Human Dignity and Bioethics

494 | Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M.
expressly in order to destroy them for research purposes. However,
a different set of considerations arises in examining the morality of
cloning to bring babies to birth.
Curiously, cloning to bring babies to birth has met with widespread
opposition by persons of many different philosophical and
theological orientations. Most subscribe to the notion that this practice
would deeply offend human dignity. There has yet to be, however,
an entirely compelling explanation of exactly why this might be
so. Does the conception of dignity offered in this essay shed any light
on this bioethical issue?
The intuitions of many observers may be captured by attempting
to understand how the difference between an artifact and a natural
kind is related to the conception of dignity that I have presented.
Artifacts have no intrinsic value. The value of an artifact is purely
attributed—conferred on the artifact by its artificer. Typically, this
attributed value is instrumental. I make a knife in order to cut things
because cutting them is useful to me. I manufacture a mobile telephone
because telephones have an instrumental value to me that is
enhanced by making that instrumental value portable. The very notion
of the intrinsic value of biological entities, as I have discussed,
entails the notion of natural kinds—the value things have by virtue
of being the kinds of things that they are. Intrinsic dignity is
the name we give to the intrinsic value of members of the human
natural kind. This value is discovered, not made. It is decidedly noninstrumental.
The introduction of various reproductive technologies into clinical
medicine has worried many observers for many years, but few
have articulated these worries carefully. The possibility of cloning for
reproductive purposes seems to have led many observers to agree that
these long-standing worries have had genuine moral substance. The
President’s Council on Bioethics has expressed this unease as the difference
between begetting and manufacture. 41 A child born of the
normal course of affairs is begotten. A child brought to birth after
having been cloned seems manufactured. The conception of dignity
expressed in this essay perhaps gives a more fundamental basis for
explaining the worry captured by the pithy distinction between begetting
and manufacture. Cloning blurs the line between the value
one discovers in the human as a natural kind (i.e., intrinsic dignity)