Ramblings on Cloning

I’m up a little late tonight having a little trouble sleeping because I’m still messed up from the time fluctuation that occurs when you spend a week across country. So I’m catching up on my reading and ran across this post from Andy at World Wide Rant.

I just watched The Island myself last week and was also pleasantly surprised at how good it was as compared to what I was expecting. Andy has some interesting insights into the connections between this movie and many others (you might find some of them a little contrived, but I think he’s onto something), but more importantly he touched on a subject that I’ve thought a lot about.

Would a human clone have a soul?

The simple answer I would give is absolutely, positively not. However, my reasons for believing this are far simpler than you might think. I don’t think that a clone would be anything less than human, I think that a clone of myself, besides being an absolutely wonderful thing to release on this world (I mean who wouldn’t want two of me?) would have just as many rights, and be just as human as myself (regardless of those who might disagree with my status as a human being).

My reason is simply that I don’t believe in the idea of a soul. I don’t believe that I have one, I don’t believe that you have one, I don’t even believe that my own children have been endowed with this mysterious soul thing. A soul would imply that there was an existence of being outside of these physical bodies our consciousness inhabits, and without evidence of such a thing, I just can’t believe in it.

However, I realize that the vast majority of people on this planet do believe in such a thing, and as Andy points out, this could pose a problem for human cloning in the future.

Let me get straight, that I am 100% in support of research and experimentation in the field of human cloning. I think that the understanding and advances in science and the medical benefits that can be gained by this line of research are enormous. I realize that there are ethical considerations, but I also believe that most of those ethical problems are not so much real problems as they are religious concerns.

Take for instance, embryonic cloning. Many people are concerned with the wholesale cloning of human embryos that will be subsequently destroyed, tantamount to abortion. Well, the truth is, this happens on a regular basis today in fertility clinics across the world. When dozens of eggs are fertilized for implanting into a mother’s uterus, what do you suppose happens to the embryos that are not implanted? Well, they sure as hell aren’t being used for stem cell research!

The concerns of safely bringing a clone to term and the health and life expectancy of a fully termed clone are of real concern, and I don’t think it should be attempted until those concerns can be addressed, however, those can’t be addressed until we can get passed the ethics problems of embryonic cloning.

But to me the most important ethical concern would be societal. In today’s highly religious environment, would clones be accepted as fully human if a large segment of the population believed they weren’t blessed with a godly soul? Could a situation such as described by The Island occur where clones are produced for organ harvesting? Is it possible we could justify a new race of slaves, using these “soulless clones”. I think that it’s quite possible that the first waves of clones could in all likelihood face the same human rights issues or worse that have plagued our past.

Let me know what you think, comments are always open and welcome no matter what your stance.