Reproducibility of Man

Julie Rappold

Philosophy 137

K. Mink

03/21/00

Reproducibility of Man

When Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1969, I am sure he didn't expect it to parallel the arguments of today's discussions on the ethics of cloning. In the short shadow of the replication of Dolly the sheep, and five little piglets from Virginia comes the discussion on if this practice should really be allowed, and if so, what limits do you set? How can you look in the eyes of people who have had there family members pass away because the cloning of pigs for their organs have been outlawed. But what do you say when it comes to the question of just raising humans, lets say in a "human farm", for exact organ and tissue matches. Where do you draw the line on the recreation of things from our past? After finding the perfectly preserved wooly mammoth in the arctic a few years in the past, researchers from several nations have been actively collecting tissue from the remains of the wooly mammoth in preparation for an attempt to bring the beast back from ten thousand years of extinction (Salsberg 1). If you let scientists do this, do you restrict them from cloning mummified Pharos from ancient Egypt, for historical purposes only right? Another issue of cloning a person is the civil rights of those cloned, do you dispose of them if something goes wrong. The practice of cloning, which oddly resembles the disaster of Frankenstein, needs to be restricted in some way, or we all will be living in some sort of odd parallel universe.

According to a collaboration of public opinion polls from 1997 when Dolly was first cloned, 87% of Americans believed that the practice of cloning should be banned. Yet the scientists of the world continue to actively pursue this area of science. After doing much research on the internet I came across article after article by Doctors who where so excited about the "miracle" of cloning. Some, even more terrifying, think of the clones as being maintained as mere organ farms, manufactured for their spare parts by persons anticipating the need for transplanting hearts or kidneys, livers or lungs (Ferre 2). While it might sound ethical to recreate a pig for medical purposes you are still sacrificing the life of that animal. But is right to raise a copy of yourself just in case you might need a transplant in the future. You can't just sacrifice a human the same as you would a pig or other animal.

Unfortunately with the developments in cloning, you know some egotistic person will want to clone themselves. With the right amount of money, this could actually happen. "Others worry that interests would be sure to make clones of great athletes and other idols of pop culture, rock singers, movie stars, and the like, and, even worse, that temporary, parochial standards of beauty and human excellence might be frozen into flesh (Ferre 2). Inevitably, racist preferences would surface and those with the power of this technology would use it to distort human genetic history, reflecting their conscious and unconscious prejudices. This leads to human population evolving into a society where everything is alike, somewhat of a cloning holocaust. "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence" (Benjamin 31). If someone decides they no longer desire that type of person they have selected, how do you go about finding a new candidate to clone if you have already eliminated every other type of person? Walter Benjamin wrote about original artwork in this way. His essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction spoke of original artwork in this area. The original was just not as impressive anymore if you could make a dozen to a thousand copies of it.

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work is

lacking in one element: it's presence in time and

space, its unique existence at the place where it

happens to be. This unique existence of the work

of art determined the history to which it was subject

throughout the time of it's existence. This includes

the changes which it may have suffered in physical

conditioned over the years as well as the various

changes in it's ownership. The situations into which

the product of mechanical reproduction can be

brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet

the quality of it's presence is always depreciated"

(Benjamin 29)

Wouldn't the same standards apply to the replication of a human? While identical twins share most of their genetic make up, you can still