The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.3.0405
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoIn Love's Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum claims that fictional narratives can teach us how to live life in a different manner than real-life situations can, because "our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial."1 However, this is not the only reason that narrative fiction can contribute to ethical deliberation in a way that everyday life cannot: in projecting nonactualized (and nonactualizable) story worlds, narrative fiction expands the ability of readers for ethical contemplation; in portraying other conceptions of what a good life may be in a world that departs from the actual world in some essential respects, narrative fiction provokes readers to reconsider their values and what they believe a good life is in the actual world.The specific contribution of science fiction to narrative ethics derives from its distinctive generic features. Science fiction narratives typically represent neither verisimilar nor impossible scenarios. The domain of these narratives is what might be possible in the near or remote future, according to the state of science and technology at the time of their composition.2 The ethical issues that science fiction raises are related to scientific and technological development, its prospects and its risks. The fundamental question that it addresses is in what ways the envisaged state of science can affect personal identity, human desire, will and cognition, and the conception of humanity, that is, what a human being is or should be. Indeed, Darko Suvin, a prominent scholar of science fiction, underscores what he considers the immanent relations of science fiction and ethics: "This genre has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary)."3"Clone narratives" are one of the most common types of contemporary science fiction. Some of these narratives (such as David Rorvik's In His Image) elaborate on the scientific methods employed for cloning, whereas others (such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go) provide only several perfunctory remarks on the technique of cloning or even utterly avoid this topic.4 Damien Borderick characterizes science fiction as giving preference to an extended description of the object (e.g., the space in which the narrative takes place), but clone narratives break with that format by typically focusing on the psychology of the clone(s) and/or the sociology of a community of clones.5Although the question of whether human cloning will ever be feasible and actually practiced is speculative and depends not only on scientific development but also on political and ethical decisions, the successful cloning of other mammals—the most prominent example being the sheep Dolly, cloned in 1996—generates a cultural climate in which human cloning seems imminent.6 Therefore, the issues that it raises—its likely impingement on debates about personal identity, the status of the family in modern society, the goals, limits and perils of science—are represented in clone narratives as particularly urgent, demanding an immediate ethical response.Some of the concerns of scientists and bioethicists with regard to cloning are hardly or not at all addressed in narrative fiction and vice versa: clone narratives dwell on the cloning of whole (human) organisms and do not attend to the cloning of genes and of cells for therapeutic purposes (e.g., the use of cloning in the testing and development of new medicines and vaccinations and in tissue transplantations), most probably because these uses of cloning are not narratively appealing.7 Similarly, the risks of miscarriage, prenatal death, harmful mutations, and developmental abnormalities—elaborately discussed in scientific debates about cloning—are not taken up by clone narratives.8 Scientific discussions treat cloning in the context of associated technologies of artificial reproduction, such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF), whereas most fictional narratives do not.Conversely, some of the scenarios posed by science fiction and their ethical repercussions do not concern bioethicists, who maintain that they are very unlikely to ever occur. Most notably, scientists deem implausible or even impossible the societies of clones portrayed in communal clone narratives, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's "Nine Lives," Damon Knight's "Mary," and Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. The popular (and only partly justified) image of clones based on these narratives is of a faceless and cohesive mass, governed by strict rules and codes of behavior whose purpose is to secure social and political uniformity and stability.The fundamental premise of this article—that clone narratives (narratives that feature clones as protagonists and cloning as a significant theme) can provide insights pertinent to the ethics of human cloning in actuality—has been contested by several bioethicists, most of whom support the promotion of human cloning. These scholars claim that science fiction narratives and films typically present a negative view of human cloning by representing clones in a distorted and misleading way. For instance, Gregory E. Pence claims that many misconceptions about human cloning come from science fiction. At least half of this fiction sees human clones as little better than troglodytes…. People who create humans by cloning in fiction have evil motives and their creations cause evil. The lasting impression from these … fictional treatments is that humans originated by cloning will be exploited, treated as serfs or slaves, and never be the equals of real humans.9 This stance is reinforced by Brian Stableford, who argues that the dominant voice of science fiction "loudly proclaims that all technological innovation, and everything not yet discovered, is inherently evil."10I concur with Pence that some clone narratives present