While we were busy with a few other projects recently, we failed to note that Kyle Munkittrick of the Pop Transhumanism blog had a follow-up post in our exchange about the morality of cloning. It’s a disappointing response. He ignores some of our major arguments, he misrepresents others, and he repeats some of his own points that were so weak that we didn’t bother rebutting them first time he made them.
Although this back-and-forth could go on indefinitely, I suspect that both blogs’ readers would quickly tire of the exchange, so except for the few further comments below, we’ll let the record stand for now.
Mr. Munkittrick points out a pair of studies that suggest that twelve-year-old children born via IVF have good relationships with their parents and are emotionally and socially well adjusted. He intends these studies to rebut our point that the lives of children conceived via assisted reproductive technologies can be profoundly shaped by the facts of their conception.
The studies that he points to, though, paint a more complicated picture than he may realize. (I’ll refrain both from my usual kvetching about the shortcomings of this kind of social-scientific research and from pointing out the many oddities of these particular studies.) One of the studies, for example, notes an apparent “difference in attitude toward parenting” between couples who conceive via a sperm donation and couples who conceive naturally: the families that relied on sperm donors apparently had “more positive parent-child relationships” with their twelve-year-olds.
For the purposes of argument, let’s accept this finding. This means that different modes of conception available today can provoke (measurably) different styles of parenting. It would stand to reason, then, that producing a child via cloning might also result in a noticeably different style of parenting. That is surely hinted at in Bryan Caplan’s lament that launched this discussion: he wants to experience a “sublime bond” with a cloned child, a bond shared only by himself and his clone, a bond he apparently does not feel with the children he and his wife already have.
Once we agree that child-rearing would be transformed if a child were produced by cloning, we can speculate as to how it would be transformed. This kind of speculation — grounded in a rich understanding of the meaning of procreation in human life, of child-rearing, and of the relationship between the generations — is necessary for ethical reflection about cloning. The 2002 President’s Council on Bioethics report on cloning is a model of this kind of balanced, informed, and searching speculation. Mr. Munkittrick, by contrast, refuses to concede that cloning might have any effect whatsoever on the cloned child — despite the fact that the language of cloning advocates like Bryan Caplan suggests that a desire to change the meaning of procreation, child-rearing, and the relationship between the generations, is in fact central to their advocacy of cloning. Why is it that defenders of cloning are loath to discuss the subject directly in those terms?
But enough about cloning. What makes Mr. Munkittrick’s response so disappointing is that his Pop Transhumanism blog is so often a pleasure to read. It is spirited and doesn’t creak with the earnestness, self-importance, and obsessive self-referentialism that make certain other transhumanist sites so very tedious. Also, Mr. Munkittrick doesn’t shy away from picking fights with his friends and allies, and he is admirably skeptical about parts of their vision of and for the future.
Speaking of fights that he picks, Mr. Munkittrick did challenge this blog a few weeks ago and we never got around to responding publicly. Since more than a month has gone by, and since most of his challenge was either insubstantial or deeply misguided, I’d like to focus only on one aspect of Mr. Munkittrick’s post — one where he describes his own views, saying that he believes
in natural rights, but that those natural rights are emergent and explain why a single human cell does not have the same rights as a child, and, furthermore, why a child does not have full citizenship but an adult does. Though our legal system doesn’t say it explicitly, this form of rights codification implies that rights stem from a specific level of cognitive aptitude allowing autonomy, sentience, empathy, and reflexivity allowing one to function in a polis…. I was able to incorporate ideas like uplift and non-human rights into my value structure without compromising other beliefs, such as that many animals are justly treated with fewer rights than humans because of their lower cognitive capacity.
For Mr. Munkittrick (and any commenters who share these views), some questions:
First, if you understand natural rights to attach to a “specific level of cognitive aptitude,” what is that level, specifically? Which rights are not possessed by human beings whose cognitive aptitude is beneath that level (a category that would presumably include those who formerly functioned at or above that level, such as a permanently comatose person or an elderly person with advanced dementia; those who have yet to reach that level, such as an infant, a fetus, or an embryo; and those who may never reach it, such as the severely developmentally disabled)? Are there any rights that all human beings, regardless of cognitive aptitude, possess?
Second, do you believe that cognitive enhancement will be an important factor in shaping the future of humanity? If so, and if you believe that rights attach to cognitive aptitude, do you believe that the cognitively enhanced will possess new rights? Like what? If you believe that “animals are justly treated with fewer rights than humans because of their lower cognitive capacity,” do you believe that in the future unenhanced human beings would be “justly treated with fewer rights” than enhanced posthumans “because of their lower cognitive capacity”?