Human cloning and 'posthuman' society
by
Blackford R.
School of Philosophy and Bioethics,
Monash University, Australia.
Monash Bioeth Rev. 2005 Jan;24(1):10-26.

ABSTRACT

Since early 1997, when the creation of Dolly the sheep by somatic cell nuclear transfer was announced in Nature, numerous government reports, essays, articles and books have considered the ethical problems and policy issues surrounding human reproductive cloning. In this article, I consider what response a modern liberal society should give to the prospect of human cloning, if it became safe and practical. Some opponents of human cloning have argued that permitting it would place us on a slippery slope to a repugnant future society, comparable to that portrayed in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. I conclude that, leaving aside concerns about safety, none of the psychological or social considerations discussed in this article provides an adequate policy justification for invoking the state's coercive powers to prevent human cloning.

Human cloning
'Designer babies'
Private eugenics
Psychiatric genetics
Human self-domestication
Selecting potential children
Human therapeutic cloning
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis
Could human cloning make us happy?
'A life without pain? Hedonists take note'
Francis Galton and contemporary eugenics
Reproductive cloning combined with genetic modification

Refs
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Critique of Huxley's Brave New World