Theos-Talk Archives (January 2005 Message tt00166)

Cass Silva wrote:
> What happens if we clone a clone?
Rather than doing it a piece at a time, let me tell you:

Clones with duplicate personalities is the stuff of fantasy stories, 
designed to, through fiction, examine the concept of environment vs. 
heredity (and usually, but not always, ignoring the factor of monad, 
although the surprisingly good movie ROBOCOP has an interesting take on 
this). As I have stated before, a clone is as much the being from which 
the clone is taken as an identical twin is his or her brother or sister. 
It is a genetic duplicate; certainly no more, and, considering 
environmentally created mutations, often less. And virtually NOBODY 
believes that we are born with our entire personalities.

So, why the controversy, one might ask.

There are several major problems with cloning humans. The first is, 
since it's an experimental process, what we are doing is performing 
biological experiments on human beings. Any errors will cause human 
suffering.

An even bigger problem is one which, considering the state of the 
world, especially small dictatorships, may be inevitable. While it is 
clear to the scientific community that human clones are full-fledged 
human beings, there are many in this world who have no problem with the 
concept of human beings as possessions; slavery is still common in the 
Muslim world, for example. And, since clones are a genetic duplicate, if 
one needs an organ for transplant, the organ of a clone would be the 
most compatible. So, those who could afford it, and have no problem with 
treating human beings as objects, would be able to create clones of 
themselves as "spare parts", every 10 or 20 years, so that they are 
always guaranteed to have young adult parts available for transplants. 
Even in the largest country in the world, China, they have no problem 
extracting organs from arbitrarily imprisoned and enslaved people, to 
give to more privileged members of the society, or to sell for profit. 
And there are plenty of countries in the world, each with a vote in the 
U.N., whose leaders have absolute power, and are for sale.

So regardless of any bans we attempt, those of conscience are faced 
with a choice between two great evils. Either human cloning for spare 
parts is going to happen, or we must use military force to prevent it. 
And most would consider the former to have fewer karmic consequences 
than the latter.

Bart