Is cloning the absolute evil?
Authors: G Hottois
Journal: Human Reproduction Update (1998)

Although the literature raised by the announcement of Dolly, beginning in 1997, is very uneven in quality, as Hermitte (1997) writes in the last volume of the French Cahiers du Comite Consultatif National d’Ethique (the October volume is devoted to the cloning issue; see also the outstanding critical analysis by Bertrand Liaudet of the Reponse au President de la Republique au sujet du clonage reproductif in the same volume), everything has been said and repeated. The only task left would be the tireless distinction between true and false assertions, between sound arguments and sophisms. The priority seems to be no more the analysis and assessment of the cloning techniques, but the analysis and assessment of all the symbolic reactions about and around these techniques and their possible extension to human beings. ‘Words’ and not ‘things’ seem to be the actual major concern for the philosopher. Francis Bacon, whose ideas did so much for the development of the ‘new science’—the modern, experimental science—and for the institution of the first scientific Society (the Royal Society) called ‘idols’ these symbolic representations and beliefs which continuously are hiding things and facts behind words and which hinder the progressive and responsible mastery of nature by man. During the first half of the 20th century, Sir Alfred Ayer, one of the promoters of logical positivism and neo–positivism, was inviting the learned community to a kind of ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between scientists and philosophers. The first should analyse facts; the second should analyse words and sentences. We know that this division is a too simplistic. However, philosophers are essentially devoted to meaning, concept, proposition or argument analysis. This task is not a subordinate one: human beings live at least as much among symbols or signs as amongst facts and things. Even more: human beings as such have access to things and facts only through words and representations. However, one particular aspect strikes the philosopher about cloning: it is that kind of existential or metaphysical horror which the idea of cloning (especially human cloning) has raised and which contributed much to its universal and a priori condemnation. Six to seven dramatic pages on reproductive human cloning in the Reponse au President de la Republique au sujet du clonage reproductif, written by a work group from the French National Consultative Ethics Committee in April 1997 are, in this sense, exemplary. They are talking about the ‘unacceptable overthrow of the human condition’, about ‘the great lottery of heredity, with its unlimited uncertainty, which constitutes a major protection of human being’, about ‘attack on human condition’ or ‘getting out of human nature’, etc. And these pages conclude to an inescapable ‘definitive, categorical, vehement ethical condemnation’. In this paper, I will limit myself to the idea (and it is only an idea at present time) of human reproductive cloning. This idea is interesting from a philosophical point of view because of its almost universal and absolute condemnation. All the other uses of cloning techniques could be right or wrong. In this sense, they are not different from ordinary means or tools, even if they call for particular prudence. Reproductive human cloning is described as an absolutely unacceptable technique, as an act that no circumstance could possibly justify; worse than killing, for which people have found so many justifications and excuses. ‘Thou shall not clone’ should be put at the very beginning of the Decalogue. Could one say that human cloning is an illustration of the absolute evil? Kant, who is one of the most quoted philosophical references in bioethics, talks about ‘radical evil’. But ‘radical evil’ is, for him, only the evil linked to the