If I clone myself what relation does the clone have to me? And what does this tell me about what makes me – me? My clone is not my self. It will be different in personality, cognition, as well as its place in space-time. This difference can help us to assert, away from the materialistic picture of identity, that we are not simply our genes. This should impact our moral and social thinking about the dangers of cloning, which remain troublesome, writes Kathinka Evers.
Ever since Ian Wilmut’s team of British embryologists cloned a sheep called Dolly in 1997, there has been a heated debate amongst scientists, politicians and the general public about whether or not cloning should be allowed. One of the most frequently expressed worries, in particular to the possibility of cloning human beings, is that it would produce “xerox copies” of living organisms - identical creatures. Fearfully, one envisions an army of indistinguishable individuals: homo xerox. Yet what this means, and the nature of these cloned “identities”, is often left unspecified.
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