Do debating tactics get any more confused, sleazy and odious than this?

A slave owner in the antebellum South thought that blacks were not human beings, and he resented like hell an abolitionist telling him that he had to treat a black like a human being, and it was his principled view that that wasn't the case. And you had to fight a civil war and basically use the state to enforce the notion that all men are created equal, and that blacks were as fully human beings as whites were. So there are times that that libertarian model just doesn't work very well.

So, Fukuyama claims that libertarianism, a belief in the sovereignty of the individual, would have defended slavery? Francis, get a clue. Slavery was a failure of statism--in which laws were passed that made it legal for one man to enslave another. This was as far from libertarianism as it's possible to get.

Comments like this make it hard to take anything he says about ethics or morality, on the subject of cloning, or anything else, seriously.

Rand, I think you are missing Fukuyama's point. What is at issue with this technology is who defines what it means to be a man. The North made a decision that Blacks are people and imposed that decision on the South. Who will make the decision that clones have the same rights as their originals or that suitably enhanced dogs don't or vice-versa?

-Alex-

Slavery a failure of statism? How do you figure? In the antebellum period, the greatest opponents of statism were slaveholders, men like Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun.

Taken out of context, Fukuyama's comment looks like the worst sort of ad hominem. But for those of us who've read the book, the point he's making is not that you could have a libertarian justification of slavery, but that even libertarians have to recognize that there are objective moral standards which ought to place limits on individual freedom.

Even libertarianism has to start from first principles. If you define the "man" who possesses "human rights" as did the antebellum South, you have justified the "statist" philosophy which grants slaveholders a property right in their slaves. Unjust and immoral, but internally consistent, given the underlying definition of "human".

At the most basic level, both sides in the cloning dispute begin with assumptions as distinct about the definition of who has "human rights" as did the slaveholders and the abolitionists. Fukuyama makes the point in the book that without a political solution to the question of limiting biotechnological applications in the human realm, we could see a similar social catastrophe as the Civil War.

I am amazed that people -- perfectly intelligent ones, I might add -- cannot grasp the connection between slavery and statism. In order for slavery to work at all, an elaborate system of laws had to be enacted and maintained. It's not like you could just claim a slave as your very own in the absence of a law against owning people. Ownership fundamentally requires complex legal relationships. Myriad state-endorsed machinations were involved in the day-to-day processing of the hideous institution that was slavery.

What happens when slaves flee across state lines? When they revolt, does an owner have any recourse at law? How does an owner claim a runaway slave? What about tort law as it relates to slaves? Slaves are property; how -- if at all -- is that property to be taxed? What of freed slaves? What papers must they carry to prove their freedom?

Yes, slavery cannot exist without the complicity of a state.

And I don't know of any libertarians who believe that some clones should have different rights than others. If someone is unable to see the difference between the huge gulf between a blastocyst and a living, breathing person, and the trivial one between a black man and a white man, I don't know how to argue with them.

I should add that I think that a public debate about what is "human" is a worthwhile one, and one that's long overdue. Where I differ with the Fukuyamans of the world is in their belief that we should shut down medical research until such a debate takes place.

Christopher Johnson fails to note that these anti-bellum leaders were pro-states' rights. Not people's rights. They didn't object to government per se; they objected to the level at which governmental decisions were being made. They wanted a strong enough state to outlaw the humanity of an entire race of people; they just didn't want power in the hands of an entity that opposed that proposition. If you endorse martial law at the state level but a loosely-constructed federation linking those states, you aren't anti-statist.

Re: R Simberg
Many people fell into the gulf between the black man and the white man... and the gulf between your cloned blastocyst and the human need not be so vast. We already invitro-fertilize, why not with a cloned blastocyst? Take your blastocyst, clone it. It is undeniably human, and shouldn't provide a civil-rights problem correct? Primates are over 99% human genetically. A 1% differences seems to matter greatly in terms of freedom. Make some libertarean-type choices about genetic content, and it is now... what? If I choose that my child should have horse-like qualities to improve stamina, capacity to work and suit him to a vegan diet, is my child protected as a human or as a horse. Reverse it, I want to improve my horses, so I increase their intelligence and give them fingers... what then? Indeed we must debate prior to the creation of a spectrum of human animal crosses so that the permissible animal slavery doesn't become blurred with impermissible human slavery. If our continued fight against tobacco and our fight against slavery shows anything, it is that it is vastly more difficult to fix a problem after economic and social interests have become entrenched. Debate, decide, then research.

"even libertarians have to recognize that there are objective moral standards which ought to place limits on individual freedom."

Like Fukuyama, Christopher Johnson above has the same strange idea that libertarians believe in the complete supremacy of the individual, above any other absolute moral values. I don't know any libertarians like this, even the Objectivists. Obviously atomistic individuals occasionally bump into each other, with conflicting goals, and there had better be some rules governing conflict. Libertarians don't merely "recognize" objective moral standards, they embrace them!

Though Fukuyama's has legitimate worries about transhumanism, it remains a few years away--let's focus on the 99% of issues (the exception being abortion, where again the definition of the individual is confused) to which libertarian principles readily apply. Fukuyama famously announced the "end of history"; his claims about the death of libertarianism are even more exaggerated.