Cloning and Harming: Children, Future Persons, and the Best Interest Test
![handle is hein.journals/ndlep13 and id is 43 raw text is: CLONING AND HARMING:
CHILDREN, FUTURE PERSONS, AND
THE BEST INTEREST TEST
M. A. ROBERTS*
1. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HARM
A profound issue raised by the prospect of human cloning is
the question of harm. If cloning, while harming no one, stands to
help people with respect to those activities that form [a] cen-
tral ... part of an individual's life and contribute ... powerfully
to the happiness of individuals,' then under the United States
Constitution and any number of normative theories a ban or
restriction on human cloning would be both legally and morally
suspect. Thus, the use of cloning to produce a new person may
be considered an exercise of procreative liberty protected by the
Fourteenth Amendment privacy guarantee. If so, a state will
need more than a mere rational basis to justify a ban or restric-
tion on cloning.2 Rather, the state will be required to show that
the ban or restriction is necessary in the service of some com-
pelling interest. But if cloning harms no one, then it is hard to
see how a ban or restriction on cloning would satisfy this more
stringent test of state action.
On the other hand, the state is empowered under the Con-
stitution to take narrowly tailored courses of action that have
the aim and probable effect of preventing harm. For preventing
harm is one of those compelling interests for which the state is
constitutionally permitted-and morally obligated-to strive.
* Associate Professor of Philosophy, College of New Jersey; J.D.,
University of Texas at Austin, 1986; Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at
Amherst (Five-College Ph.D. Program), 1983. The author is extremely grateful
for comments received on an earlier version of this paper from Bonnie
Steinbock and in discussion from Daniel Callahan, Strachan Donnelley, and
Erik Parens of The Hastings Center. An abbreviated version of this paper will
be presented at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical
Association in April 1999 (Berkeley). An earlier version of this paper will be
published in Current Trends in World Bioethics (A. Szczesna & A. Alichniewicz
eds., Medical University of Lodz).
1. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 204-05 (1986) (Blackmun, J.,
dissenting).
2. For an explanation of the relevant constitutional law, see John A.
Robertson, Liberty, Identity, and Human Cloning, 76 TEx. L. REv. 1371, 1388-92
(1998).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ndlep13&div=9&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Cloning and Harming: Children, Future Persons, and the Best Interest Test
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