implausible scenarios that may generate inaccurate, primarily negative conceptions of clones and cloning (to what extent narratives have such a deplorable effect is a matter for sociologists). However, for those fictional narratives that portray clones negatively to have such effect, they have to be interpreted (only) literally rather than (also) allegorically (for instance, as displaying anxiety about the human inclination to dehumanize the other) and as stating truths about clones (rather than as using clones as a means to provoke the imagination). Hence, it cannot be stressed enough that imaginative creations project autonomous story worlds, which should not be conceived of as accurate representations of the actual world.The negative portrayal of clones in popular clone narratives and films should concern scientists rather than be dismissed as merely invidious and harmful. Human cloning provokes anxiety over the desire to pursue scientific knowledge and control nature as the ultimate goal of humanity, not only because such endeavor is often tied to regrettable motives and disastrous results. Such anxiety is notably displayed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written more than a century before the first scientific attempts to clone animals.11 The laboratory creation of human beings is treated in some clone narratives and films (e.g., Fay Weldon's The Cloning of Joanna May) as a culmination of this pursuit of knowledge unbalanced by ethical principles, which replaces God with man as "the unmoved mover," the primordial principal of all creation including himself.12In the following sections, I focus on an interpretation of and a comparison between two French and two English clone narratives, which raise some ethical issues that are either marginalized in bioethical debates or examined from other points of view. Other clone narratives are mentioned at relevant points. I begin with the issue of cloning someone without his or her consent, which is portrayed in several narratives as absolutely reprehensible (regardless of the creator's motivation). Indeed, cloning without consent violates Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative that commands us to treat others always as ends and never only as means.13 I then turn to the effect of cloning on familial relations. From this respect, cloning is represented as ethically ambivalent: a benevolent motive (such as the wish to retain a partnership) can bring about devastating results, as Louise L. Lambrichs's A ton image (1998) (In Your Image) well demonstrates. The third issue I explore is cloning oneself or another in order to achieve some kind of immortality, which signifies both an illicit transgression of the limits of nature and a (spurious) way to give meaning to the transience and the irreversibility of human life. This section compares and contrasts Lambrichs's novel with two other novels in which immortality through cloning is a major theme: Fay Weldon's The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) and Michel Houellebecq's La possibilité d'une île (2005) (The Possibility of an Island [2007]). Finally, I look at Naomi Mitchison's representation of cloning in Solution Three (1975) as a means of ensuring the survival of humanity at an age of acute environmental crisis.14 This benign motive for cloning turns out to be more problematic than it seems at first.15Bioethical debates about cloning dwell extensively on the danger of dehumanizing clones, treating them as objects or second-rate human beings, and violating their dignity.16 The issue of cloning someone against one's will, or rather regardless of it—one of the main topics of clone narratives that feature clones as unique individuals rather than as members of a community of ostensibly identical clones—is rarely addressed in these debates. It is a highly improbable situation from the point of view of scholars in Western democratic countries, who tend to believe that the rigorous supervision of scientific research and the strict regulations against human cloning in their countries are most likely to preempt such horrifying scenarios.17By contrast, these kinds of scenarios are common among authors and readers of science fiction. Lambrichs's novel A ton image recounts the story of Jean Letertre, raised on a farm in Normandy by an atrocious father and a mother too diffident to disobey him. Jean goes to Paris to study medicine and becomes an obstetrician. In Paris he meets Françoise, a thirty-year-old woman who lost her husband and two sons in a car accident, and they marry. Then Françoise finds out that she is sterile and becomes dejected, fearing that her husband will leave her if she does not give birth to his child. She vehemently refuses to receive an egg donation or an embryo donation, among other reasons, because the idea of having a child "who has nothing from her" ("qui n'aurait rien eu d'elle"), that is, none of her genetic material, repulses her.18 Jean's boss Cardoze persuades him to resolve the problem by consenting to the cloning of his wife: cloning here helps an infertile couple to reproduce. Assuming that Françoise is likely to object to the idea, Cardoze vaguely informs her about a new technique that will enable her to have her own child. Jean promises to conceal from Françoise the origin of their daughter, and the secret that he keeps gradually works to distance him from his wife. One day another doctor divulges the secret to Françoise; she commits suicide, and Jean is left alone with their daughter, France. He becomes delusional and—confusing France with Françoise—rapes his daughter. Realizing what he has done, he strangles France in a hopeless attempt to purge himself of his shame and guilt. Jean narrates his story during his trial, when he is incarcerated and awaits his verdict.When Jean hesitates as to whether he should accept Cardoze's proposal, he ignores the basic fact that Cardoze asks him to clone Françoise without asking her consent and does not realize