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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
"Every unenslaved man owns himself," remember?
SC ( 12/09/2003, 08:35:54 )As you've said elsewhere, according to natural law, we own ourselves. If our official laws are to mean anything, we must own ourselves, or someone else will. Our lives literally depend on having the right to copy ourselves as we see fit. Just because we can't sell parts of ourselves for much money doesn't mean that our bodies are worthless; to us, they're priceless, and a just society should have official laws which reflect that.Right here, on these pages, we are cloning ourselves. We are copying portions of our thoughts, our experiences, our personalities. These copied fragments of ourselves are protected to some extent by copyright; the rights to reproduce and profit from them reside with us until we give them up. Most of the time, these copies can't be sold for a profit, but once in a while, circumstances arise in which someone else profits from another person's creation, and the one who profits is expected to compensate the creator.Human beings deserve no less protection than works of art; in fact, as the supreme works of art, we deserve even more. We can't predict which stray piece of DNA will play a part in a discovery that saves millions of lives or is worth millions of dollars, but eventually, it will happen with a few of them, and the people who donated the necessary cells deserve recognition and reward for the creative effort they made just to stay alive, and for their decision to give their very selves for the benefit of others.All of us owe debts to people who came before us, and we still remember them, praise them, pay money to their descendants (who are, in some cases, copyright holders), or otherwise try to reward them as best we can. If some of those people desired to be cloned, that would be the most appropriate reward.Someone might want to clone you because of the contribution you have made here. It's already happened, in the traditional way; the administrator asked for permission to "clone" your writing. It would be very difficult for you to be therapeutically cloned against your will, and probably uneconomic for you to be reproductively cloned, as you have said, but someone could use your DNA for research without your consent, perhaps to see if there is a genetic component to the desire to do charitable work. In the general sense, knowledge of anyone's DNA could be of commercial value to researchers, insurance companies, marketers, and so on, and theft of someone's genetic code would be a breach of privacy.In many ways, the issues we discuss are related to the question of whether society values people's creations more than the people themselves. It is worth recognizing that people have intrinsic value, which ought to be recognized by law, whether anyone ever tries to exploit that value or not, as well as unrecognized value which can never be fully expressed in creations which are only pale reflections of the original. Like the protagonist in "Death of a Salesman," people can be killed by the idea that they have no worth apart from those portions of themselves that they can sell. They can also be killed by the idea that once a copy of the original person is available in some form, the original is no longer needed.
This Message is being posted for educational purposes, as well as for comment and criticism, by the visitors to the HumanCloning.org Foundation website (www.HumanCloning.org ).
Disclaimer: Information provided on this web site is for educatonal purposes only. It is not a substitute for, nor can it replace advice from your own physician.
HumanCloning.org™ Established December 11, 2002.
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