Humans Are Not Papers.
“I just want to live. I don’t care how,” Lincoln Six-Echo says.
“You’re not real. You’re copies of people out here in the world,” people reply.
The movie, The Island, impressed me.
Having no ceiling to limit it down, technology has continued its growth and development since its first arrival. Nowadays technology has even started to intrude the divine right of nature: People have begun to desire the creation of life. Human cloning is the ultimate destination they hope to arrive at. “To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number,” Neil Postman argues in Technopoly. If a man develops a new technology that can invent human beings, humans will begin to be seen as objects. Human cloning must never happen.
No shortcut existed in the past. One by one, word for word, people had to copy out a written document with their hands to create its replica. Pouring significant amounts of time and labor, each transcription was treated with great values in return. However, starting with the engraving block technique of Egyptian, humans developed printing technologies, such as Gutenberg’s Printing Press. Finally the development reached its destination where pressing a button using one finger is the only task required to create words and texts. No more admiration is aroused for a written edition due to its commonness. If developments in cloning humans take place, it will result in a similar sequence with insignificance and cheapness of human life.
Cloned humans would be nothing different from other people except for the fact that they are born without chronic pains of mothers. Some people claim that human-cloning should be allowed for medical usage, such as creating organs for transplant. All human beings are born or created holding natural rights that follow the privilege of living as humans. A person should never be allowed to decide the purpose of another person’s life. It is a trespass against a person’s civil liberties to create the person for certain purposes, but cloning could easily lead to this. “You’re special. You have a very special purpose in life,” says the God-like man to the clones in the movie, The Island. The clones’ “very special purpose” is to devote themselves to serve their owners by providing organs: They die for their identical being regardless of their will. Although this has not taken place in reality, it is very likely what the situation will look like if cloning becomes possible.
Another possible problem with cloning is that with emergence of identical beings, society may be situated in chaos. Loss of uniqueness will occur, and the concept of individuality will be gradually but surely be lost as well. When border lines among these individuals fade away, the whole society will sink below the manageable surface. No human is perfect; therefore potential human errors take a big role in resisting the allowance of human cloning. The possibility of a cloned human being deformed and disabled cannot be ignored. There is a case in which Dr. Wilmut of Roslin Institute of England conducted the birth of a clone sheep in 1996. At first, the experiment seemed successful; the sheep, Dolly, was healthy, and was praised as the very first mammal created by men’s hand. However, side effects began to rise up on the surface. Its abnormal speed in aging led to serious lung disease, and it had to be euthanatized. As a result, it barely complete half of normal sheep’s lifetime. This may happen during human cloning process; in that particular case, no payment can pay the price of it.
Human dignity will crash down with demise of individualism among people. Life of a person will be treated as if it is accessible effortlessly. Eventually, the existence of a human will be considered easy and cheap as a paper copy of a document. Humans are not papers. Humans are not documents that can be copied whenever they are needed.
Human cloning is the box of Pandora. It is the Eden’s apple. Once we open the box and eat the forbidden fruit, our entire species will suffer. Euthanizing a person is more serious undertaking than euthanizing a sheep. Are we ready to deal with the moral question involved?
May 8th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Oh I watched this movie, and it was shocking.. It scared me because it made me wonder what if this really happens.. I viewed this movie as inhumane because creating humans to be used destroys the purpose of us, humans.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:41 am
I see your point but there is the thing called “necessary evil”. Think critically. if there are two clones of a person, and if one died in secret nothing would change very much. It’s like mario having two lives, at the cost of the life of a mushroom.
question of ‘moral’ is very intricate, because in the beginning there was no moral, moral is not a divine rule that must be kept but a thing humans made for themselves justifying it by religion, etc. Because, at the cost of moral, human science can leap ginormously. Cloning is a potential cure for the uncurables, and it’s a light of hope to them.
Should we neglect God’s will and artificially expand our lifespan, or just accept our fate and die at age of 25?
taste of modern technology is just too tempting and tasty for majority of people to stay submissive.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Thanks for stopping by my site. Very interesting article here…what weighs in the balance is definitely huge technological advances versus the well being of what is being created. I am willing to sacrifice technological advances in exchange for quality of life for another human. Good read.