Cloning debate recap and thoughts.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is a warning letter to the future of science.

How can we deal with the consequences of cloning, it asks, and adjust to the idea of a world in which people are no longer divided ethnically, but genetically.

We discussed in class the pros and cons of cloning, and while the pro side was mostly scientific reasoning, facts and calculations, the cons was emotional. How could we take another’s life? How could we (and yes, this was becoming ‘we’, for the Pros side was now being addressed as if outside of a hypothetical situation) live in an immoral world?

Easy.

Morals are subjective to what is needed. Morals are constructs of society, and as such are going to change as society changes, and society itself is changed by technology. Technology constructs interactions and relationships, pure and simple –and if one day they created a human eye for blind people, we’d be okay with that. If they made lungs and a heart, that’s totally fine. But once they make a human, or something in the shape that we call human, well hold the phone because (and pardon the language) shit is going down.

Now don’t get me wrong. I personally am hard pressed to harvest organs from living species. Deathbed donations are totally fine, they aren’t using them anyway – but organ farming, that’s a whole new bag of cats.

But I defended my side of pros, and yes, with science, because science is relatively objective. Debates fuelled by emotion end up with someone angry at someone else. It’s easy to defer your debate – to say: I don’t believe in this, so I don’t know how to talk about it, but the truth is we all do. We know the pros, and the cons, and it’s just easier to side with emotion. Emotion is necessary for being human, emotion is needed for continuing to have a society full of helpful taboos so we don’t eat the flesh of our family, or marry the wrong cousin.

So let’s look at cloning differently - What if they made people who could carry two sets of organs – two hearts, two sets of lungs, ect.

And then, they would just harvest the extra organs from the person?

The clone doesn’t die, and they’re still in full retention of what is necessary to continue living. Easy, right?

But the cloning debate is more personal. It’s empathising with the clone and asking what if that was you?

And that brings it back to the Freak.

In my last post, I stated that the reason the Freaks were upsetting was because of the possibility of us being a Freak is so conceivable as to be frightening. Being a Clone is even more so.

There is nothing otherwise identifiable about Clones, and in a strange Truman twist, we could be living our clone lives – waiting without knowing for our own donations.

So to sum up:

Yes, I believe that Cloning has the potential to better the lives of people

At the cost of a good life for clones, if an Ishiguro world comes about.