ABSTRACT
Defenders of biotechnology extol its potential to increase food production and quality, and to cure diseases, endow us with “improved” human traits, and prolong human life. Interestingly, the same dichotomies that have polarized information-technology discourses into one-sided technophobic and technophilic positions are reproduced in debates over biotechnology. But to publicize and politicize biotechnology issues, social movements will have to take up issues like the cloning and stem cell debate into their public pedagogies and struggles. Full-blown human reproductive cloning is problematic for numerous reasons, and we reject it on the grounds that it lacks justification and portends a world of eugenics and genetic discrimination rooted in the creation and replication of desired human types. The opportunistic attitude of cloning advocate Panayiotis Zavos is all-too-typical: “Ethics is a wonderful word, but we need to look beyond the ethical issues here. Francis Fukuyama advances an Aristotelian argument that roots ethics and politics in a substantive notion of human nature.
