James Wilson contributed essays to The Weekly Standard during its early years, writing on topics spanning ethics, culture, and science. His pieces explored subjects ranging from the moral dimensions of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" to the ethical paradoxes of cloning.
IN THE INCREASINGLY DULL, narrow, methodologically obscure world of the social sciences, it is hard to find a mind that speaks not only to its students but to its nation. Most scholars can't write, many can't think. Ed Banfield could write and think.
Let us suppose that it becomes possible to clone human beings. The creation of Dolly the cloned sheep makes this more likely than anyone once suspected. How should we react to this event?
Were you a newspaper editor, imagine your reaction if a cartoonist came to you and proposed a comic strip that would offer the reader moral instruction conveyed by the antics of a self-centered six-year-old boy whom only saintly parents could love and no other child could tolerate. The strip would…