the soul: whether a cloned human possesses a soul, where that soul comes from and what this implies about the nature of the universe.
Practical Ethics
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More practical ethical questions about cloning humans entail potential harm to the clone. Many attempts to clone mammals fail, and those that succeed often produce clones with shortened lifespans. Other clones experience serious health problems and may possess drastically impaired immune systems. A human clone with such impairments may experience a poor quality of life, leading to the question of why such a clone was created in the first place.
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Twinning
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Assuming a human clone could be created with no genetic defects, it must face the issue of its "parent": a clone is not a unique individual but an exact copy of another genetic pattern. That raises questions of how the clone chooses to express its individuality, or indeed if it can at all. Its choices may be hampered by the need to emulate the parent, or it may be driven to move in a radically different direction in order to attain a sense of separate identity. One can argue that children produced through traditional intercourse face many of the same issues, but with a precise copy, those issues become exacerbated.
Animal Cloning
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Animal cloning entails fewer ethical concerns; or rather, the ethical concerns match those of uncloned animals. Some people believe that animals should be treated in the same manner as humans, and those tenets would apply to cloned animals as well. However, in 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determined that food derived from cloned animals was safe for human consumption, stating that the cloned products are "virtually indistinguishable" from uncloned products. The FDA further suggests that no special labels be used to mark food products from cloned animals, according to a report by MSNBC.
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