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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
The "Pro-Debate" camp
SC ( 10/22/2003, 05:42:31 )So, you really don't mind if Bionic Virus is hateful, just as long as she lengthens her sentences a bit. It's like saying, "How dare you swing a club at that person? Why don't you use poison instead?"Your interest in this "debate" is starting to look a little ghoulish. Much of the media coverage of human cloning is not designed to inform people at all, but to stir the pot; to keep the “debate” going as long as possible. The premise behind this approach is that controversy is the most important thing (more important than basic freedoms, for instance), because it sells the most books or newspapers or TV advertising. The premise, implicit in some of your posts, and much of the coverage that human cloning gets in other media, is “I am against human cloning, but in favor of debate about human cloning.” At first, I thought this premise sounded quite noble. It seemed reminiscent of Voltaire’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” However, as I looked at the words again, I detected an undertone of doublethink, the mental juggling employed by characters in George Orwell’s "1984" to believe two mutually exclusive things at the same time.If people are in favor of debate in the parliamentary sense, in which the side with a minority of seats can say whatever it wants but is destined to lose the vote, they are not really providing a forum in good faith. If by debate they mean an airing of views in a public forum in attempt to seek the truth, they are also not setting up that debate properly. In most cases, the “debate” is really rigged from the start, for a balanced, interesting debate on whether clones should be allowed to exist is possible only as long as they don’t exist. All of us are basically taking part in a forum for “debate” on cloning in which everyone can speak except for the human clones themselves. A debate on the merits of human cloning, in which a human clone were one’s opponent, would be so unwinnable as to barely qualify as a debate at all. The clone would merely say, “Of course my life is worth living, you idiot,” and that would be the end of the debate. Therefore the version of Voltaire’s quote, as far as future human clones are concerned, is “I disapprove of what I think you are going to say, and I will fight to the death to keep you from saying it.”It is impossible to deny people the right to exist and allow them the right to free speech at the same time. The right to exist is the foundation upon which everything else rests, and the one right which most cloning “debating” forums try to deny. One way or another, the arguments made against human cloning tend to assume that we’re better off dead. This not only makes the "debate" absurd, since those who oppose cloning are very much alive, and therefore very poor advocates for their own position. It is also in direct opposition to the moral, legal, medical, and religious principles by which decent people live their lives. Religions assume, for instance, that life is not only worth living, but worth living again, or forever, or again and again. Medical doctors are expected to give care to a patient if that care can save or preserve the patient’s life, and if they deliberately withhold that care, they can be charged with murder.What are we to call it, then, when people can see that a life-saving technique is about to be developed, and campaign to see that as few people as possible will be allowed to benefit from it? That might be called a campaign to commit genocide. When people campaign to get every last nation in the world to agree to force all their citizens to abide by such a restriction, that might be described as an attempt to institute a global totalitarian state. That would entail the suppression of virtually every freedom we know of, including the right to exist and the right to speak freely.
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HumanCloning.org™ Established December 11, 2002.
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