"What Would a Clone Say?"

Like Gary Rosen, I read and thoroughly enjoyed Kazuo Ishiguro's recent novel, "Never Let Me Go."  (See Rosen, "The Way We Live Now:  What Would a Clone Say?", N.Y. Magazine, Nov. 27, 2005, available here).  The novel is, in a nutshell, a coming-of-age story about Kathy H., who (along with her boarding-school classmates) a clone created entirely for organ-donation purposes.

Rosen uses "Never Let Me Go" as the starting point for what he characterizes as a Kantian, non-religious argument against "therapeutic" cloning:

[Y]ou don't have to be a raving Bible-thumper to entertain moral doubts about so-called therapeutic cloning . . ..  All you need is a bit of Kant from Ethics 101, especially the part about treating other people, presumably even proto-people, not as a means to your own ends but as ends in themselves.  It is an injunction hard to square with the literature on S.C.N.T., with its talk of "harvesting" and "programming" stem cells.  The language of the scientists and their supporters is clinical, meliorative and humane, but it gives off an unmistakable whiff of cannibalism.

Some see the cloning debate as just another skirmish in the abortion war. After all, if it is permissible to abort an embryo, what could be wrong with putting it to some lifesaving use instead?  But abortion is an ordeal unsought by the woman who faces it, a tragedy of circumstance.  There is, by contrast, nothing accidental or contingent about creating nascent human life with the declared aim of destroying it.  It is the deliberate use of one (developing) person as the instrument of another, a practice that should give pause even to those who ardently favor abortion rights.

I agree with Rosen's bottom line, I suppose.  Still, I guess I regret what appears to be his premise, namely, we should be relieved to learn that naked Kantian assertions about "not using persons as means" -- which, Rosen (too quickly?) assumes also apply to "proto-people" (???) -- provide a basis for opposing cloning, since we would otherwise be stuck with the foundationless "moral doubts" of "raving Bible-thumpers."  Rosen is the editor of Commentary, and he knows better:  The argument about the morality of human cloning is far richer than his "Kant v. the Rubes" account suggests.  And, I'm curious:  Does anyone else have doubts about whether Kant's "persons are ends, not means" dictum really works, without the help of (the raving Bible-thumpers') religious arguments?