I think there are extra considerations to do with what the clone’s relation to von Neumann. Plausibly, it might be wrong to clone him without his consent, which we can now no longer get. And the whole idea that you might have a right to your likeness, identity, image, and so on, becomes much trickier as soon as you have actually been cloned.
Also there’s a bit of a gulf between a parent deciding to raise a child they think might do good and a (presumably fairly large) organisation funding the creation of a child.
I don’t have strongly held convictions on these points, but I do think that they’re important and that you’d need to have good answers before you cloned somebody.
How could it be wrong to clone him without his consent? He’s dead, and thus cannot suffer. Moreover, the right to your likeness is to prevent people from being harmed by misuse of said likeness; it doesn’t strike me as a deontological prohibition on copying (or as a valid moral principle to the extent that it is deontological), and he can’t be harmed anymore.
Also, how could anyone have a right to their genome that would permit them to veto others having it? If that doesn’t sound absurd to you prima facie, consider identical twins (or if they’re not quite identical enough, preexisting clones). Should one of them have a right to dictate the existence or reproduction of the other? And if not, how can we justify such a genetic copyright in the case of cloning?
Cloning, at least when the clone is properly cared for, is a victimless offense, and thus ought not be offensive at all.
The belief that people can only be morally harmed by things that causally affect them is not universally accepted. Personally I intuitively would like my grave to not be desecrated, for instance.
I think we have lots of moral intuitions that have become less coherent as science has progressed. But if my identical twin started licensing his genetic code to make human burgers for people who wanted to see what cannibalism was like, I would feel wronged.
I’m using pretty charged examples here, but the point I’m trying to convey is that there are a lot of moral lenses to apply here, and there are defensible deontological prohibitions to be made. Perhaps under scrutiny they’d fall away but I don’t think it’s clear cut, or at least not yet.
I think there are extra considerations to do with what the clone’s relation to von Neumann. Plausibly, it might be wrong to clone him without his consent, which we can now no longer get. And the whole idea that you might have a right to your likeness, identity, image, and so on, becomes much trickier as soon as you have actually been cloned.
Also there’s a bit of a gulf between a parent deciding to raise a child they think might do good and a (presumably fairly large) organisation funding the creation of a child.
I don’t have strongly held convictions on these points, but I do think that they’re important and that you’d need to have good answers before you cloned somebody.
How could it be wrong to clone him without his consent? He’s dead, and thus cannot suffer. Moreover, the right to your likeness is to prevent people from being harmed by misuse of said likeness; it doesn’t strike me as a deontological prohibition on copying (or as a valid moral principle to the extent that it is deontological), and he can’t be harmed anymore.
Also, how could anyone have a right to their genome that would permit them to veto others having it? If that doesn’t sound absurd to you prima facie, consider identical twins (or if they’re not quite identical enough, preexisting clones). Should one of them have a right to dictate the existence or reproduction of the other? And if not, how can we justify such a genetic copyright in the case of cloning?
Cloning, at least when the clone is properly cared for, is a victimless offense, and thus ought not be offensive at all.
The belief that people can only be morally harmed by things that causally affect them is not universally accepted. Personally I intuitively would like my grave to not be desecrated, for instance.
I think we have lots of moral intuitions that have become less coherent as science has progressed. But if my identical twin started licensing his genetic code to make human burgers for people who wanted to see what cannibalism was like, I would feel wronged.
I’m using pretty charged examples here, but the point I’m trying to convey is that there are a lot of moral lenses to apply here, and there are defensible deontological prohibitions to be made. Perhaps under scrutiny they’d fall away but I don’t think it’s clear cut, or at least not yet.