Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [51]
Curiously, for a good deal of our recent history it was believed that in OHR, all the essential character of the embryo came exclusively from the man, and that the woman was little more than an incubator. Cloning might be viewed as the equal opportunity realization of this!
Assuming I’m right, then cloning has gotten a bum rap. And if cloning is permissibly used to solve social problems, the case for cloning is bolstered (even if it has other costs). So it’s good news for cloning if we discover that clone warfare is possible and acceptable. And it’s not necessarily bad news for cloning if clone warfare is not a benefit of the process, as long as it’s not a significant harm.
Getting into Your Genes
The possibility of a clone army scares a lot of people. Perhaps it’s because they think that clones will be more easily manipulated: to control one is to control them all. This danger looms most clearly in the case of genetically determined traits. In a blooper that somehow survived the editing process, an Imperial stormtrooper bumps his head in A New Hope. According to George Lucas, this incident receives a genetic explanation when we see Jango Fett similarly bump his head entering his ship on Kamino, and realize that the trooper is his cloned descendant. Jango Fett is not generally a klutz, of course, otherwise it would make little sense to clone him for an army.
But “nature” isn’t the end of the story: clones of the same host can still vary greatly in their characteristics. If an army consists of genetic duplicates of the original—an army of Bobas, say—then their similarities will ultimately depend on “nurture,” on environmental factors such as diet and education. Raise and socialize them all the same way, and they’ll presumably be very similar. But that has little if anything to do with cloning. Surely the same thing can be achieved with non-clones, with about the same rate of success. Clones can be bent to an iron will, but so can we. And it doesn’t follow that the army will be superior by being raised in a uniform environment. Perhaps it’s better to use a variety of environments, and see which produces the best soldiers—a survival of the Fettest!
Indeed, part of the point of the clone army is that it’s superior to the droid army because the clones are more flexible, more “creative.” It’s the droids that are supposed to lack autonomy—the capacity to direct their own lives—so there’s no need to bend them at all. And they can all be stood down in an instant, as happened when Anakin destroyed the Droid Control Ship in The Phantom Menace.
The other clones are not like Boba, however. They are genetically manipulated to reduce their autonomy, to make them a bit more like droids than you and I are. Genetic manipulation scares people, too, with or without cloning. But genetic manipulation does not seem inherently bad, either. It’s playing God, but so what? Genetic manipulation doesn’t necessarily harm anyone, as we can see from the following example. Suppose that in the story, Luke Skywalker’s parents, other things being equal, would have conceived a genetically deficient child, because of an abnormality in the egg. (Leia can be safely ignored, since she almost certainly came from a different egg, but if it helps, feel free to suppose there never was a twin). The genetic deficiency is this: the child that would have been born in the absence of treatment would have been missing an arm (a fate that befalls Luke anyway, but from environmental causes). However, the genetic deficiency is corrected prior to conception.
There are two ways of describing