NationStates Jolt Archive

Okay, i have to decide whether to legalise human cloning in the Dominion of Bansidhe Wraiths.
i want my people to have as much freedom as possible - and my economy could do with some boosting, too, both of which legalising cloning would help.
BUT - then there's the moral issue.
i don't want these poor human experiments wandering around my country, with no identity of their own.

So.

If one wanted to run a country with as much freedom as possible, but still maintain a high standard of morals...
well...
Which would you choose?

I'd dismiss this issue. This is an either or issue. You either help freedoms and economy, or improve morality. Can't have them all in this issue...

Of course you should legalize cloning. If you develop clone tech, you can create hordes of super human zombie clone warriors and send them to destroy the evil Commie spastards from the face of the earth. What could be better?

I don't see a moral issue. It's really not that different from artificial insemination except that you no longer need a father or his semen. Everyone seems to think that there's some moral issue with having a baby withouth sperm, but other animals can reproduce asexually. And don't tell me that it's not natural, because humans already do unnatural things day in and day out every day on a daily basis. A clone would still have a mother, and they still start out as babys who grow and play and learn and make friends and meet people and fall in love and some day maybe have a family of their own. And if when they do get married they find out that their spouse is sterile or that their sperm count is low or that for whatever reason they can't have kids, then I hope by that time we've stopped being so narrow minded as to tell them that having themselves cloned to have kids isn't an option for them. But you never know... maybe we'll be even MORE disenlightened by then and we will have banned artificial insemination as well (you know it's 'unnatural' too).

Hmmm...well, legislation is pending, but i've decided to fund this cloning experiment.
Hey, why not?

I dismissed it. Well, actually, I didn't respond to it at all. This way, I won't get it again, since you can't have the same issue more than once at a time. :D

I'd dismiss this issue. This is an either or issue. You either help freedoms and economy, or improve morality. Can't have them all in this issue...
I second this opinion

I dismissed it. Well, actually, I didn't respond to it at all. This way, I won't get it again, since you can't have the same issue more than once at a time. :D

Well, is your goal to manipulate the game, or to make a decision you feel good about?

In the game: definitely, dismiss it if you aren't willing to lose one or the other.

In the abstract: Assuming these are science-fictiony clones, I guess there could be problems. But anything at all realistic wouldn't face the no-identity difficulty. If you managed to clone someone successfully, then you'd have an infant with the same genetic material (or almost, depending how you do it). Practically speaking, it would be like freezing someone's identical twin for thirty years and then thawing him/her. Do kids not have identities if they're just like their parents? A clone would be JUST like his or her "parent", but only physically.

The moral choices would be the laws restricting application of the technology. Or, perhaps, assertions from some of the more close-minded among us that clones wouldn't have souls ... but they said that about women and most non-white racial groups, too.

If this is the same issue I got, then I think that you are all missing the point of the morality here. The question is not wether cloning should happen or not, it is if clones should be used in medical reasearch, if cloning was just for reproductive means, then there would be no moral issue people.

There would still be a moral issue. There are a lot of people (myself NOT included) that feel that any sort of cloning is stepping on God's toes. It's the whole "creation of life" thing, that get's 'em all freaked out.