Lapse of Reason: The libertarians and cloning

National Review, Feb 11, 2002 by Ramesh Ponnuru

In November, the libertarian magazine Reason posted on its website defenses of human cloning by 38 "leading thinkers and commentators." The occasion was noteworthy for several reasons. One is that Virginia Postrel, the former editor of the magazine who organized the feature, assembled a truly impressive group. Writers included Nobel Prize- winning scientists, prominent bioethicists, political scientists, law professors, economists, and philosophers. The symposium provided a fair sampling of the best arguments for human cloning on offer.

Another reason to pay attention is that human cloning is quickly rising to the top of issues that divide libertarians from conservatives. To be sure, many supporters of cloning, including many of Postrel's contributors, are not libertarians. But many of the most articulate supporters are libertarians, and the issue has clearly become a priority for them. Postrel recently went so far as to write that much as she dislikes Tom Daschle, she hopes the Democrats keep the Senate this year because they're less hostile to cloning.

Both parties, reflecting public opinion, want to ban "reproductive cloning." But Democrats, more than Republicans, favor "therapeutic cloning." The distinction concerns not the cloning technique-the act of creating a human embryo would be the same in both categories-but the intention. In reproductive cloning, the cloned embryo would be intended to develop into a baby just as a normal embryo would. In therapeutic cloning, the cloned embryo would be used for medical research and treatment, and destroyed in the process.

The Reason symposiasts differ among themselves about whether reproductive cloning should be banned (some would ban it because it is currently unlikely to yield healthy children) and whether cloning research should be federally funded. But all of them, along with other writers affiliated with Reason, favor therapeutic cloning, and none of them seems opposed in principle to reproductive cloning. Their arguments overlap considerably. Those arguments also share characteristic flaws.

Before examining the merits of the case for therapeutic cloning, it's necessary to clear away some underbrush. Debaters on both sides of this debate, as in other debates, use loaded rhetoric and emotional appeals. In the case of the Reason symposiasts, much of this rhetoric is just silly-especially coming from people who present themselves as the party of, well, reason.

They liken a ban on therapeutic cloning to the persecution of Galileo, say it is "contrary to the ideals of American freedom and democracy," claim that it would lead to a "vindictive police state driven by anti- scientific agitators," and attribute support for it to a "fear of change." The memory of witch hunts and burnings at the stake for heresy is invoked. Michael Lind writes, "Like most Americans, I do not want to see the United States degenerate into a cross between Amish Pennsylvania and theocratic Iran." Harvey Silverglate imagines that a ban on cloning, like a ban on abortion, would violate the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of religion and speech. He also writes that "as recently as the horrendous events in New York and Washington, we have come to see the inevitable result of intolerance of differences as to issues that touch the ultimate questions of human life and existence."

Several contributors also write, without a trace of irony, that supporters of a ban are guilty of "panic" and "unreserved hysteria."

Overheated rhetoric need not discredit the cause with which it is associated. Some of the rhetoric here, however, stems from an analytical failure: specifically, a failure to acknowledge that there are rational arguments against therapeutic cloning that demand refutation. In the comments quoted above, it is assumed that opponents of cloning are moved by religious sectarianism or psychological flaws. They are taken to have made no effort to reason about cloning, rather than merely to have reasoned mistakenly.

The assumption that there are no rational grounds for conservative moral views-or at least none that need consideration in public debates- has a fine pedigree. Whether or not they know it, the libertarians are echoing John Rawls, the most influential liberal political philosopher (which is of course to say the most influential political philosopher) of the last thirty years. Rawls argues that in a modern democracy, policies must be based on reasons that can in principle command universal assent rather than on personal interests, secret rationales, or sectarian religious dogmas.

Rawls's concept of "public reason" sounds fine in bare outline. But as he and his students elaborate it, it has a nasty tendency to rule conservative policies outside the realm of acceptable debate. Rawlsians don't, in the first place, look very hard for conservatives' reasons. If large numbers of people prefer conservative policies but are unable to articulate suitable "public reasons" for them, their views are held to be sub-rational and therefore can't prevail. If philosophers can articulate rational reasons for these policies but the average Joe can't understand their reasoning, those reasons are deemed insufficiently accessible to the public.