List of Pros and Cons of Cloning Humans

With the development of new technologies we must also ask ourselves new questions. We are now capable of doing a lot of things we were not capable of doing in the past and as such, we need to wonder whether or not we should actually do them. One excellent example is related to our nuclear capabilities, and the ability to destroy our world as we know. It is pretty obvious we shouldn’t exterminate mankind as we know it, but it’s just an example.

Another example is whether or not we should clone human beings, and the implications behind this act. Cloning is a way of asexual reproduction, never known to mankind before. If you decided to clone yourself, the clone wouldn’t be your child, nor your relative. It would be a new category in itself – it would be your clone. Most people believe human beings shouldn’t be cloned, but let’s look at the pros and cons:

List of Pros of Cloning Humans

1. Faster Reproduction
There are a lot of countries suffering from demographic problems which include lack of young people, meaning that in a few years the country will basically have almost no one giving birth to new children, and a lot of people dying from old age. Cloning would offer a clear solution to this problem.

2. Better Understanding
Cloning would allow us to understand the human being as a whole a lot better, sine it is possible to manipulate certain aspects of the clone. This means that diseases could be cured, physical flaw could be fixed and, ultimately, a super-human being could be manufactured.

3. Improving Families
Cloning could allow people who have fertility problems to have “children” made out of their own DNA. People who have fertility problems wouldn’t have to resort to settling with having no children or adopting (which sometimes means the adopted child is mistreated).

4. Lesbians Could Have Children
With reproductive cloning, lesbians wouldn’t have to bring in DNA from a man not involved in their relationship – they wouldn’t need a sperm donor. As such, they would be able to have a family that involves their DNA only, making it seem more “real” to their eyes.

5. Parents Could Redress Their Losses
There is nothing quite as hurtful for parents as losing their son or daughter. Cloning could put a patch on that would be allowing parents to redress the loss with a clone of their lost child. This would imply huge ethical problems, if seen from the right point of view, including the fact that “replacing” the child would put a burden on top of the cloned child that could never be lifted, degrading its life, as well as our society in general.

List of Cons of Cloning Humans

1. Loss of the Individual
Cloning would destroy, or at least diminish, the sense of uniqueness every individual is entitled to have. If it is entirely possible to create someone exactly like an individual, what is it that makes him unique? This could also lead to clones being considered less humans than non-clones, since the non-clones are the “original” individuals. This would, however, only be true if society allowed it to be. Taking into account issues such as racism, however, it seems pretty clear that it would be true.

2. Discrimination
As mentioned above, clones would certainly be discriminate and, like all of us, they surely didn’t ask anyone to exist. For example, cloned children wouldn’t be raised with the same type of love and attention that children who were not cloned. This would damage them psychologically, turning their lives into something a lot worse than what it should actually be. The problem could be solved, however, by the parents themselves if they managed to avoid discrimination.

3. Lack of Safety
The truth about cloning, unfortunately, is that it is still incredibly unsafe. Almost 100% of mammals cloned resulted in incredible failure since almost all of them ended up turning into miscarriages or ended up being born with life-threatening abnormalities. According to some experts, it might not even be possible to create healthy clones, since the process would end up putting the clone itself at grave risk, specially when it comes to its physical safety. Other experts, however, suggest that every technique can be perfect and that with time mammal cloning will be perfected as well. After that, they say, it will be possible for us to start cloning humans as well, being able to perfect the techniques involved with time and patience.

4. Moral Dangers
If, in the future, cloning is allowed and widely accepted in society, the whole definition of what is a human being is going to have to be analyzed all over again. Furthermore, is such thing is accepted, who can predict what else is going to be accepted in the future along the lines of these incredible genetic engineering’s. Not only that, but if nowadays philosophers try to understand these concepts, no one can truly even begin to imagine what the future can bring for our society and what else is going to easily be accepted or rejected.

It is arguable, however, that the human society can accept or reject any ideas or technologies on its own terms. With education and proper discussion, everything is possible and anything can be achieved within our society. The science of philosophy has been develop to help us understand these problems as we need to trust our own kind in order to be able to get past them.