Cloning and the Outsourcing of Ethics

October 24, 2005

Wesley J. Smith has a column on the World Stem Cell Foundation, Korean cloning scientist Woo-Suk Hwang’s project to avoid skirmishes over the ethics of cloning. The plan is to do cloning in areas where it is not forbidden (South Korea, the United Kingdom, and California) and export stem cells derived via the destruction of these cloned embryos. According to Smith,

This brings to mind Stanford University ethicist William B. Hurlbut’s warning against the “outsourcing of ethics.” After all, how is Hwang’s proposal any different in principle than if organ transplant surgeons formed a foundation to procure organs in “safe havens” allowing them to circumvent laws requiring that vital organ donors be dead? Or, if vaccine researchers sought “safe havens” to perform unethical research on primates in order to accelerate the time when their experiments could be conducted in human trials?

Read the whole thing.