Opiniatrety

There is a missing 'f' in the title I believe :)

I agree that the same points apply to IVF as to cloning. That was one of the points Sarah and I returned to frequently. There are very few arguments against cloning that are not also arguments against IVF. If we regard the moral acceptability of IVF as settled (and admittedly many do not, but many more I believe do) this is a strong argument for the permissibility of cloning.

I agree that the argument (or rather, expression of bemusement, which is what I really made) cuts as strongly against all artificial assistance for reproduction as against cloning, as Brian and Sarah say. In fact, I'd never have doubted the legtimacy of allowing such assistance if I hadn't seen their argument. I doubt that it cuts as strongly against allowing people to have sex, because i) I think there are other, very powerful, interests people have in being able to have sex (some people, anyway) and ii) disallowing reproductive sex would quickly elminate the supply of potential adoptees.

By the way, I don't think there is something wrong with wanting a biologically related child, or even with cloning. But the non-wrongness of something is not a decisive case against prohibition.

I agree with all your points--though the question I had in mind didn't concern whether people should be allowed to have sex at all, but whether reproductive sex was morally permissible. The arguments against government interference in what kind of sex consenting adults can have are pretty overwhelming to me, in the absence of public health concerns, but that doesn't settle the moral issue. For the argument about the supply of babies drying up, maybe I could reframe the moral issue as "Is it OK to deliberately conceive a baby when there are babies waiting to be adopted?"--All that said, I think the distinction between relatively effortless processes and processes that require massive amounts of technology is enough to shield reproductive sex from the argument.

I also think one thing that gets people about cloning is the prospect of hundreds of genotypically identical people running around--which might be considered a harm to society rather than the people, but which also ain't gonna happen, so seems irrelevant.

Anyway, Brian and Sarah have pretty much convinced me that reproductive cloning and IVF have the same status--I favor the middle standard approach to potential harm to the child, but that shouldn't be harder to transcend in principle with cloning than it was with IVF.

By way of response to Henry's initial quote in the main text of the blog, it seems as though there are some good, moral reasons that we ought to allow, and perhaps even encourage prospective parents to have biologically related children, and not adopt.

1. Consider Israel, for example. Israel, for good reasons, has strong pro-natalist policies. One of these policies regards post-mortem sperm extraction. On this policy, even without explicit consent from the newly deceased man, a woman is allowed to have her partner's sperm harvested so that she may conceive a child who is biologically related to her father. Here, I think there is good reason for Israel to affirm a commitment to genetic parenthood through their public policies, like this one.

2. Another reason that parents want to have children who are biologically related to them is so that they may inherit their genetic characteristics, characteristics they deem as valuable and in some sense, identity-conferring. (Here, I am not using the strict, philosophical sense of "identity".) Consider couples who have achondroplasia or who are Deaf (where "Deaf" should be understood to refer to both the impairment itself and the culture). Many times these couples want to have children who share these characteristics with them for several reasons: 1) they feel that the only way they can be adequate parents is to raise a child who shares their characteristic (and actually, this has been used as an argument in the literature on IVF regarding embryo screening for that particular trait, but this issue opens up a whole other can of worms like what we owe our future children, whether birth can ever be a harm to a child, etc.); 2) commitment to disability rights implies welcoming the opportunity of parenting a child with disabilities, so much so that perhaps this ought to come before raising an able-bodied child (a child who needs to be adopted, perhaps).

On this second view, I don't want to people to think that I am advocating that deaf couples or couples with achondroplasia should abort fetuses without these traits, it is just that there are good reasons for them valuing genetic parenthood.