that his attempt to keep their relationship intact will in fact separate them irredeemably: in his urge to plan and control his future and retain stability, Jean binds his wife to a future that she might have preferred to avoid. Jean is unsure whether the main reason for her committing suicide was the truth (i.e., learning that her daughter was a clone) or the fact of his deception. In either case, Jean has gravely violated Françoise's human dignity.19Cloning someone without his or her consent is a wrongdoing regardless of the cloner's motives, yet an evil motive for cloning makes the act even more appalling. Yinon Nir's "Didn't You Know That You Had a Sister?" (1998) recounts the story of the twenty-three-year-old student Yehoshua, who surprisingly finds out one day that he has a four-year-old sister. Yehoshua's parents decide they want another child, but Yehoshua's mother had had a tough pregnancy with Yehoshua and now is too old to get pregnant again. Yehoshua's father, a geneticist, clones his wife so that her clone can give birth to the child (it is assumed that the clone can be born and immediately become a mature woman who can get pregnant).20 This unnatural scenario is followed by another implausible scene in which Yehoshua discovers that he too was cloned by his father, not once but thousands of times. In this case, the reason for cloning was to cover the high costs of Yehoshua's father's genetic research. His father sold the clones of his brilliant son to couples who wanted to adopt a child. In Nir's story, cloning someone without asking their consent becomes a symptom of a radical capitalist society whose members have lost all moral inhibitions and treat human beings, even their own families, as commodities rather than as autonomous subjects who are worthy of respect.Such an objectification of the cloned subject is also illustrated in Weldon's The Cloning of Joanna May. Unbeknownst to her, sixty-year-old Joanna was cloned when she was thirty, because her husband Carl wanted to prevent the natural (and inevitable) process of her aging and have younger versions of her as substitutes.21 Like Jean in Lambrichs's novel, Carl does not divulge the secret of her cloning to his wife; unlike Jean, however, he does not keep the secret because he wishes to protect Joanna from a nervous breakdown but rather because he believes that Joanna would be happy to know that she has "children" (35). His powerful, godlike feeling as "creator" induces him to (half-seriously) threaten his new young lover Bethany that he will clone her too (113) and affects his decision to murder Joanna's two lovers (78, 125). When Joanna finally finds out that she was cloned, she feels ambivalent about it. On the one hand, she is confounded at her suddenly altered self-identity. She is also afraid that Karl will abuse his "delusions of omnipotence" (191) to exact revenge on her by creating another clone from her cells to be raised by Bethany (156) or, alternatively, by killing the clones, whom she now considers as belonging to her (157–58, 188). On the other hand, she feels that the clones—simply by being her "copies"—boost her ego and render her more self-assured. She tells Carl that "you just make more of me, no less … you might end up doing more good than harm, in spite of yourself, if only by mistake" (110). Thus the evil intention of cloning someone irrespective of his or her will may incidentally have positive implications for the one cloned.By showing that the intentions of the decision to clone another person without his or her consent can be thwarted by the consequences of the deed, the implied author demonstrates that both the clone and the original are autonomous human beings and not the fantasies of the clone's creator. Lisa Tuttle's story "World of Strangers" (1998) illustrates this very well. The story concerns a woman who cloned her gay ex-partner without his consent after he rejected her, because she felt that she could not live without him and that she should at least have "her own personal, infant replica."22 When Nick, the "infant replica" of her infantile wish and the narrator of the story, grows up, he discovers the truth and despises his mother for having stolen life instead of creating it (302). However, Nick changes his mind after he meets his father-original and they fall in love with each other; Nick believes that his supreme bliss would never have been possible had his father raised him as his child. Only in such extraordinary conditions can the repressed incestual-narcissist wish of loving one's clone-son be realized and legitimized: "I no longer hated my poor, mad, sad mother, for it seemed she was no longer the wicked witch, but a good fairy in disguise. If she had not kidnapped me, I'd never have known this happy ending" (307). This "happy ending" of losing her child to her ex-lover is a scenario that Nick's mother could not have imagined.In all these stories, cloning is presented as an unbearably "user-friendly" technique, in the sense that every capricious, obsessive, vicious, or greedy person can easily steal some skin cells from the person he or she wishes to clone, put them in a test tube immersed with liquid nitrogen, and send the test tube to a laboratory. The scientists in the laboratory work discreetly, illegally, and without any supervision—like criminals who execute their crimes clandestinely, they do not even consider asking the consent of the cloned person. This engenders not only legal problems (a severe violation of one's rights over his or her body) but also undermines the foundations of familial relationships: trust, sincerity, and cooperation are replaced by deception and secrecy.Nancy Freedman's Joshua, Son of None (1973) is an essentially different case, which nonetheless reinforces the conclusion that cloning someone without his or her consent is necessarily wrong. In this novel, a young doctor named Thor clones the assassinated president of the United States, whom he admires. Since the president