 Scarlett Johansson On A Production Line?
It's impossible for a normal person to confuse a mug with a man (what a great start for
this column!). As we all know, a mug is a simple product made by humans for the purpose of
serving them. On the other hand, a man is a more complicated being created by God (or
Nature, depending on what you believe in) and rarely knows what/whom to serve. Thus, we
can say that there's a huge difference between us and what we produce.
Imagine that you're sitting in a room with a friend of yours and are very very VERY angry
about some unrelated thing; you have to direct your anger somewhere in order to feel
relieved. Which one would you pick as a target? Your friend or a mug? A normal civilized
person would pick the latter, of course. (If you think you'd hit your friend just to feel
better, the rest of this newspaper might be too complicated for you. Please hand it to
someone who can understand it.)
But, what if we produce a man instead of a mug? Does his status of being a product change
the idea that hurting him is immoral? Would it be legal to have a cloned slave?
Two movies dealing with such questions are being shown these days: "The Island"
and Godsend." In my opinion, the former is a successful science fiction/action film,
while "Godsend" is a pathetic attempt to use genetic engineering's negative side
to scare the audience. If we leave our critiques of the films aside, and focus on what
they say about cloning, we see two different aspects of the problem: "The
Island" tells about how tragic it is to be a clone, while "Godsend"
illustrates the inevitability of the use of such a technology if it happens to exist.
I'm sure that two centuries ago, it wouldn't have been a problem to answer the questions
I've asked. In the days when women, peasants and people of color didn't have any rights,
why would an artificial man count? These days, however, it's not that simple. Right now,
everyone with human DNA has some rights (even Ajdar Anık, as a free citizen, has the
right to sing). But there might be another view of this issue, although it doesn't seem
logical to me: if we can use anything we produce the way we want, why shouldn't we use a
living human product? I'm not trying to play the devil's advocate, but I'm afraid the
majority have already started to ignore the alternative views, and we're losing the chance
to come up with viable answers.
Since we know that our biological and genetic features aren't very different from those of
other animals, it wouldn't shock me if an institute decides to clone human beings
tomorrow--probably, some are already doing it secretly.
In one way or another, it's a possibility that we'll have factories (or institutes, or
whatever you might call them) producing Homo sapiens within decades. It would be wise to
ask and try to answer questions about what our mainstream ethics really are before that
day comes. Otherwise, reality will catch us out.
İsmail O. Postalcıoğlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com
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