In this blog post, we will examine whether embryos can be considered living beings or simply a bunch of cells from the perspectives of Kantian ethics and bioethics.
In February 1997, a paper was published in the renowned biology journal Nature. This paper soon took the world by storm and added a new item to bioethics. It was the birth of Dolly, the first mammal cloned from adult cells. Of course, the scientific community had successfully cloned frogs and rabbits before Dolly. However, Dolly caused a huge stir because she was created by transplanting the cell nucleus of a mature ewe to produce a genetically identical sheep. This was because it meant that nuclear replacement technology could also be applied to humans. The possibility of cloning humans sparked opposition not only in the scientific community due to safety concerns, but also among the general public due to ethical concerns raised by religious groups. However, British bioethicist John Harris argued in his thesis and books that there was nothing ethically wrong with cloning genes or even humans. He demonstrated in his papers and books that many of the traditional arguments against cloning are not logically convincing. He clarified that Kant’s principle does not apply to cloned humans and presented arguments from a utilitarian perspective that the existence of cloned humans would increase the total amount of happiness in the world.
John Harris is a British bioethicist who has expressed his support for human cloning. He argues that cloning technology can be beneficial to humanity and that ethical opposition to it is not necessarily reasonable. While acknowledging that serious ethical issues must be considered, Harris does not believe that cloning technology itself is so ethically problematic that it should be banned. He focused more on the potential benefits that cloning technology could bring.
In this argument, we will refute John Harris’s position that Kant’s principle cannot be applied because cloned organisms have both means and ends. Furthermore, we will argue that the use of human embryos, which he justified on the grounds that it increases the total amount of happiness, is in fact morally undesirable by applying Kant’s principle. Through careful counterarguments and analysis, this paper will clarify the ethical and moral issues that we will face in the coming decades. This supports the sufficient grounds for prohibiting human cloning and, furthermore, helps Darwin’s gene pool function properly by preventing humans from changing their traits and minds, which are the result of evolution, at will.
When the birth of Dolly was announced in Nature magazine in 1998, negative opinions prevailed. In his commentary, renowned molecular biologist Axel Kahn found grounds for opposing cloning in human dignity. In his commentary published in Nature magazine, he appealed to Kant’s ethics, saying, ” “Creating human clones solely for the purpose of obtaining spare cell lines is, from a philosophical point of view, a clear violation of the principle of human dignity as articulated by Immanuel Kant.” He went on to argue that creating a child identical to oneself is wrong because that child would be treated as an object.
However, Harris argues that it is not desirable to apply Kant’s principle to the growth process of cloned humans. This is because Kant’s principle is taken for granted and persuasive, but it is also very vague and open to a wide range of interpretations. Kant’s argument that humans, as rational beings, are inherently dignified and therefore “ends in themselves” is valid. However, Harris argues that people never treat others solely as tools. In other words, even if cloned humans are created as a means to “give Bill a sister,” he argues that they are not created solely for that purpose. Furthermore, as can be seen in the example of identical twins, even if cloned humans have the same genome, it does not affect the autonomy of each individual.
However, I believe that Kant’s principle can be applied to Harris’s argument. In other words, I disagree with the opinion that cloned humans cannot be subject to Kant’s principle because they exist both as ends and as means. Kant’s principle does not simply deal with humans as ends in themselves and as means to an end. In his famous “categorical imperative,” Kant states that the dignity of each individual human being presupposes mutual subjectivity. In other words, he transforms the traditional concept of subjective freedom into the concept of mutual subjectivity. This means that the relationship between oneself and others is a mutually constitutive mechanism for the freedom of the individual. From the perspective of the “universalized other,” this is a norm that governs human relationships with others, establishing a norm of reciprocity, or formal identity, whereby what humans expect and assume from others, others also have the right and qualification to expect and assume from us.
However, cloned humans have a different relationship with others than ordinary humans. The question is who their social or genetic parents are. Human cloning requires a nucleus provider who provides DNA, an egg provider who provides the space for the nucleus to be fertilized and mitochondrial DNA, and someone to carry the cloned embryo in their womb. In this case, most of the DNA of the cloned human is identical to that of the nucleus provider. In that case, is the mother of a cloned human being the woman (or man) who provided most of the DNA? Is it the egg donor? Or is it the woman who carried the embryo and fetus in her womb for 10 months? If so, can the cloned child call the woman who raised him or her his or her real mother? Or should she simply be called a DNA donor? Furthermore, the mother of the nucleus donor could be the grandmother of her daughter (or son), but she could also be the mother because she has half of the DNA. The above examples clearly show that cloned humans, by their very existence, have relationships that go beyond the existing framework of blood relations. These examples are different in nature from other cases where biological parents do not raise their children, such as adoption and test-tube babies. In the case of test-tube babies, only cases where sperm from an anonymous third party is used for artificial insemination are recognized, and in the case of adoption, the child is usually the child of a person who has no relationship with the adoptive parents. However, cloned humans have a different kind of mutual subjectivity from these cases, as they inherit the DNA of their parents. Furthermore, they form different relationships with society than existing humans. First of all, there has been no concrete discussion on how to treat cloned humans, whether they should be treated as citizens, how to provide welfare, and to what extent human rights should apply to them. Of course, due to technological limitations, cloned humans have not yet been created, so relevant laws have not been established, but if cloned humans are actually created, there will certainly be discussions on how to create relevant laws. Furthermore, laws regarding human rights that have been created over a long period of time may suddenly have to be created within a single generation in the case of cloned humans, which could lead to cloned humans living under different laws than other people. In such cases, mutual subjectivity would be lost, and Kant’s categorical imperative would no longer apply. In other words, since mutual subjectivity, which is a prerequisite for discussing human dignity, would no longer exist, even if cloned humans had both means and ends, this would be contrary to Kant’s principle and could be interpreted as ethically undesirable.
