Final Round Table

Cole: Implications of the timeline and ethics of cloning.

This post is going to cover the implications of the future setting on cloning and how it shows in the book as well as exploring the ethics and ideas on cloning.  It is clear that these are extremely relevant and only one is directly shown in the text, that is the ethics of cloning.

Even now human cloning is considered illegal due to ethical issues that may occur and in this book do occur.  Its clear that people use clones for organs, and its also clear this happens often as there are multiple drug lords in Opium and hundred of rich people in the world.  Now the question is why did human cloning become legal? Why did clone be declared a “non-person?” I believe that this is due the idea that people feel life is short and want to live longer.  Regardless of how they do it people will attempt to use any means necessary to live longer, whether it be eating healthily or using clones organs.  The second option is noticeably easier, and if you could afford it usually a good idea as what’s wrong with living a little longer? Always having a suitable donor if you are injured?  It allows you to never worry to live life to its fullest and to be even happier than ever before, knowing your days are less numbered than another’s.  Its an incredible deal, but only for the price of murder, sad to say that’s a price paid all too often and in too great a number even today.  Ethics simply cease to matter when money greed and the promise of immortality, sought after for a millennia come into play.  As things become easier they will be done, as things will be done we will forget why at first we did not do them, this is what happened in the House of The Scorpion.   In the future clones were easier to make than today, as such people tried to see if they could do it, and it was done.  From that point on it would snowball out of control into a process that would eventually cumulate into every man and woman having a personal organ bank, regardless of what or where that organ bank was.

Yet in the book another major force is noted.  Religion played a large role in the book, and it seemed to affect the way people viewed clones.  As clones are unborn and unbaptized many religions would view them as evil, this is shown when the priest screams for Matt to leave a funeral naming him an “unbaptized limb of Satan.”  Its clear that religion has helped people dislike clones and propagated the idea the are evil, further justifying their use as organ banks by the rich.

In all ideas of greed, immortality, religion, and money have shaped this worlds idea of clones and how to go about them.