Leon R. Kass

About the author: Leon R. Kass is Addie Clark Harding Professor at the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

The widespread use of reproductive technologies has led people to accept the possibility of human cloning as just another technological advance. Therefore, if human cloning research is permitted, it is likely that humans will be cloned. Most people naturally find the idea of human cloning repugnant, though many find it hard to logically justify this feeling. But human cloning would be unethical for three reasons: The genetic and social identity of the cloned person would be unclear; a cloned human would be a manufactured product inherently lower in status than those who made him or her; and parents would be in a controlling position above their cloned child. Since it...