Harris also takes the position in his paper that we should not rush to conclusions about the ethical status of embryos, i.e., the applicability of Kant’s principle. To defend his argument, he presents a utilitarian view that embryos themselves do not have personhood. If we define the point at which personhood begins in terms of rationality, self-awareness, and interests related to desires, the question becomes when the interests of embryos arise. The conditions for interests are the “capacity to feel pain” and the “desire to avoid pain,” so killing a person means terminating its future desires. However, since embryos do not have future desires, they cannot be considered persons, and from the perspective of maximizing the total sum of individual happiness, which is the goal of utilitarian ethics, killing embryos does not reduce the total sum of happiness.
In conclusion, he argues that the use of embryos, which have the potential to become human beings if left alone, is a form of assisted reproductive technology. Furthermore, he argues that the use of embryos is the same as having children as successors or to preserve genes.
However, I believe that Kant’s principle can also be applied to embryos, and I will prove this from a personalistic perspective. In order to prove that killing embryos reduces the total sum of happiness, let us first consider that embryos are also individuals. Regardless of their ability to act in a particular way, human beings are persons simply because they are human beings. Biologically, human existence begins at the moment of fertilization, and the stages of human development are merely names for each period of time, not points of discontinuity that distinguish human existence from a mass of cells. This is because the development of human life is a continuous process, and there are no meaningful points of discontinuity that bring about qualitative changes. In other words, it is ethically wrong to use embryos that can naturally become human beings if left alone. Furthermore, according to recent embryological research, mammals begin planning the formation of each organ in the body from the moment of fertilization. I believe this is evidence that fertilized eggs and embryos up to 14 days after fertilization, when the primitive streak forms, are not just a mass of cells unrelated to humans.
If you agree with my argument that embryos also have personality, then the issue of excessive embryo sacrifice arises. In fact, the probability of creating cloned embryos decreases rapidly as we move from mammals to primates and humans. Even when cloning sheep, which are lower animals, 276 fertilized eggs were implanted, but all attempts failed until the 277th fertilized egg was successfully implanted, and Dolly was born. Cloning actual humans requires many more sacrifices. Dr. Michael Souls, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said at a US House of Representatives hearing on human cloning, “Based on the success rate of cloning sheep, which are three to four times more fertile than humans, it would take 1,000 pregnancies to produce one cloned human, and 999 of those pregnancies would end in miscarriage, premature birth, stillbirth, or birth defects.” Consider the remaining embryos that were not successfully born. Applying Kant’s principle, the remaining embryos are merely a means to achieve successful cloning and were treated only as tools to create healthy cloned humans. Harris’ argument cannot accept these embryos, and therefore his argument is self-defeating.
Furthermore, even if technology advances to the point where it is possible to create cloned humans without sacrificing other embryos, there is no guarantee that they will be treated as ends in themselves rather than means to an end. The most prominent example of this is the harvesting of organs from cloned humans. In his book, Harris takes the position that cloning humans for organ transplantation is also ethically acceptable. He bases this on the position that what certain people consider ethically undesirable is in fact only a personal opinion. However, if the reason for creating cloned humans is to harvest their organs for transplant without rejection, his entire argument is refuted. This is because cloned humans are born solely for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Even if cloned humans are capable of having their own emotions and acting autonomously, their purpose is to replace the organs of the original human, and their personality is determined only after the fact. According to Kant’s principle, this is morally unacceptable because it treats humans as mere tools without autonomy.
In this argument, we have refuted John Harris’s position that human cloning is not ethically problematic. First, we argued that the Kantian principle cannot be applied to cloned humans because they have both means and ends, and that they have autonomy even if they have the same genome. As a specific basis, we pointed out that cloned humans have a different relationship with others than ordinary humans, which is a prerequisite for Kant’s principle, and therefore it is ethically undesirable. We also refuted Harris’s second argument that embryos are not treated as persons, so Kant’s principle cannot be applied, and that it always acts to increase overall happiness. To support this, he showed that embryos can also be viewed as persons from a personalistic perspective and that Kant’s principle is applicable. He also proved that it is morally undesirable under Kant’s principle to use cloned humans solely as tools for organ harvesting.
Through this argument, I showed that the creation of cloned humans, which has been a social issue since the birth of Dolly, is not ethically valid when applying Kant’s principle, which discusses human dignity. Furthermore, ethical research on cloned humans is continuing to develop as technology advances, so it requires ongoing attention.
