There’re numerous other arguments, and the one I find particularly important is that once you start manufacturing human beings, human beings become a commodity rather than a protected form of life. The societal definition of a human being will shift, and probably in negative ways.

This assumes, of course, that science can ever be stopped, which seems unlikely.

That’s the first thing that’s made me laugh out loud today.

Human cloning as such is just another way of making a human child, and every supposed moral problem surrounding human cloning can be reduced to an entirely familiar problem by replacing the word “clone” everywhere with the word “child.”

Your clone is not you, and has the same moral relationship to you as any of your children. As such, asking the question, “Do I want my children to be more than normally susceptible to co-evolving parasites?” is probably the question anyone thinking about having a child by this method should ask.

it is easy to know where your genitals have been, try keeping track of your genes.

http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/mcgee.html

The first objection discussed in detail is pretty widely accepted. Cloning anything is HARD. You have less than a 100% success rate even when you already know how to do it “right”. Even when you think you do, though, problems may not show up til well after the animal/human can experience suffering.

Another objection is determination of parenting responsibility/authority. As difficult as it was, I’m not sure I’d trade growing up in my family for growing up as intellectual property of a corporation or as a science project.

That’s somewhat similar to part of #4′s post. The likely to inevitable degradation of the regard for a human life to the view of it as property.

As for genetic manipulation of the traits of offspring, I’m with #8. We’ve had far too much artificial support of inheritable disease spreading and too many decades of sending the healthiest breeding males off to war. We NEED to start repairing those effects through genetic surgery.

Is there a risk that there will be a tendency to eliminate homosexuality? I suppose it’s possible in the long term. However, we’re talking really long term here most likely.

We still don’t have a clue on genetic markers for it (assuming they exist) let alone traits like intelligence and longevity.

As someone who is gay, I’m not certain I particularly care. It’s not as if there’s some form of genocide occurring.

Symmetric features, a great singing voice, strength or an extremely efficient respiratory or circulatory system are far easier to find and select for. It’s highly unlikely that all this will provided for free as a universal birthright,

I think folks should be far more concerned about saddling kids with sports or profession specific traits that make them feel coerced to do/become specific things at their parent’s whim. On top of that, there’s those who will have even less chance to compete.

Human cloning is going to happen, like it or not. Cloned people would be people, too. I’m not sure how they would turn modern notions of morals and acceptable social behavior on ear. A clone will be indistinguishable, at the macro level, from any other person. With present-day technology, clones will be born just like everybody else. (Just like identical twins, actually.) The clones will just be people. How is this going to change society so fundamentally?

Ooooo– maybe they won’t have “souls”! Yeah! No “souls”! Spoooky!

*sigh*

I do think that cloning as a means of reproduction is a bad idea, just because we don’t have a clear understanding of what we’ll be fucking up. Our method of sexual reproduction evolved because it works. I laugh at the kind of hubris that says “we can out-think billions of years of evolution” when we talk about engineering our own genomes.

Every time I hear “junk DNA”, I just think “4kb demos, procedural texturing, and a black-box CISC virtual machine with megs and megs of micrcode that you’ll never get to see” and giggle madly. One we have a working grand unified theory, then maybe we can totally understand the “VM” that biology executes in.

If the argument is all “evil people might get hold of it and do something bad”, then let’s start the banning with cars or guns.

@ #15 – You’re right, there’s no genocide occurring against homosexuals (at least in America). However, the example of abortion shows that people are much less squeamish about making these decisions when they don’t have to put a face to it. Think about what would really happen if most parents got to decide which box to check on their BabyCo application form, [] heterosexual or [] homosexual. As was said, evolution built sexual reproduction best it could – which also probably means that cloning, like in vitro, will never become the usual way of reproduction for humankind.

#16 – I don’t know of any experts, on either side of the debate, that deny that clones will have souls or be people (although they may not be treated as complete persons by a society that will necessarily shift its understanding of what a human being is). After all, the same could be said of in vitro babies. The concern for most religious people is the state of the souls of those who make the decision to clone.

Travel surely helps this– you’re not limited to just picking spouses within walking distance. I imagine a study of (rich enough to fetch spouses and selective enough to choose carefully) European nobility would be illuminating. Even if the Habsburg jaw shows they didn’t select for pretty.

In short:
Cloning != genetic modification.

But I would like to single out one particular argument against genetic manipulation for closer study: The don’t-play-god argument.
We are already playing god in a number of ways: Ailments that would have been fatal/debilitating if left to the care of “god” (whatever that means) are routinely cured – e.g. difficult childbirths, myopia, syphilis, malaria and so on.
In fact, nearly every aspect of our bodies and their reproduction is under human control. There’s no reason our genetic makeup should somehow be sacrosanct. If it creates “perfect” humans – so much the better – this world needs all the extra brainpower it can get.

I don’t think that’s much of an argument against cloning.