Great article on libertarians & cloning

National Review Online today posted an article by Ramesh Ponnuru from the 2/11/02 issue of the magazine, in which Ramesh takes libertarians for task for their "lapse of reason" (reason being the thing on which libertarians pride themselves) on the question of therapeutic cloning.

Speaking of the rhetoric from pro-cloning libertarians, he writes, "Some of the rhetoric here, however, stems from an analytical failure: specifically, a failure to acknowledge that there are rational arguments against therapeutic cloning that demand refutation," and he continues further on to say that "[from the libertarian perspective,] opposition to cloning is held to be based merely on subjective feelings of revulsion or on religious dogma, with no reasons to back them up." It is in fact only occasionally that a pro-cloning libertarian acknowledges the pro-life argument (that the embryo is a human being and therefore that it is homicidal to kill him or her for scientific research), and even then, the arguments against the pro-life position are surprisingly weak (see Ramesh's comments on Virginia Postrel's December op-ed in the Wall Street Journal).

Those are only a couple of the highlights of this piece. I highly recommend it.