The basic form of my question is: Would it be ethical to create multiple clones of the same person and raise them in different environments?
I see no reason for it not to be ethical. Certainly people could use the idea unethically; for example (as Brandon brought up in one of his posts) parents could try to 'replace' a deceased child with a clone of that child, which would almost certainly result in some kind of psychological mistreatment of the clone child. However, if the people around the clones treat them as unique individuals, with no socially significant similarity to the other genetically identical clones, I do not think that there would be any problem. The only possible issue with this might be that, if most of humanity eventually became clones of just a few people, genetic variation would become almost nonexistent, probably resulting in problems with any non-cloned children that people might choose to have.
No comments:
Post a Comment