Not since the arrival of Dolly has cloning been so much on the radar screen of Americans as it has been this spring. In recent months, human cloning appeared as the cover story of at least three national magazines, including one as unlikely as Wired, the technology journal devoured by Internet aficionados. Major newspapers, too, dedicated untold column inches to a subject many thought had already been analyzed beyond redemption. The question arises: Are media heralding things to come or merely pounding the drums of paranoia? It would seem to be the former over the latter if stated intentions to clone humans are taken seriously. Italian fertility expert Dr. Severino Antinori and his American partner Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, for example, say that, as a fertility treatment, they will clone a human being within the year in an unspecified Mediterranean country. A North American religious cult, the Raelians, reportedly plans to clone a human and claims to have over fifty female surrogates waiting in the wings.

Since 1997, when somatic cell nuclear transfer technology (SCNT) successfully rendered the first cloned mammal-Dolly the sheep-the experiment has been replicated a number of times. Research labs across the globe have subsequently cloned a host of other animals-mice, cows, goats, pigs, even gaurs-but, not as far as anyone knows, the human animal.¹ Nonetheless, some people think that human cloning is just around the corner-from the Raelians and their chief scientific advisor, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, to the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, Alan B. Krueger.

In one of his regular New York Times columns, "Economic Scene," Krueger explored human cloning as a marketable enterprise. "By most accounts," he wrote, "the remaining technical hurdles are about to be cleared to make human cloning feasible."² If indeed only "technical hurdles" remain to keep us from our delayed twins, the issue rather quickly becomes one of whether or how such technology ought to be brought to market. It is telling to read Krueger's recent words:

Market forces do indeed loom large and Krueger's candid assessment provides the ideal backdrop for this article. My premise: although we cannot predict the degree of its popularity, human cloning is likely to become a reality for some people who have both the desire and the means to make use of new assisted reproduction technologies (ART). As an ethicist, I am greatly discomforted by this thought, and I wonder if the hubris of humanity is reaching heights unimagined by Reinhold Niebuhr when he warned us about the condition of human sinfulness-pride.⁴

Nonetheless, any amount of nay-saying from moralists will not likely change the reality that some people want human cloning, are willing to pay for it, and under globalized capitalism and free trade will not be prevented from fulfilling their desires. Nor am I certain that we should legally prohibit human cloning. While most Americans express distaste when confronted with the cloning issue by pollsters⁵-articulating what many call the "yuck factor"-simultaneously they are loathe to legislate against freedom of choice. And since the assisted reproductive services industry is all about making choices possible for people who can pay for them, one assumes that at least initially human cloning will find a home within this unregulated, $2 billion-a-year industry.⁶

"Where there is a demand, there will probably be a supply. You can already see it," Brian Alexander writes. "A cloning infrastructure is slowly emerging to satisfy a market that doesn't quite exist yet."⁷ The infrastructure Alexander refers to ranges from the nonprofit, internet-based Human Cloning Foundation, at www.humancloning.org, which links people interested in human cloning projects, to for-profit ventures such as Southern Cross Genetics, Canine Cryobank, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Then there are the religious and philosophically-based endeavors, such as the Raelians' Clone-Aid Project, an effort to achieve immortality through cloning; and Summum, which charges $65,000 and up to "mummify clients who want to preserve their cells through cloning . . . So far, 147 people have paid for the service via life insurance policies."⁸ Though Canine Cryobank's genesis in the market was freezing heads and bodies of canines, it also claims to be "storing human cells for future cloning and has told the Human Cloning Foundation they will consider helping people who have lost 'their human spouse, child, mother, father, etcetera.'"⁹

Lest the reader think these claims are specious, bear in mind that one of the world's premier in vitro fertilization clinicians, Dr. Mark Sauer of Columbia University, tells Alexander: "I cannot go through the week without people asking me for it [human cloning] . . . They say, 'Can't you just do it for me? I'll be your guinea pig. You can experiment with me.'"¹⁰ This brings us back to Krueger's claim that "the marketplace-not government regulation or ethical norms-will determine who avails themselves of cloning services." The implications here are that market forces are stronger than moral forces and that government generally is loath to interfere with the market. It is axiomatic in capitalism that the market exists both to create and to satisfy desire.

