Human cloning goes against by beliefs in so many different ways, its unnecessary to make another "clone" of a human being. Its not natural birth and the expectations and the difficulties the clone will have to experience growing up. It challenges my views by trying to find beneficial ways a clone can help families and society, but what no one tends to realize is the clone being raised to become like its original and not have its own identity. Also, by making clones of people, the population grows rapidly because in a way, a person's genetic DNA never dies so in a way, a person can live forever. Today's population is already an issue and cloning humans adds more to the problem, along with dodging death.
The philosopher I can go with is the Tao and Taosim because human cloning isn't natural at all. It goes against the natural flow of life and death and when that is toyed with, life is changed and people become selfish creating an identical person to take the place of a loved one. The Tao has an issue with people striving for more and trying to achieve a material to be happy, without desire, a person does not suffer and if you can deal with a loved one's death, life will go on. Adding a clone in the picture only makes things awkward and complicated.
I am commenting on Becky Bradley's blog, http://becksbradley.blogspot.com/. As well as Jess Biondi's blog, http://jessbiondi.blogspot.com/.
Identity is very important when talking about human beings. Indiviuality and sense of self would be compromised because the clones sense of self will not necessarily be their own's but a replica of someone else's. I agree when you speak about the life simply being someone else's. Vicariously living through your child is one thing, but an exact replica of yourself is simply unnecessary and plain weird.
ReplyDeleteEvon, I agree with you that cloning isn't totally natural and that there would be certain expectations placed on the clones throughout there lives, but I need to ask, do you think that EVERYBODY would get a clone, or would there be certain standards or laws governing the process? I also need to ask, why shouldn't a person be able to live forever? Isn't the main goal of science to inspire great advances in health and, eventually, bring an end to disease? If you think that human cloning is a bad thing, and a person prolonging their own life, then wouldn't you at least need to acknowledge that we need disease, wars, and death in order to control the population? If all diseases were cured, the same problem would occur, but now the only difference is that you wouldn't want to stop cures because of the ethical ramifications.
ReplyDeleteI stated that the clones would have some issues with identity myself. And this is very important issue. This can lead to clones developing psychological problems from early ages from the day they begin to realize themselves the extreme similarities between them and their "parent". Many emotions can be a result of this, but I see anger being one. Say if the clone does not like the parent (as some children do) they may grow angry at themselves in which can cause things like crime or even suicide rates to go up.
ReplyDeleteI like that you mention over-population. That is something we have issue with now to a degree and cloning can worsen it.