(2) Cloned humans are real persons. 
The life we engineer in the laboratory is really life. Inasmuch as the cloner of humans is itself a natural creature, cloning must be considered to be a process of nature. As such, cloning humans would finally be more like nature's process of creating identical twins than some Frankenstein horror story. A cloned person would grow and develop through the fundamental processes that govern the development of every other person: a genotype giving rise to a phenotype, a person emerging through the interaction with physical environment and culture. Parenting and schooling would continue to be critical in the development of a personal identity, since no human being can survive by genes alone. Those of us who believe that God started this whole process in creation and sustains it from day to day would conclude that this cloned person is, like the rest of us, in the image of God and possesses a soul (given that there are several different theological notions of what it means to have a soul). 

Many persons will have difficulty accepting these ideas, primarily because they are so alienated from nature that they cannot understand their humanity within the parameters of nature as we as know it today. Cloning is another occasion for us to learn that whatever else we may be, we are thoroughly natural creatures. 

(3) What is natural? What is artificial? 
The cloning developments of recent weeks are shown, thereby, to be also revelations of nature, as well as of human beings. Nature is like this, at least on planet earth--it clones sheep and perhaps even humans. Familiar dualisms are empty and unhelpful. The dualism between pristine nature and the nature that bears irretrievably the marks of human intervention is almost fully obsolete. Our concept of "nature" today is closely related to our image of the cyborg--the pristine and the artificial in one reality. Cloned humans are natural persons. Since natural children inherit genes from both a father and a mother, cloned humans are not natural children of those whose cells are cloned, but rather of that person's parents. 

(4) Multiple contexts of morality. 
Since being human is intrinsically a moral enterprise, the discussion of cloning must include from the outset questions of motivations, purposes, and consequences. The moral and spiritual issues have to do with why we clone, what interests it serves, and the moral status of those interests. These also include the question of what the purpose of cloning, or of any human life, is, and what the consequences of cloning might be. In the non-human realm, under the assumption that plants and animals exist to serve us, including our need for food, clothing, and medicines and cosmetics, we have concluded, without much public discussion, that all genetic engineering is desirable, if it serves our wellbeing. In other words, plant and animal nature has been defined as commodity or resource for human purposes. What confidence can we have that human cloning will not proceed under the same commodity rubric? 

The practice of human cloning will be marked by a dauntingly complex set of motives and values, in a wide range of contexts: personal contexts (individual motives and values will determine whether people choose to be cloned), professional contexts (medical professionals will administer cloning and legal professionals will argue individual cases and draw up contracts), free market contexts (the biotechnology companies will make cloning profitable), and the government context (regulating or de-regulating cloning for the common good). In all of these contexts, decisions are morally charged, marked by conflict of opinion and clash of competing interests. The complexity arises when any specific cases of cloning come to mind. Think of the difference in how we might regard a wealthy person cloning an offspring as a potential source of transplantable body parts and a childless couple who see good reason to practice cloning as an alternative to in vitro fertilization, or as a form of adoption. 

We are about to enter once again into the whole question of what human life is all about and how it should be conducted--cloning has simply raised the stakes in this discussion. When we consider that the cloning discussion is simultaneous with the discussions of abortion and doctor-assisted death, we sense the enormous burden that our individual and societal psyches must bear in these days.