With all of this as a backdrop, I make a case in this article for regulation of the market for human cloning. I view government regulation as a moral imperative, and I offer Margaret Radin's theory of incomplete commodification as a way of taking up this imperative. The question of whether we should engage in human cloning or not is fast becoming a historical inquiry. It seems to me that there are circumstances under which we might consider cloning humans to be morally permissible and circumstances under which it would not be morally permissible. I briefly suggest the contours of these boundaries in this article. However, I mean chiefly to defend the thesis that ethicists urgently need to attend the question of how to regulate the market in ways that accord with a vision that goes back to Aristotle, that of human flourishing.

My argument turns on two interrelated questions, one pragmatic, one visionary. The pragmatic question: In what way, if at all, may somatic cell nuclear transfer technology be brought into the marketplace as assisted reproduction? This issue is best approached by beginning with the visionary question suggested by Iris Murdoch's metaphysics: Do we see rightly?¹¹ How we answer this, I submit, reveals much about the kind of society we wish to shape with our emergent genetic knowledge, in general, and with our knowledge of nuclear transfer technology for human cloning, in particular. Are we able to see clearly what kind of persons-and hence what kind of society-we wish to become? Such are the questions that ought to frame our deliberations on human cloning, especially with regard to how the technology gets commodified.

THE THEORY OF MORAL VISION
This question of an appropriate vision that precedes action is easily obscured by market priorities and market rhetoric¹² concerned with making technology usable and profitable. I argue, however, that the kinds of questions raised by Murdoch are precisely the questions to which biotechnology should attend, and that it ignores these at its own peril, and ours as well. In her work, The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch places before us the relevance of the inner life, of vision and attention in the task of morality. Our pursuit of the moral life entails, she suggests, a reverence for the mystery, ambiguity, and rich texture of those interior contours, which may in the long run be more important than empiricism's insistence on an ethics of action. In Sovereignty, Murdoch argues for an interpretation of morality in which attention is prioritized over action, thus rendering an ethic of vision. In Murdoch's view, an ethic of vision must precede an ethic of action because moral agents are more than the sum total of reason moving will to action. It is not that she eschews action, but she insists that our actions must be based upon a vision of the real that comes from the difficult and prior work of attention.

Murdoch's moral theory turns on the distinction between an ethic of action formed by the human will and an ethic of vision formed by sight or attention. In the former model, the province of the moral is characterized by the sheer movement of the will to particular action such that moral meaning comes from the conflation of will and action, and the affective, interior life becomes subordinated to one's capacity to mobilize the will to movement. For Murdoch, however, the fundamental choice in the moral life is to see things as they really are-or not. "We can only move properly in a world that we can see," she writes, "and what must be sought for is vision."¹³

How are we to acquire the vision that Murdoch would have the moral agent seek? We must approach every moment with an "unselfing,"¹⁴ an attending, a breaking the barrier of "methodical egoism," as she calls it, for we are after all, "distracted creatures, extended, layered, pulled apart."¹⁵ In both The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch develops Simone Weil's concept of "attention" to give content to this ethic of vision. "I have used the word 'attention,'" Murdoch writes, "to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent."¹⁶ For Iris Murdoch, the task of the moral agent is to see-and from truthful vision right action follows.¹⁷

Right action then involves seeing-the larger picture, the ambiguous, huge, multiform, and unpredictable horizon of vision. It means focusing one's attention. If ever we have needed a reminder of the importance of focusing one's attention on the larger picture, that time is now, for the questions raised by cloning are profound ones: questions about what kind of persons we wish to become; questions about whether human cloning accords with our most deeply held notions of human personhood; questions about whether cloning as assisted reproduction promotes our sense of what constitutes human flourishing.

