Some of us think that being asked to write a term paper on what Aristotle meant by "human flourishing" is tough. President Clinton, however, in response to the successful cloning of a sheep by scientists in Scotland, has given a Federal bioethics committee exactly 90 days, not to "reach any conclusion or make specific recommendations for legislation or regulation"-that, it seems, would be too much to ask-but, and I quote, "only to 'review the legal and ethical implications of this technology'" (The New York Times, Feb. 25).
Okay, folks. You've got 90 days.
Leaving aside jokes about "only" reviewing the ethics of cloning in 90 days, however, Clinton's request does raise a very serious issue. I do not mean the issue of cloning. I mean the issue of this "bioethics committee." His 15-member committee includes an economist, some law professors, a professor of "health," a professor of "religion and medical education," a geneticist and an "expert on genetic defects." However, it seems that no philosopher has been included.
This absence of philosophers from the bioethics committee is not an isolated phenomenon. I have read page upon page of coverage of this scientific breakthrough in the newspapers, and I have read quote upon quote from child psychiatrists, biologists, law professors, theologians, psychologists and the like. Not a single philosopher, however, has been quoted on the issue.
It can hardly be the case that philosophers were consulted and that they all refused to comment. It must have been the case that they were not even asked. As a result, I have had to read all sorts of rubbish, served up by all kinds of amateurs. That philosophers are not even consulted about this issue is a depressing reflection of the media's sheer lack of interest in what philosophers have to say about these matters, as opposed to their interest in 'scientists' and 'religious' types, who, of course, are not being asked questions about science or religion, but rather about complex issues of morality.
If this bioethics committee is full of the same kinds of amateurs-people who do not have years of professional philosophical training behind them-then I shudder to think about what their "review" of the ethics of cloning is going to come up with.
Another interesting fact is that, at least going by the names I have seen, all of the members of this bioethics committee are men. And, indeed, all of the grab-bag of psychiatrists, biologists, religious instructors, etc., interviewed so far, have been men. Only one woman has been quoted in the articles that I have read. Yet her comment was by far the most quotable thing said about the whole affair. Dr. Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said, "There'd be no need for men."
It may be that it is the policy of the American media to only interview men about matters of science and ethics. Or it may be that only men are obsessed with the prospect of replicating themselves. Or it may be that it is only men who are obsessed with impregnating female sheep against their wills. Or it may be that it is only men who are terrified about becoming a redundant sex. I do not know.
But until I hear some intelligent commentary about this matter from some good philosophers, including some good women philosophers (and I can think of several hundred of them, a good number of whom have published books on these matters), then I shall continue to consider the media coverage of this issue to be all but useless.
There is another dimension to this affair that, I am sure, the bioethics committee will be ignoring. Not a single person-I emphasize, not even one person-has raised the question as to whether the cloning of a sheep is an ethical issue. The ethics of cloning, it seems, only begins with humans. Dr. Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who cloned the sheep, has already discussed the possibility of having "pig clones genetically engineered to be a source of organs for humans" (New York Times, Feb. 24). If this column represents the first contribution to the debate on the ethics of cloning by an aspiring philosopher, then let me begin by striking a blow for the animals.
After all, you wouldn't particularly like it if a race of super-intelligent, super-developed Martians colonized Earth tomorrow and decided to clone you, in order for you to be a source for their alien body parts, would you?
James Mahon is a second-year graduate student in philosophy.
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