Is cloning people inherently evil?

>But that's about consequences and responsible use more than anything

At this point, it boils down to proper parenting and being a good parent. If the clone chooses, despite good parenting, to live a life of evil, then they are probably evil in and of themselves. Well, now we're getting into issues of "sins of the father" type stuff and if they translate to any children, offspring, or creations.

I'll admit I'm going off the IRL basis for cloning, not "insert DNA, receive an adult who has all the memories of the original."

Well, can someone be born evil? What if you clone an evil person and raise them to be a good, kind, responsible human being, and the circumstances of their evil nature were mostly in upbringing and parenting?

>Well, can someone be born evil?
In D&D they can, and in fact some races frequently are.

I wouldn't say "evil" so much as bad business. Cloning is expensive and you'd want to hit a higher market than that. Also consider your target demographic. I'd say 50k at the least, with maybe something more like 100k being more like it.

You'd also have to count overhead: cost of machine maintenance (assuming cloning machines), stocking an armory for customers (letting them bring their own weapons is bound to cause problems without special dispensation), corpse disposal, legal costs (oh boy would there be a lot of those), health and safety, utilities, facilities... It all gets very expensive; frontloading the cost of killing things is bound to be, and in this scenario you aren't even offloading those costs to others the way you with, say, selling produce, since they aren't carting off the product and dealing with everything else on their end after that.

Note that when I say "Created life is an ethical minefield", I don't just mean cloning. Imagine someone creates a human subspecies. They are all squat, broad-shouldered, muscular, Neanderthal looking motherfuckers with arms like mating pythons. They are genetically hardwired to not be very bright but enjoy moving heavy things around. People use them as manual labor for pitiful pay. The worker race sees no problem with this, because they are being paid for what they see as easy and fun "work". Are they slaves? Are they being exploited? Should they have been created in the first place? If no, what do we do with them now? That's the kind of ethical questions that blow your fucking legs off with this sort of thing.

i think the ethical questions was the specific purpose of this thread's creation. reverse trolling.

I suspect more people would pay good money to fuck Hitler, and with multiple customers per Hitler you can lower the price by a lot.

>Is cloning people inherently evil?
Treating people as things, as products or means to an end rather than people can be considered evil.

It really depends on how this foundation was planning on treating the clones after their creation.

Well, was the sorceress evil? Maybe that was the point instead.

>Are they slaves?
No, they're not the property of a person and they're being paid a wage for their work.
>Are they being exploited?
Yes, if their pay is below the national minimum wage or if they are being worked in ways that violate Labor standards or workplace safety. If not, then they are not being exploited, any more than a human doing work they enjoy and are good at is exploited.
>Should they have been created in the first place?
Irrelevant. Once a race is created, it's far to late to ask if it's a good idea to create them. The following question is more relevant, since it must be answered regardless of whether or not they should have been created.
>what do we do with them now?
Presumably use them for manual labor. If they are genetically coded to be unintelligent, education in abstract concepts will generally not pay off, so higher education will be wasted on the subspecies when that money could instead be used to educate and train a human. Basic literacy and social skills necessary for cooperative labor should be drilled into them, and then they begin relevant job training and physical conditioning to prepare for the workplace.

"Ethical questions" is generally just a vehicle for disingenuously asking easily answered questions as if they were world-shakingly difficult.

This.

Chairman Yang, pls return to your punishment sphere and stay there.

>Is cloning people inherently evil?
Only if they're pre-programmed to seek their others out to destroy them causing mayhen across the land in the process akin to that of Beholder Xenophobia, because you're one of those people who cannot stand the idea of another "you" existing.

I assumed the clone would be a pre-programmed copy.
Exactly the same in every way.

C O N T E X T

The reason cloning is illegal irl is that the trial and error required would result in all kinds of cruelty.

If it's a garrentied success then we have too look at the setting.

Will it be a homunculus? Will it have a soul? What genre is the game? How bad is playing god? Are they cloning it as a weapon?

This shit is important OP, you fag

oh hell, in my state assisting in human cloning is a felony on par with owning a loaded machinegun or meth possession.

Cloning is obviously not bad, but the future. The prophets must pass down their genes, even after death.

Usually the case, because people don't want to ask the question of if you have the right to modify an embryo to grow ONLY an ear or a lung and if it still qualifies as human.

You gotta charge more, man. The overhead for manufacturing Hitlers wouldn't be at all cheap.

Yeah, right now the only people willing to fuck with human GMO or cloning are the Chinese.

>The reason cloning is illegal irl is that the trial and error required would result in all kinds of cruelty.
Pfft, yeah, right.