I do not wish to encourage the scrutiny of motives as a way of adjudicating human cloning, good or bad. Nonetheless, it seems to me that people will choose to clone for two kinds of reasons, which can roughly be distinguished in the following ways. Suppose a couple sincerely desires to bear and raise a child and they feel that SCNT would be the best method for bringing that child to life-a lesbian couple, for example, who cannot have a child genetically belonging to each of them in any other way. This we might call a more or less benevolent motive. On the other hand, there will be persons who sincerely desire to have a child by cloning for reasons that may strike us as morally unsavory¹⁸-replacing a deceased loved one, wanting to see oneself or one's spouse achieve immortality, and so on. The reason we may feel the latter scenarios are unsavory, I submit, is that the underlying motives appear be fueled by narcissism. And where children are concerned, most of us feel that a motivation rooted in concern for the other-the cloned child in question-is preferable to a motivation rooted in concern for the self. Yet, both kinds of scenarios would be possible, even likely, given the anything-goes-if-you-can-pay-for-it hallmark of the ART industry.

The point is, if one cultivates the ability to "see rightly," as Murdoch admonishes us, likely one will not consider using SCNT to have a child for morally unsavory, narcissistic ends, such as pure self-fulfillment, immortality, or replacing the dead. It could be argued, I suppose, that replacing the dead is altruistic and not at all self-indulgent. Murdoch would tell us, however, that to maintain such a position is to be caught in a state of illusion or fantasy, and this is precisely what she inveighs against-for no genuinely moral action could be taken when one acts from illusion. Surely, acting from a desire to recreate the dead, or from a desire never to die, is a sign that one is not seeing reality clearly and honestly. Indeed it is possible to clone a human being for reasons that come from cultivated attention, reasons that involve motives of benevolence, say, over egoism, just as it is possible to clone for self-interested reasons. In any case, to clone a human being for the wrong reasons-in Murdoch's terms, to move straight to action without cultivating that "just and loving gaze" as a prelude to right action-can only diminish human flourishing.

Thus, perhaps what is needed with this question of human cloning is exactly the kind of moral shift Murdoch makes: not an ethic that eschews action, but one that begins by asking the prior and all-important questions of vision and attention. I suggest that these prior questions of vision and attention necessarily lead us to issues of relationship: What kinds of relationships do we value? Are genetic relationships becoming more prized by parents than are relationships of bonding regardless of the genotype of the child? What kinds of relationships do we wish science to be in service of, and not the other way around? As I have alluded, I do not wish the science of SCNT to be used in service of relationships where a cloned human is created merely as a means to some end: to secure one's own immortality, for example. While this article is only suggestive of such questions, more attention needs to be paid to the whole issue of science in the service of human relationships.

Murdoch reminds us to cultivate the affective interior life so that we might orient ourselves towards the good. Such an orientation certainly seems necessary. The intuitive cultivation of a disposition towards the good is often lacking in our technological culture. Were it not lacking, one wonders whether fertility experts would be rushing headlong into human cloning despite the enormous safety concerns raised by scientists and ethicists alike.

Yet we may ask whether cultivation of such a disposition is an adequate response for a situation, such as this cloning issue, that ultimately calls for a decision in the form of action. If fertility experts who intend to clone humans persist in doing so, as they have assured us they will, we can no longer avoid one very pragmatic consideration. What is the appropriate way to think about commodifying nuclear transplantation technology as another product in the assisted reproduction arsenal? Thus far, I have suggested that the appropriate way cannot be one that diminishes human flourishing and clouds the capacity to see. I shall now argue that two extremes of commodification-wholly regulated and wholly unregulated-both obstruct such vision, while a middle ground of "incomplete commodification" is more likely to accommodate our instincts towards the good.

HUMAN FLOURISHING AND THE "FREE" MARKET
My premise has been that SCNT for human cloning will be used-sooner rather than later it would appear-as a form of assisted reproductive technology. All ART in the United States are presently unregulated market commodities. By this I mean that things that we tend to conceive of as belonging to us-things that we would consider integral to our sense of selfhood, such as embryos, eggs, and sperm-such "things" are now bought and sold in an unregulated marketplace of commodities. The personal property I have just identified is distinct from property not infused with the same sense of personhood. We may love our automobiles or be extremely attached to our stock portfolios, but for most of us neither a car nor a stock portfolio is intimately connected to our sense of what it means to be human. We need to regulate the market for SCNT in a way that accords with our sense of human cloning as deeply connected to our sense of personhood. Should we ignore this moral imperative, we will witness gradual erosion of values-not because of cloning per se, but because we have allowed the market to subsume something that is not the equivalent of widgets.

