Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Never Let Me Clone? Countering An Ethical Argument Against The Reproductive Cloning Of Humans, Yvette Pearson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the March 2006 issue of EMBO reports, Christof Tannert, a bioethicist at the Max Delbrück Research Centre in Berlin, Germany, presented a moral argument against human reproductive cloning on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (Tannert, 2006). In this article, I address some problems with Tannert’s views and show that our concerns about this prospective procedure should prompt us to scrutinize carefully the conventional procreative practices and attitudes. Indeed, if we set aside objections that are grounded in genetic determinism, many of the offensive features of human cloning are identical to problems with procreation by more conventional means, …