is already dead, he cannot give his consent to be cloned, but the consent of his living and loving wife is not asked for either. Many years later, when the clone Joshua is elected president (as if becoming president is at least partly hereditary), it seems that the fantasies that Thor projected on him have become real. It almost seems as if Thor did not "produce" a new person from the genes of a dead man but has resuscitated the dead. In light of his success, Thor is not distressed when Joshua, too, is assassinated: once more he clones the president immediately after his death, needless to say without his (or anyone else's) consent. Cloning a dead man without asking his consent (when he is still alive) is not as morally reproachable as disregarding the will of a living person in the matter of cloning. Nevertheless, and although Thor's motive for cloning is certainly not evil—he simply refuses to accept the premature death of someone whom he highly respects—his act is disrespectful.Opponents of cloning would presumably claim that the fictional scenario of cloning someone without their consent is an extreme case of the transgression of human limits and rights, which makes man a godlike creator who nonetheless lacks God's supreme wisdom and benevolence.23 By contrast, proponents of human cloning are likely to dismiss the nightmare of being cloned against one's will as highly improbable and therefore irrational. However, I think they should take seriously the anxiety that some fictional narratives display about possible misuses of cloning rather than simply dismiss such anxiety as utterly irrational. The apprehension at being cloned against one's will is related to a more general unease with the growing conflict between human autonomy and science: science is perceived no longer as merely helping to achieve a greater autonomy for humans (that is, expanding their ability to control, plan, and ameliorate their lives) but, on the contrary, as threatening to deprive them of their most basic rights and freedoms.Bioethical discussions of cloning dwell on the question of whether or not, and to what extent, cloning can affect the child-parent relations. Scholars who oppose cloning maintain that cloning would confound interfamilial relations and roles (the genetic mother or father of a clone will also be considered an identical sister twin or brother twin) and that it would likely weaken the connections of the nongenetic father or mother to the clone (assuming that genes strengthen these connections). They further claim that parents of a clone would be inclined to have unrealistic and unjust expectations concerning the development of their "manufactured" or "made" child and exert pressure on him or her to fulfill their expectations. By contrast, proponents of cloning claim that the problems that parents to a clone would have to deal with are not essentially different from those that "normal" families must tackle and that cloning is one of the modern technologies of reproduction that can enable infertile couples as well as homosexual and lesbian couples to realize their dream of having their own child; in these cases, the severing of love and sexual coitus from reproduction is inevitable.24A ton image expands this scope of the discussion by demonstrating that cloning can be a factor (but not the only factor) in the deterioration and the ultimate destruction of relations between partners. At the beginning of the novel, Jean stresses that love was the only motivation for his crimes (11). However, as he completes his story, he admits that he was wrong: love did not motivate him but rather the lack of love and the desire to be loved (366). Most significantly, the lack of motherly affection, approval, and empathy seems to have a considerable effect on his choices in general, and on his relations with women in particular: his love for a woman many years older than himself, his separation anxiety, and most notably his request from his lawyer to raise and educate his clone, a subject on which I elaborate in the next section.25 After his mother's death, Jean admits that he does not miss her or, more accurately, admits that he has always missed her and that her actual disappearance alleviated his pain because her absence was ultimately irredeemable (311).Many years before Jean ever considered cloning his wife, as a child, he anxiously observed the pregnancy of his mother, which he knew must signal the imminent coming of another child to the family: "Dans ma tête d'enfant à moi, d'où me vint cette idée je l'ignore mais elle s'était imposée comme une évidence, cet enfant-là ne pouvait qu'être deux choses: sois un autre moi-même, sois une réplique parfaite de ma mère" (18) ("Inside my child's head there came this idea of which I was unaware, but which imposed itself on me like evidence. This child cannot be but one of two things: either another myself or a perfect replication of my mother"). Whether the fetus carried by his mother is a "clone," an exact copy of himself or of his mother, the image of the clone can be understood as foregrounding Jean's separation anxiety: he will have to compete with the new "baby-clone" for the affection and attention of his mother. If the baby is his replica, how will his mother differentiate the original from the replica, and if it is a copy of herself, will she not love her own self more than anyone else? The image of the baby-clone thus indicates Jean's existential insecurity with regard to his most fundamental, in fact his only, relation at that fragile period of his life: if motherly care is gone, he will be doomed to face the world and its threats on his own.As a doctor of medicine, Jean knows well that clones are not duplicates and that each one has his or her own personality (222–24). However, his image or fantasy of the clone eventually determines his attitude to cloning more than he is consciously aware of. The unpleasant remembrance of his expectations regarding the "baby-clone" is one of the reasons