In Contested Commodities, Stanford law professor Margaret Radin argues that once a thing becomes completely commodified in the laissez-faire market, it becomes conceptually fungible. This means that we begin to think of the widget as fully interchangeable with any other widget; in the mind and in practice, it becomes objectified, commensurable, and subject to buying and selling.¹⁹ Simply, commodification may be defined as the exchange of products in the market for money. All market exchanges, according to Radin, bear the marks of four conceptual indicia of commodification, each of which is related to the other-objectification, fungibility, commensurability, and money equivalence.²⁰ Extending Radin's analysis to our topic, the question arises whether cloning technology as an ART would be commensurable or exchangeable with other products in the marketplace. In an unregulated marketplace-Radin refers to this as a completely commodified market-the answer is that it would be. Understanding the nuances of commodification is important because once we move something into the market, we begin conceptually to accept its place among other market entities, making it easier to objectify and, hence, easier to buy and sell. This is not problematic with automobiles or furniture, but the question remains: What does fungible objectivity do to an entity conceptually related to personhood? The question is rhetorical at this point for the answer seems increasingly obvious.

Clearly, in a world where things are commensurable and objectifiable, it becomes easier to view such things as exchangeable, and so is much harder to resist full commodification. As an example, most of us find it wholly acceptable to purchase in vitro fertilization technology as a way of bringing about a child. This acceptance makes the commodification of SCNT for the same purpose seem quite natural. Indeed, in a world of complete commodification, the two are plainly commensurable and fungible.

Now one might ask, what is wrong with full commodification and why should it be resisted? As Radin argues, once technology becomes commodifiable, it is subject to free market rhetoric and to a kind of consciousness that would appear to be at odds with some important commitments to notions of personhood. A successful marketing campaign changes our behavior: we begin to behave as the market would have us behave. Again, this is not necessarily problematic with running shoes, though that, too, is an arguable point. When the market, however, makes fungible human embryos, body tissues, and other kinds of personal property intimately connected with the human being, it becomes that much easier to see human beings as fungible, too. In this way, full commodification of such personal property risks further eroding our sense of personhood.

Fundamentally, Radin seeks to clarify that "property" does indeed connect to personhood as it connects to something vital about the self. In Contested Commodities, and elsewhere, she takes up the question of whether and how we ought rightly to commodify certain things-body parts, babies, sexuality-that many of us view as "market-inalienable," that is to say, not subject to commodification. Contesting the commodification of sexuality, for example, Radin argues that certain aspects of life cannot be subject to buying and selling because to do so impoverishes our notion of human personhood and mitigates against human flourishing.²¹

I suggest that the full commodification of SCNT for human reproduction be contested on similar grounds. There simply are some things that we ought not "trade off against each other,"²² to use Martha Nussbaum's phrase. Since in universal commodification everything is fungible, the fullness of our notion of human flourishing is correspondingly diminished, as is our conception of the self. As Nussbaum puts it, "To treat deep parts of our identity as alienable commodities is to do violence to the conception of the self that we actually have and to the texture of the world of human practice and interaction revealed through this conception."²³ Thus, if we "cash out" the very things that are connected to our sense of self and of what it means to be human-tissues, embryos, eggs, and so on-we risk putting a price tag on the self. Such a practice becomes increasingly possible in the world of new genetic technologies and, I believe, as Murdoch, Radin, and Nussbaum hold, that this correspondingly diminishes our humanity.

Therefore, in order to honor commitments to the good and to personhood, Radin attempts to forge a middle ground between two extremes-neo-classical economic conservatism and traditional liberal theory-each of which, she argues, gives a rather thin account of our humanity, albeit from different starting places.²⁴ In reference to the free market, Radin notes that economic conservatives render justifications for universal commodification of everything in market terms, including children.²⁵ From the point of view of neo-classical economics, the only reason to keep something out of the market would be the inefficiency or failure of the market itself.

