…Josef Pieper, a contemporary Catholic philosopher and theologian, recently wrote an amazing small book concerning the advertising and communications industries, The Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power**, **that is astonishingly applicable to the rhetoric found in the human cloning and human embryonic stem cell research debates today. Such rhetoric, he notes, is not new. Plato attributed it to the Sophists whom he described as, “highly paid and popularly applauded experts in the art of twisting words; able to sweettalk something bad into something good and to turn white into black.” The truth itself cannot in all honesty be the decisive concern of those who aim at verbal artistry, he notes. Rather, as Plato forces Gorgias to admit, “such sophisticated language, disconnected from the roots of truth, in fact pursues some ulterior motives.” **Language is thus invariably turned into an instrument of power.**7 And this is indeed what we are experiencing today in these cloning debates – the abuse of language, especially scientific language, in the pursuit of power.
