The Ethics of Human Cloning Where do you Stand?

all for it man.
theres no reason y we shudnt. religion? playign god? pshaw!
y not? i have yet to see any reall substantial reason not to, other than 'god is angry'. that, my friend, is saying we shudnt help fight aids in africa because its god's will for the entire continent to die, and that wud be playing god.

Originally posted by Amorymeltzer
all for it man.
theres no reason y we shudnt. religion? playign god? pshaw!
y not? i have yet to see any reall substantial reason not to, other than 'god is angry'. that, my friend, is saying we shudnt help fight aids in africa because its god's will for the entire continent to die, and that wud be playing god.

I don't think the real negative is playing God. I think the real negative is whether or not we are killing a human for our own greedy purposes.

oops!

[Edited on 17-2-2004 by BlackJackal]

im still for it, but heres two articles from todays science times
nytimes.com...
nytimes.com...
they basically point out, mainly the first, that despite all this new research, its still pretty much at the point where everything is still really a shot in the dark and may all be for naught.

I like many have yet to decide on whether cloning is a good thing or a bad thing, I guess it could be either. The thing is that if we do start to clone people we do not know what the long term health of that clone will be because wasn't the clone of dolly the sheep showing some health problems. I would be all for it but i don't want this to blow up in our faces by the clone being a weaker form of the person cloned, haveing health problems and such. so still nuetral

If we don't go forwards, we go backwards.

Originally posted by Jonna
If we don't go forwards, we go backwards.

Agreed, however, is it going foward to create humans just to be slautered or is that going backwards?

I am not sure.

Originally posted by BlackJackal

Originally posted by Jonna
If we don't go forwards, we go backwards.

Agreed, however, is it going foward to create humans just to be slautered or is that going backwards?

I am not sure.

There in lies the delema. Dinomite has a great many uses...but one can also kill a lot of people with it. There are always individuals that will use advancement for selfish or harmful causes. It is a hard thing to balance.

Originally posted by BlackJackal

Originally posted by Jonna
If we don't go forwards, we go backwards.

Agreed, however, is it going foward to create humans just to be slautered or is that going backwards?

I am not sure.

if slaughtering those 'humans' provides us with a way to actually save millions, billions more lives, yeah.
sides, at what point do they become human?

Therapeutic cloning - hell yes!!
Reproductive cloning - a qualified no at this point...

Originally posted by Jonna
There in lies the delema. Dinomite has a great many uses...but one can also kill a lot of people with it. There are always individuals that will use advancement for selfish or harmful causes. It is a hard thing to balance.

I agree 100% which is the reason why I cannot decide if this is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. The fact of the matter however, is that cloning is here to stay whether it is right or wrong.

We (US) will eventually do it either in the open or secretly. Why? Because others will and the US would be behind, which is something that the government isn't to fond of. We always have to have the bigest toys.

Originally posted by Amorymeltzer

if slaughtering those 'humans' provides us with a way to actually save millions, billions more lives, yeah.
sides, at what point do they become human?

I guess it depends on how you define human

Do you define a human as a being that has the same kind of DNA as you and I? If so then even the embryo of a Clone is a human.

Do you define a human as a being that has the same kind of DNA as you and I that has progressed to a certain development point? If so then a clone would not be a human unless it reached a certain stage maybe even birth.

Do you define a human as a being born naturally between a male sperm and a female Egg? If so Clones are just play toys of the real humans and can be owned as slaves.

Do you define a human as a being with a Soul? If so then there is no way to know if a clone is human.

Originally posted by BlackJackal
I guess it depends on how you define human

Do you define a human as a being that has the same kind of DNA as you and I? If so then even the embryo of a Clone is a human.[/clone]
ill deal with this, because the others allow for cloning as most, including i, wud like it (ignoring the soul thats a tuffy)
we cant classify human life like this. if u do that, ok then, im human, ur human, a clone is human. but, my dead skin cells - human. fine ok.
my sperm? human? well, by this standard, yeah. everytime i were to masturbate, or have sex, id be killing possible humans. what about fertilization, only one sperm makes it, so millions of humans die? when a woman has her period, thats a human? a human dies every month for a woman?
this jsut doesnt work. if these are all humans, then well, whats a few more to the billions killed everyday?

Originally posted by Jonna

Originally posted by BlackJackal

Originally posted by Jonna
If we don't go forwards, we go backwards.

Agreed, however, is it going foward to create humans just to be slautered or is that going backwards?

I am not sure.

There in lies the delema. Dinomite has a great many uses...but one can also kill a lot of people with it. There are always individuals that will use advancement for selfish or harmful causes. It is a hard thing to balance.

Cloning of humans is a scary thought to me. I do not feel comfortable with the idea.
Already, (if you did not know) abortion is the number one cause of death in the United States-
What will cloning do? The money and power behind cloning of humans, if allowed (as we did with abortion)
would have dire consequenses.
But it would be similiar to the situation that surrounds aborting living human fetuses in todays time, IMO. Think about it....

*In My Personal Opinion* I Belive it is wrong. The Reason Being while this clone was not "born" it still is alive so i belive its murder to use the clone for part. if they could learn to clone individual parts by them selves i would not have as much of a problem with it.

I think the clones would be human and therefore should have the same rights as we do (if youre human anyway ) just like the case with abortion, it's still a human you're killing

but....the question that bugs me is: Would these clones have souls?

[Edited on 17-2-2004 by UnknownOrigins]

An interesting question, which raises many possibilities, both good and bad.

I'm not sure where I stand on the practical use of this technology, but I do believe that it could lead to new advances in medicinal and gene therapy treatments, particularly in the area of degenerative physical conditions.

I guess this is one of those deals where there are too many good and bad points to make it an easy argument for me.

I'm against cloning. Let's pretend they get it perfected in
50yrs, and the birth of clones is not un-common could compared to the success
of IVF, 25 something years ago.(I totally agree with IVF) Now, advance 250yrs from now.
I think the potential for a complete genetic 'stuff up', is mind boggling.
What about an 'umbilical cord bank',NOW for research re stem cells,
r&d for things we have no cure...yet. Cord blood is rich in stem cells.
The moral debate continues...

I can say that the ETs can....and HAVE....cloned humans. They even made a clone of me. She had a blank mind, which had to be educated, but she DID have a SOUL. I saw her briefly once.
I would say that humans are nowhere ready to clone themselves. The ETs have the technology to do it, and they apparently did it well.
This is one reason I wish the ETs would come out into the open. They can give us the benefit of their experience.
Humans have to sort out the ethics of such a situation. Obviously, cloning just ORGANS for transplanting would be OK. No full-size babies to use their parts! No horror stories.
Clones would be put into women and BORN that way. As far as I know, we don't have any artificial wombs yet.
Scarey topic. Humans usually manage to use technology the WRONG way as well as for good.