Traditional liberal theory, on the other hand, intending not to embrace universal commodification characteristic of the regnant Chicago School of economic theory, tends toward compartmentalization of certain things from the market-selling babies, for example. The irony, as Radin points out, is that in doing so "liberal theory has borne within it the seeds of universal commodification,"²⁶ in that theories of conceptual compartmentalization keep us from seeing the embededness or contextuality of our human transactions. To use Murdoch's language, such things keep us from "seeing rightly." To use Radin's language, the market society contains within it nonmarket relations and values that are overlooked by a liberal theory seeking to keep some things out of the market entirely. There simply is no such ideal world.

The point is that by compartmentalizing some things, or sequestering them from the market entirely, the market itself is effectively left alone and has unchecked power. This is what Radin means when she says that liberal theory "wrongly implies the existence of a large domain of pure free-market transactions to which special kinds of personal interactions form a special exception. It also wrongly suggests that a laissez-faire market regime is prima facie just."²⁷ Thus, while neo-conservatives give us an unfettered market for all commodities, even children, and liberals give us a market that is de facto just so long as certain things are sequestered from it, Radin offers a more complete account of human personhood and of our transactions and interactions in the world with her theory of "incomplete commodification."

INCOMPLETE COMMODIFICATION FOR CLONING AS AN ASSISTED REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY
What is incomplete commodification? Radin does not specify its normative content; though it is always specific to the particular thing being regulated, it may be described as follows. Imagine a sort of metaphorical market continuum ranging from complete or universal commodification on one end-neo-conservatives-to universal noncommodification on the other-Marxists, socialists, and some liberals. In global late capitalism, most things placed on the market exist at the universally commodified end of the spectrum. Incomplete commodification, in contrast, is a way of regulating that moves things to different points along the market continuum without sequestering them entirely from market interaction. The notion of a continuum avoids the pitfalls of dichotomous, piecemeal thinking. In our non-ideal world, both things hold: complete commodification is potentially harmful because it can contribute mightily to the erosion of our concept of personhood; complete noncommodification is also potentially harmful because it effectively cedes all power to the market.²⁸

What we need to see, Radin argues, is that there are both market and non-market aspects to our human interactions; we need to see the pervasiveness of literal and metaphorical or rhetorical markets; finally, we need to see that our often stubborn commitments to personhood and human flourishing perhaps are not best engendered by dichotomous either/or thinking. Incomplete commodification, she argues, avoids dichotomies, while it has the advantage of emphasizing contextuality as a response to the kind of world we live in, which is a messy one. There are no ideal or abstract persons since all of us live in embedded contexts. Our market interactions must account for a thick description of personhood, one that a theory of incomplete commodification is more likely to provide.

As a better alternative to full commodification, incomplete commodification regulates the market in order to ensure aspects of our flourishing that seem vitally important, such as contextuality, identity, and freedom. For example, Radin explains that we regulate aspects of our work lives in order to "make more possible the realization of personal ideals about work, which are related to human flourishing; a self-conception inseparable from one's work (contextuality), continuity of work (identity), and control over one's own work (freedom)."²⁹

In other words, incomplete commodification affords us a more accurate reflection of the realities of our human transactions: we value both the efficiency of the market and the fullness of our personhood. Radin uses housing regulation as an example of this point: "regulation is appropriate because, although we value the efficiency of the market, at the same time housing must be incompletely commodified in recognition of its connection with personhood . . . People engaged in market interactions often do not understand themselves as just acquiring things; they are relating to each other as well."³⁰ Think of the ambivalence many of us appear to have about commodification of genetic technologies in general, and human cloning in particular. Perhaps the sense some of us have of cloning as morally unsavory is related to what Radin identifies as a sense that some things are not properly measured in fungibility and commensurability, the language of full commodification, for to do so erodes our stubborn commitments to human flourishing. People engaged in market interactions surrounding assisted reproduction are paying for technology that has a deep connection to personhood; it is for this reason that cloning as an ART ought to be incompletely commodified.³¹ Thus, Radin's theory of incomplete commodification provides a provisional framework for answering the pragmatic question I posed at the outset of this paper: How should we bring cloning technology into the market?

