This week, we will explore the concept of ethical thought. As your lecture point

Question

This week, we will explore the concept of ethical thought. As your lecture points out, there are many different ethical arguments, but two large groups of thought are deontological (largely associated with the work of Immanuel Kant) and telelogical ethics (largely associated with John Stuart Mill). The first believes that we should judge our ethics based on the idea of universal understandings. For example, it is logical that all persons do not wish to be harmed, so ethically we can establish a principle based on this. So, under this line of thought, if it is ethically wrong to harm a person, then the death penalty must be ethically wrong, because it violates this principle. If you follow this ethical approach, all ethical questions must be evaluated in accordance to these universal principles. In contrast, telelogical ethics, which utilizes utilitarian thought, looks to the outcome of the action and weighs if it is good based on its impact on the majority. For example, in considering the idea of the death penalty again, one must weigh whether utilizing the death penalty benefits the majority of the population. If the majority is helped, then the action is viewed as ethically sound; if the majority is hurt, it is not. In understanding these thoughts and approaches, what do you think about cloning? Is there a universal thought it may violate? Or can it be considered as good for a majority? What are your thoughts, and what are the different questions that can be raised behind them?

Explanation / Answer

In biology, cloning is the act of producing copies of cells, gene or an entire organism. It is an unethical practices that violates the rights of individual identity of an organism. Cloning would create the assumption that the children could be designed and replicated to their parents wishes. The children produced from cloning should live up to the expectations of their donor. Also due to the cloning there would be lack of uniqueness among people and violate the human rights and freedom. Cloning citizens would be considered as inferior and second class citizens. Since cloning is unnatural and is against the wishes of God to procreate children it is considered unethical by many people. Since people shed millions of cells as their skin falls off. This would lead to the malpractice of collection of their cells and producing clones of random people which would raise the security concerns of an individual. Since in the cloning a donor cells are collected and these cells grown upto an embryonic stage into the petridish and then placed in a surrogate to grow further. So the age of the donor would be imprinted in the developing embryo of the clone this would lead to their faster aging and premature deaths. Also these clones can be used in criminal activities like suicide bombers, terrorists etc and could be harmful for the security and the integrity of the nation. Instead of investing millions of dollars in the field of research regarding to cloning the treatment of deadly diseases like AIDS, cancer etc should be sought. Some of the countries like China, India are very populated the act of cloning would only increase the population pressure. Also the act of cloning would interfere between the natural process of birth and death of an individual which is not ethical. So it is a universal that cloning is not good and should be banned completely.

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