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Reposted from Bluesky so I can have it in one place and expand it:
As a lawyer and SF fan, the idea of “life for a life” by cloning of murder victims is a great plot bunny 1) go with the idea that there is no statute of limitations on murder; 2) is it ethical to clone dead people without their consent; 3) who’s responsible for child support and raising the clones? 4) do you make it mandatory to clone murder victims, or is it opt-in permission from the closest living relatives? 5)what does this do to hereditary royalty and nobility, do we go back and start cloning kings/queens/emperors, what does that do to their successions? 6) what about stillborn babies or babies that died in utero and took mom with them. 7) what about cloning other famous people who weren’t royalty/nobility (e.g. sworn celibate saints?) 8) what about human chimeras, do you clone one person or do you clone all the unique sets of DNA? 9) why are you cloning these people in the first place, and who is ordering the cloning being done? 10) who is raising these cloned children? (I could see some dark motives here, just look at American slavery).
And added from my Balloon Juice comments: I have been playing around with plot bunnies about human cloning ever since I started reading the Vorkosigan saga (the series was ongoing while I was attending a Jesuit law school, unfortunately I didn’t take any bioethics classes during that) and Bujold didn’t go nearly far enough with all the horrors that could result from it, as she made the worst villains businessmen (Jackson’s Hole) instead of religious and racial fanatics. The Cetagandans I would guess are supposed to be genetic/eugenics villains but they have a veneer of cool and inclusivity and she treats them like the White Northerners did the White Southerners after the Civil War in my opinion, instead of treating them like post-WW2 Europeans would have regarded the Nazis.
I could very easily see modern Christian/Catholic fundamentalism deciding that you have to be a body birth natural conception product in order to have human rights, and excluding human clones, IVF babies, or children born from a uterine replicator and making them perpetual slaves and claiming that they were soulless and had no human rights. I keep on playing around with the idea of the Union of Civilized Societies versus the neo-Confederacy only on an interplanetary scale instead of a continent-wide scale.
Eric Flint did a better job with slavery, genetic engineering, and religious fanaticism than Bujold did when he started writing the Honor Harrington books with David Weber.
As a lawyer and SF fan, the idea of “life for a life” by cloning of murder victims is a great plot bunny 1) go with the idea that there is no statute of limitations on murder; 2) is it ethical to clone dead people without their consent; 3) who’s responsible for child support and raising the clones? 4) do you make it mandatory to clone murder victims, or is it opt-in permission from the closest living relatives? 5)what does this do to hereditary royalty and nobility, do we go back and start cloning kings/queens/emperors, what does that do to their successions? 6) what about stillborn babies or babies that died in utero and took mom with them. 7) what about cloning other famous people who weren’t royalty/nobility (e.g. sworn celibate saints?) 8) what about human chimeras, do you clone one person or do you clone all the unique sets of DNA? 9) why are you cloning these people in the first place, and who is ordering the cloning being done? 10) who is raising these cloned children? (I could see some dark motives here, just look at American slavery).
And added from my Balloon Juice comments: I have been playing around with plot bunnies about human cloning ever since I started reading the Vorkosigan saga (the series was ongoing while I was attending a Jesuit law school, unfortunately I didn’t take any bioethics classes during that) and Bujold didn’t go nearly far enough with all the horrors that could result from it, as she made the worst villains businessmen (Jackson’s Hole) instead of religious and racial fanatics. The Cetagandans I would guess are supposed to be genetic/eugenics villains but they have a veneer of cool and inclusivity and she treats them like the White Northerners did the White Southerners after the Civil War in my opinion, instead of treating them like post-WW2 Europeans would have regarded the Nazis.
I could very easily see modern Christian/Catholic fundamentalism deciding that you have to be a body birth natural conception product in order to have human rights, and excluding human clones, IVF babies, or children born from a uterine replicator and making them perpetual slaves and claiming that they were soulless and had no human rights. I keep on playing around with the idea of the Union of Civilized Societies versus the neo-Confederacy only on an interplanetary scale instead of a continent-wide scale.
Eric Flint did a better job with slavery, genetic engineering, and religious fanaticism than Bujold did when he started writing the Honor Harrington books with David Weber.
