What We Talk About When We Talk About Clone Club by Gregory E. Pence

Author:Gregory E. Pence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2016-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

BIOLOGICAL INEQUALITY AND CLONAL DYNASTIES

All of this raises a very important ethical question: Should we try to prevent the wealthy and powerful from using cloning to create biologically superior offspring, lest the result intensify social inequality? Right now, no form of assisted reproduction or cloning can be used to create a Thoroughbred racing horse. Should the same be done to protect our current, rough equality in developed countries? Should democracies fear groups like Topside and its aims?

Where early twentieth-century eugenics was unscientific, public, and coercive, this new option is more science based, private, and voluntary. It is called “stealth eugenics” in bioethics.

If we equate justice with equality, it is certainly true that North America has become a more unjust society over the last decades. In America, financial inequality has worsened over this time. There are more poor Americans than ever before, and the income of middle-class Americans has stagnated so much that “middle class” seems like a misnomer. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires continues to increase, as do the income and wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans. Add to that the inequality of inheritance, where some children inherit $1 million at birth or, like Donald Trump, get jobs through nepotism that enable them to make $1 million on their first business deal, and you realize that the deck is stacked. Biotech is quite likely to give rich children even more advantages.

It is worth ending here with the huge controversy that rages in the important field of early childhood education as to whether we can do anything at all to help poor children overcome the natural inequalities of genetics—one that engages with an ongoing debate on the impact of nature, or genes, versus nurture, or environment, that we’ll discuss further in the next chapter. Head Start, a program run by the federal government to improve the life chances of poor children, is based on the idea that, in terms of life success, genetics are less important than a child’s access to things such as nutrition and education. Started in 1965, it bypasses state educational programs, funneling money directly to poor communities for medical and dental care for children, nutritious lunches, and basic social and academic skills. Over the last thirty-eight years, it has tried to improve as many as twenty million American children. But has it been a success?

Alvin F. Poussaint, a black professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who participated in the first years of the program in Jackson, Mississippi, believes that it has. The fact that kids in Head Start were shown to have greater abilities in vocabulary, math, and sociability than kids not in the program proved it was educating poor children and thus would help them escape poverty, according to Poussaint, and therefore it should be expanded. By contrast, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the white authors of the controversial The Bell Curve, think that Head Start should be abolished, arguing that inherited abilities account for all differences in intelligence and success. Murray even

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