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This story raises another important contemporary moral issue besides warfare: cloning. Can it be permissible to produce clones of whole organisms? (That’s what I’ll mean by “cloning” in what follows.) What if the organism is a person, like Jango Fett? Can it be permissible to manipulate the process to engineer clones’ characteristics, the way the clone army is engineered on Kamino? And in warfare, can it be permissible to use a clone army, rather than typical human beings? In what follows, I’ll answer, “Yes” to all the above.

Cloning Gets a Bum Rap

The defender of warfare takes for granted that something can be inherently bad and permissible. It’s also true that something can be wrong and not inherently bad. Public opposition to cloning is visceral, but I’ll argue that much of it is misplaced. I don’t think cloning is inherently bad. It can be wrong, but we have to answer ethical questions about the wrongness of actions that are not inherently bad by using a cost-benefit analysis. Cloning might be dangerous (like not letting a Wookiee win), or consume valuable resources needed elsewhere (like pod racing), or expensive (like renting the Millennium Falcon), or unreliable (like Han Solo’s word), or liable to corruption and abuse (like the Force). It might have little application to human social and medical problems. It might in practice require the wholesale loss of valuable human lives (as those who object to the destruction of human embryos might claim). But if cloning is not inherently bad, and harms no one (or does relatively little harm), it’s not wrong. Moreover, the burden of proof would be on the opponent of cloning—in the absence of clear evidence that the harms outweigh the benefits, we ought to permit things that are not inherently bad.

So why think cloning is not inherently bad? Because there’s no good reason to think it is. First, set aside the “yuck” factor. That the idea of something is disgusting or creepy—giving Jabba the Hutt a sponge bath, say—has no tendency to show that it is inherently bad. Second, set aside the popular rhetoric. People are apt to use impressive language in condemning cloning—claiming that it’s contrary to human dignity, for instance—but what’s really needed is cogent argument that it’s inherently so.

Yet there doesn’t seem anything inherently bad about having a clone or being a clone. Unless you have very strange ideas about identity, having a clone is no threat to your numerical uniqueness. Boba Fett is genetically identical to Jango Fett, but that makes him a cross between a son and a very late identical twin.

Sometimes people claim that it’s a bad thing to have another individual around that is too much like them. But this is hard to take seriously. We do not regard the lives of genetically identical twins as significantly inferior to those of fraternal twins, or non-twins. When Luke discovers he has a long-lost twin, is it a happy occasion if Leia is fraternal, and not if (as can happen, but very rarely), she is a differently gendered identical? Even outside of family, we actively seek out those who have a lot in common with ourselves, and we think that the more commonality, the better. Maybe we don’t want another person to be exactly like us, but there’s no danger of that from cloning, given the enormous contribution of nurture in shaping our characteristics.

Looking at it from the other side, from the clone’s point of view, if all else is equal, what difference does it make that you’re a clone? (Sadly, I doubt that all else would ever be equal. But if we treat clones as less deserving of respect than the rest of us, that is our own moral failing, not theirs).

Finally, there’s a general worry about the employment of artificial or “unnatural” reproductive procedures. If you still think there’s something inherently bad about cloning, compare it with ordinary human reproduction (OHR), and with reproduction by in vitro fertilization (IVF). I submit that if OHR is not inherently bad, then neither