Cloning John Ashcroft

What do John Ashcroft's assault on civil liberties and the recent debate over cloning humans have in common? The opposition to both arise partially from the cost of error.



Few people object to criminals being imprisoned, but we cherish our constitutional liberties precisely because governments often abuse their power. Knowingly or unknowingly, governments imprison the innocent, and we've decided that such errors are too high a price to pay in the name of security. Better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man be imprisoned. But with the higher risks and fear associated with terrorism, that equation has already shifted.



Of course, cloning is also a huge controversy that I can't resolve here. There are (at least) two kinds of cloning at issue, so-called therapeutic cloning for improved medical treatments, and reproductive cloning to create a full person. One of many objections to reproductive cloning is that the process is likely to be faulty. It has been called immoral to attempt to create clones when the likelihood of birth defects is so high. Need reproductive cloning be guaranteed error-free, or merely no worse than the risks associated with traditional conception? Ironically, the objection to reproductive cloning may become greater when the likelihood of failure lessens.



Regardless, in our personal and national decisions, we must consider both the risk of inaction and the cost of errors resulting from action. In either case, it is naive to debate the topic as if there are no risks involved in inaction (the current war on terrorism being but one example). It is equally naive to debate a topic as if actions are risk-free when both failure and sucess carry considerable consequences (the current war on terrorism again serving as a prime example).



### Get your Daily Bruce! ###

Which arguments put forth by government, industry, or technologists have you found to be faulty?