A Critical Examination of Carol Kahn’s " Can we achieve immortality? The ethics of cloning and other life-extension technologies " Part 1

Introduction

It has become very popular nowadays to exalt the ambitions of scientific discovery, especially when it concerns human flourishing. In all fairness, scientific knowledge and discovery has produced much good for human beings in the world. But now science is taken to be more than merely a successful enterprise but almost the very measure for qualitative improvements on human existence. Ethical judgments and reasoning must submit to the dictates of scientific discovery and knowledge if it’s to be granted a hearing or have any reasonable defense for any ethical claim. But as we shall see soon, science alone has no ability to do all the work in evaluating the proper recourse for moral judgment and decision-making because ethical notions of rights and human flourishing are tightly tethered to metaphysical and epistemological assumptions (rightly or wrongly) regarding the nature of human beings and what can be known about them in an objective sense.

In this essay I will accomplish four tasks. First, I will Carol Kahn’s utilitarian ethical framework based on future entitlements and who would be part of the future beneficiaries. Second, I will allude to a grisly scenario concerning human beings at the embryonic stage of development that Kahn proposes. Third, I will analyze two understandings of harm as she articulates it towards the end of her article and lastly apply these understandings to the abortion issue.

Carol Kahn’s Utilitarian Ethical Framework Based on Future Entitlements

Kahn starts off by prompting us to examine how we should formulate and understand our ethical responsibilities in terms of the future when she writes, “To develop an ethics for the future, we must know what the future holds in store for us.” (P.14) It is relatively uncontroversial that we should examine what the future holds for us now to develop proper ethical procedures towards moving to the future. But there is an underlying question that must be answered for Kahn to make her case: Who counts as one of us? As we will see later, Kahn seems to give the impression that only human beings who seem to have an interest for or desire their future are part of the future plans we need to respect and treat with dignity when she starts discussing issues of cloning and other procedures. But in any case the utilitarian principle is fairly straightforward: given the desire to maximize utility for human beings who have a future, there is a proper way we ought to go about treating such human beings now.

New Proposal for Kahn: Creating Brainless Children

Kahn wants us to imagine the potential successes that cloning on human embryos would produce if it were in fact possible (not assuming that it’s not possible). She suggests that “First, an embryo would be cloned from a somatic cell and then, when the embryo is six weeks of age, the collection of primitive cells called the telencephalon, the forerunner of the higher brain, would be removed and frozen. In this way, the clone would never be allowed to develop the one thing that makes us human- a brain. Indeed, the clone would never become a sentient being.” (P.15) Essentially the human being’s development would be manipulated in such a way as to stop its higher brain functions from developing. This would be almost equivalent to creating an anencephalic human being on purpose for an apparent moral good.

The overarching principle is that if it would benefit more fully developed human beings (i.e. adults) to perform on experiment on lesser-developed human beings that would turn out well for more fully developed human beings, then the act is morally permissible. The rightness or wrongness of that action would not be so much located in what it does to certain human beings but whether it’s beneficial for other human beings. Presumably numerous people might argue that it's morally permissible to abort mentally deformed or impaired fetuses because they lack certain capacities for value-giving properties like consciousness, sentience or self-awareness. Because they lack these traits and are deformed and impaired, they're not persons and aren't harmed through abortion, as the argument goes.

Imagine if we took Carol Kahn’s advice and applied it to human beings at the embryonic stage of development. If we would intentionally create mentally deformed or impaired fetuses, dismember them, harvest their body parts and organs and distribute them - for curing a disease - to the person from whom the embryo was cloned, would that experiment be morally wrong, given the fact that we have manipulated its development in such a way so as to use it as a means for the good of another? Or, have we harmed the human being by deliberately mentally impairing it so that it will not become a person with rights, especially if it would benefit another? If it doesn't have rights in virtue of not being a person because it's mentally impaired, deformed, or lacks a fully functioning brain – including not having the right not to be killed through elective abortion - then it neither has the right not to be used as a thing for the good of another whether through abortion procedures or deliberately tinkering with its development so that it will not reach the point presumably when it acquires rights. If human beings have value for possessing these value giving properties and we manipulate and obstruct their development in such a way that blocks them from acquiring those value giving properties if it serves an apparent noble purpose, then this isn't morally wrong.