It's hard to say if Burroughs is being funny here, because he's certainly full of it. Cloning cannot create armies of consciousnesses tuned in to some central brain. It also won't undermine individuality, as his imaginary Men of the Cloth worry, by printing cheap replicas of somebody's precious individual character. This is point No. 1 in any debate about cloning. The process just copies a genome, and poses no worse a threat to the human sense of self than does any identical twin.

From there things get complicated, though, and a new anthology of articles on the subject is meant to help navigate this weird, still-uncharted moral territory. "Cloning: Responsible Science or Technomadness?" wants to be a complete overview of the debate so far, mixing religious declarations with philosophical arguments, scientific findings and governmental decrees; the original Nature article on Dolly the sheep even shares space in these pages with a (very bad) story by Douglas Coupland.

The writers brood over the question of individuality and self in the aftermath of Dolly's birth in 1997. So far the debate relies on language borrowed from older arguments, like the ones over abortion or slavery. Whether you're for or against human cloning in the abstract seems to depend, right now, on whether you're pro-life or pro-choice. And almost every philosophical writer in the book refers to Immanuel Kant, who (in the context of slavery) insisted on treating all people as "ends in themselves, not as means to an end."

So, the philosophers ask, what would Kant think of cloning? Answers fall into categories. Some writers can't get past the sickness of the idea of replicating a person. They insist that anyone intentionally cloned, for whatever reason (vanity, infertility, minor body-part transplants), would live under a psychological cloud. "The cloned individual will be saddled with a genotype that has already lived," writes Leon Kass, an ethicist at the University of Chicago who leads the anti-cloning charge. "He will not be fully a surprise to the world."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"