Moral Status and Personal Identity: Clones, Embryos, and Future Generations

Summary

I. Introduction

The permissibility of our actions can sometimes depend on the identities of those who will be affected by them. Investigating this phenomenon has been a traditional focus of deontological ethics. Deontological ethics claims that what we ought to do is not always a function of what will produce the best outcome: we could be morally constrained from producing the best outcome because it would require harming someone who would not himself benefit from our action, though others would. John Rawls referred to this as the moral relevance of the separateness of persons. One way of expressing this idea has been that persons are not, in general, substitutable for one another when we do a calculation of harms and benefits. More precisely, harm to person A may not be compensated for by benefit to B just because it would be compensated for by the same benefit to A himself. In Section II of this essay, I shall briefly canvass some ways in which the differing identities of those affected by our acts can bear on the permissibility of imposing harm on them without any accompanying benefit for them. I shall also consider what sorts of properties an entity must have in order to make it the case that harms imposed upon it are not compensated by benefits that flow to another.

In Section III, I shall examine the validity of concerns about reproductive cloning that focus on the fear that cloned people will become substitutable for each other.