Better never to have lived?

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat Jan 04 2003 - 21:26:10 MST


Lee Corbin asks, in another thread,

> What is bad about Dolly's arthritis? Who is it bad for?
> Would it have been better for Dolly if cloning had been
> forbidden? Would Dolly be better off dead?

These are very good questions, which go to the heart of the cloning
issue and a number of other related subjects. Under what circumstances
should we feel justified in bringing a child into the world? How should
we balance risks and rewards for an unborn child? If we take a chance
and a child is born with a handicap, have we wronged the child?

I certainly don't claim to have complete answers to these questions,
but here are some thoughts. Let me focus on Lee's points, particularly
the last, would Dolly be better off dead?

First, while I think there may be people and animals who are better
off dead, I think that would mostly apply only in extreme cases.
If someone is in terrible, constant, unrelievable pain, they might be
better off dead. But just having arthritis or diabetes or some other
sickness that limits quality of life would not be enough to say that
someone is better off dead.

On the other hand, it's possible that Dolly had another alternative.
Her choices were not between being born defective and not being born
at all. From a certain perspective, Dolly might have been born whole
and well. She might have been born from a normal reproductive process,
with a different genome and different upbringing. Her choices then are
between having defective genes and having healthy ones. In that case
we would agree that having a healthy genome is the preferred outcome.

The obvious difficulty with this perspective is that it raises the
question of who is Dolly? How much of her life circumstances could
be changed while still allowing us to think of her as the same person?
Conventionally we draw a line and say that minor changes would preserve
identity - if I had had a different breakfast today, I would be the
same person. But sufficiently large changes would commonly be said to
change this - I would have been a different person if I had been adopted,
or if I had a different set of siblings.

However for some purposes we need to adopt a more inclusive position where
even large changes can be considered to preserve identity. From this
point of view, the name is like a label or token which would apply to a
different entity in each possible world. As long as we can come up with
a consistent naming scheme that applies the labels to entities across
the worlds, we can consider the entities carrying that name to be the
same identity.

We saw some examples of this in our discussion of some of Robin Hanson's
"agree to disagree" economic results a few years ago. Part of his
reasoning required considering the possibility that pairs of individuals
were born with circumstances and predispositions exchanged, in order to
analyze rationally when people should disagree. This analysis predisposes
a notion of identity similar to what I have described above, where I can
consider what might have happened if I had been born as, say, George Bush,
with his genetics and upbringing.

The point of this discursion is that if we accept that this is a
defensible notion of identity, then it is possible that Dolly might have
been born as someone other than a clone. Maybe some other experiment
might have been done instead, and she would have been born healthy.
So we can disapprove of Dolly's creation without necessarily saying that
she would have been better off dead. We could say that she would have
been better off healthy.

The question remains though as to whether any sheep would have been born
to take Dolly's place if she had not been cloned. And this arises even
more for human cloning, where at least in the early days the technology
seems likely to be applied mostly in cases where people are unable
to reproduce otherwise. If the alternative to the cloning is to have
no one born, human or sheep, then we really are back to the situation
raised by Lee, where you have to claim that the clone is better off dead
in order to condemn their birth.

Summing up, if cloning allows for more people to be born than would be
possible otherwise, it is hard to object unless the clones' lives are
so terrible that they all commit suicide as soon as possible to end
their agonizing existence. But if there are alternatives to cloning
that still allow just as many people to be born (including adoption of
healthy babies birthed by others), then we could say that the cloning
is wrong if it creates people who are less healthy than would have
been born in the alternative. At this point it looks to me like the
second circumstance holds, that cloning will not substantially increase
the number of human beings in the world, so this suggests that it is
proper to condemn cloning if it leads to unhealthy babies.

Hal



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