Jean rejects the idea of cloning himself (119). His fear that his clone will be born mentally retarded or have other defects can be justified in scientific terms, but in this case, why does he fail to consider that fatal errors can also occur if the clone is Françoise's? Is his fear of raising a clone of himself with defects greater because he cannot live with the materialized presence of his own "shadow" in Karl Gustav Jung's sense, that is, the aspects of his personality that he disavows or represses?26 Since the narrating character associates clones with copies, he is horrified by the possibility of having two clones—one his and one Françoise's—whom he imagines as lovers, duplicating the relations between their parents.The meaning of the baby-clone gets inverted after Jean matures, when his boss Cardoze proposes to clone Françoise. For Jean, cloning in these distressing circumstances signifies security and stability; he believes that it will enable him to retain his love for his wife, which compensates for the lack of motherly affection. Jean attempts to justify his decision to accept Cardoze's proposal, explaining that j'ai l'impression d'avoir immédiatement compris qu'il s'agissait d'une folie et su à la même seconde que rien ne m'empêcherait de la réaliser. Il faut dire que la folie en question, je la pressentais sans bien la cerner, aucun argument rationnel ne m'en gardait sinon le sentiment vague de transgresser un interdit mal défini; ce qui me poussait, en revanche, était très précis: le désir de Françoise, que je partageais, d'avoir coûte que coûte l'enfant qui lui rendrait sa joie et sauverait notre union … et l'idée qu'en cédant, je faisais pour ainsi dire coup double en ayant l'enfant désiré tout en créant un événement scientifique sans précédent. J'allais ainsi, du même coup, trouver le bonheur en famille et entrer dans l'Histoire. Quel homme normalement constitué eût résisté à pareille perspective? (107–8)(I have the impression that I immediately understood it was insane and knew at the same time that nothing would prevent me from doing it. It must be said that I had the premonition that it was insane without reasoning it out; no rational argument kept me from cloning except for the violation of a poorly defined prohibition. By contrast, what incited me was very precise: Françoise's desire, which I shared, to have at all costs the child that would bring back her happiness and save our union … and the idea that by giving way to it, I would strike a double blow as it were, in both having the desired child and creating an unprecedented scientific event. I was going to find familial happiness and at the same time enter history. What normally constituted human being with a similar viewpoint would resist this?) The narrating character contrasts his double motivation for cloning—retaining his relationship with his beloved wife and gaining fame by engaging in a groundbreaking experiment (the second motivation becomes insignificant, because Jean takes enormous steps to conceal his deed)—with his anxiety over transgressing human limits by breaking an ineffable taboo. His reasons for accepting the proposal are hence both compelling and well founded on argument. Retrospectively (at the time of the narration), however, he comprehends that his ominous feeling about cloning was more legitimate than any line of reasoning. A resisting reader would object to the rhetoric of the narrating character and claim that there are rational arguments against his decision: he should have respected his wife as an autonomous subject and let her decide for herself if she wished to be cloned. He should have also been aware that his conception of a clone as a substitute for the original is perilous: since Jean's image of clones is of identical persons in both looks and personality, it is likely that he unconsciously considered Françoise's yet unborn clone as a potential (much younger) substitute for his wife. For the same reason, Jean suggests naming the baby "France," a name that he associates with Françoise as a small girl (119).The striking similarity between little France and Françoise as child, which Françoise's mother notes (164), does not trouble Jean. However, as she grows up and reminds him more and more of her mother when he first knew her, his concern becomes apparent. Its climax is when he loses his temper and slaps France on her face simply because she imitates a mature seductive woman (318–20). Although he is aware of the differences between his wife and his daughter in both character and behavior, he admits that he conflates his two loves and regards them as one duplicated entity: Ainsi mon amour pour elles deux, en fait, se confondait. Mais sait- on pourquoi l'on aime et les raisons que j'apporte ici ont-elles un sens? L'expérience d'aimer ainsi un seul être dédoublé est si étrange et si enrichissante, elle m'a ouvert de tels horizons sur les réalités insoupçonnées du clonage (221)(Hence my love for the two of them has in fact been conflated. But do we know why we love, and the reasons that I give here, do they make sense? The experience of loving a single doubled entity is so strange and so enriching. It opened my horizons to the unsuspected realities of cloning.) Jean's delusional state after Françoise's demise, manifested in his inability to differentiate his live daughter from his dead wife, is thus unsurprising.A more general insight that the reader can draw from A ton image is the need to distinguish between a primary cause of the disruption of familial relations and a secondary cause, which assists the primary cause on whose effect it depends. According to the implied author of the novel, cloning should be considered a secondary cause of Jean's delinquent behavior and its catastrophic results, whereas his neglect by his parents and his personality are their primary cause. This is demonstrated by the structure of the novel: the chapters recounting the main sto
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