I suggest that ethicists and religionists lobby Congress to regulate the market by incompletely commodifying the process of SCNT for assisted reproduction. For example, this might mean that if a couple wishes to conceive a child whom they intend to love in its developing uniqueness, and they wish to make use of any safe method of assisted reproduction in order to bear this child-including cloning-they should not be prohibited from engaging in incomplete market transactions for this purpose. By this rationale, cloning as an ART would be analogous to, say, the regulation of the housing market on the grounds that it is, as Radin has argued, intimately connected to personhood. Similarly, I am arguing that safe nuclear transfer technology as assisted reproduction belongs in the marketplace, though incompletely. Properly viewed and regulated, ART and the process of nuclear transfer need not undermine personhood, even where cloning is concerned. If left unregulated, I predict further erosion of some our deepest values. We could, of course, choose to criminalize the cloning of humans, but doing so will only move the enterprise elsewhere and provide no long term satisfactory solution. We could also choose to ignore what legally goes on in the unregulated free market of biotechnology and fertility. A better solution would be to do that most un-Republican of things: regulate the market; commodify SCNT, but incompletely.

Recall Radin's distinction that a literal, completely commodified market contains four elements: exchanges of things in the world, for money, in the social context of markets, and in conjunction with four indicia of commodification: objectification, fungibility, commensurability, and money equivalence. As we know, each one of these indicia is intimately related to the others so that, for instance, if a thing is objectified it is more readily seen as exchangeable with any other thing on the market for money; hence, it takes on commensurability. I suggest we might think of these indicia of commodification as useful criteria for assessing whether and how far to commodify human cloning technology. If it were found, for example, that using SCNT for assisted reproduction means that some aspect of our personhood is undermined by one of these indicia-objectification, for example, or fungibility-then we might place this technology on the incomplete side of the continuum, and confidently regulate the market in ways that are more in accord with our commitments to human flourishing. The reader may well ask for the content of the kind of regulation I suggest. It is not my purpose to specify the content of economic regulation, nor am I equipped to do so; I only suggest that such regulation is morally imperative.

CONCLUSION
Will human cloning as a reproductive technology significantly change the texture of our world? Will it radically alter our notions of personhood? I have suggested that cloning from benevolence need not significantly change the texture of our world. But how are we to tell the difference between benevolence and self-interest? This is where Murdoch's insistence on the interior cultivation of vision is so important: we must cultivate seeing reality clearly and work to counteract states of illusion. In terms of what is before us, I believe that the unregulated commodification of SCNT for human cloning-not necessarily cloning itself-has greater potential to undermine our commitments to personhood. I have used Radin's theory of incomplete commodification as a guide for how nuclear transfer technology as cloning gets placed on the market continuum, suggesting that incomplete commodification is more likely to help us maintain our commitments to flourishing than is complete commodification.

I have also argued that such a pragmatic consideration needs to be balanced by a prior question of vision. In fact, it is precisely because the application of Radin's theory is such a delicate and complex task-and because the market so voraciously devours all commodities-that I urge us to pause and ask ourselves the prior, but complementary, questions to which Murdoch calls us: Are we paying attention? What kind of persons do we wish to become, individually and collectively? How might human cloning as assisted reproduction promote, or hinder, our deepest notions of relationality? How might it reflect our most cherished notions of personhood? As I suggested at the outset of this paper, the question that needs to frame all our deliberations about cloning; indeed, about the uses of new genetic technologies in general is this: Are we able to see clearly the kinds of persons, and hence what kind of society, we wish to become?

As we ponder the conundrum of commodification, we might remember the importance of cultivating an interior disposition towards the good, since, as Murdoch assures us, it is from truthful vision that right action follows. In any case, the moral life is an ambiguous one, as James Gustafson has told us, and nothing-especially not ethics-can free us from the discomforts of moral ambiguity. It can however, as I have tried to show, help guide our thinking about whether and how we want to commodify nuclear transfer technology at the human level, in ways that accord with our vision for human flourishing.

NOTES
1. It should be noted that researchers in Japan claimed to have cloned an eight-stage human embryo and then destroyed it. The experiment, however, has not been published or verified.