The ACTUAL reason why cloning is illegal is because the law has absolutely zero basis on how to treat the clones and what rights they have. Are they property? Individuals? Should they count as electorate? Should we use them as slaves? Are they the same as the original individual in the face of law and can you be sentenced for the crime your clone committed?
Etc., the questions are just too numerous, and everyone is trying to lay off the moment as far into the future as they can, because people aren't comfortable with asking and answering these questions.
We've literally just had this discussion in the "Council of Elrond" thread, like, a day ago.

There is absolutely some fuzziness in the law, but consider we have yet to get a clone to live a normal lifespan.

And?

Why do people assume cloning is anything more than creating a genetically identical copy of a person? It's like making an identical twin. There's no reason to assume that they would even have similar personalities.

They are not healthy, cost is not the only reason we don't clone willy nilly. Like I said we have a lot to learn, and that knowledge will cost lives

What evidence is there that she will even be a sorceress? Do they know if those abilities are passed through genetics? Or are they passed through liniage making the clone just a normal woman

That's precisely it. Creating a clone is just like having a kid, just with slightly more predictability. But it won't think and behave the same as the original person unless you somehow print every single neural connection. Even then I don't know if it would be the same person because my knowledge of neurology is pretty lacking.

>Cloning someone in order to give someone who died in a horrible accident a second chance at life is probably good.

What the fuck? You realize that cloning and resurrection aren't the same thing, right?

>What the fuck? You realize that cloning and resurrection aren't the same thing, right?
But, user, from the outside, it doesn't matter that the consciousness isn't the same. :^)

>being this cucked by the dairy jews
>falling for the cheese meme

People have children all the time who will not reach the average lifespan, particularly when they know they'll be passing on genetic diseases or when they're fucking morons who think prayer can replace getting the kid medicine.

So far we haven't made those situations illegal

>Irrelevant.

They haven't actually been created, though, is the thing, so this thought experiment is partially serving to ask whether we, in reality, should be willing to create a servitor race.

The fact that you had to define away the one question that can't apply to humans who happen to match the same qualities as closely as possible suggests that "ethical questions" actually has more meaning than you'd like and you need to blind yourself in order to avoid confronting those aspects of reality.

That said, I largely agree with most of your other answers, with the caveat that they only apply in the event that they're being individually grown and molded to fit this profile (the ethics of which greatly depend on the exact methodology). If we're doing something like setting up a breeding population, then you need to account for natural variation leading to examples who don't fit the stereotype - in other words, any of them who desire a different career, higher education, and so on, should be permitted to pursue it and helped to do so to the extent it's socially reasonable. This is unlikely to occur in the first place when they're all being tailor-made, but otherwise it's very likely that outliers will exist in reasonable numbers.

>inherently evil

The smug little shit () has a point.
On what basis do you unarguably define an act as inherently evil, especially since the circumstances and the context of the act influence its morality?

Question,
whats the REAL difference between extending your life with clones vs extending your life as a lich?

One of them you die and the other you die.

You can still fuck.

Becoming a lich involves the soulmurder of another person which IS definitely EVIL. While clones used for this purpose presumably have no soul and when you would normally die your soul goes to the clone body no tampering with any soul but your own so not evil.

Law =/= morality

There are also plenty of arguments about those situations that are none too simple. Morality is messy and no one is gonna agree on any of it. But as far as OPs question goes the only answer would be what does your God believe?

How are you extending your life with clones? There's a big ??? between your first step and your profit, and it's crucial to answering your question in the ethical terms its context suggests are desired.

> whats the REAL difference between extending your life with clones vs extending your life as a lich?
In case of the lich, "you" put your soul into an object and become immortal.
In case of the clones, "you" still die, while your clones live on.

In case of the lich, you put your "you" someplace safe and then channel it into a body. Your "you" is safe and intact, allowing you to become immortal.
In case of the clones, you copy your "you" and then die, while your copy lives on, but it's not the same instance of "you" as the actual original "you".

In the theoretical, the servitors had already been created and the "ethical questions" were in reference to society after the servitors had been introduced to humanity.

If the question is "Should we create a similar human subspecies when we become capable of such feat", then that is more dicey, as the societal benefit of a more productive and higher morale manual laborer would have to be weighed against the sudden unemployment of laborers who relied on those jobs. In the past, when automation in manufacturing and the availability of 3rd world laborers offered similar benefits for similar costs, it was decided that the benefits to productivity and profit margin outweighed the negative effects, but unless the costs of retraining and rehiring the displaced workers is absorbed by either companies or the government, the economic benefits of servitor laborers will be mitigated by the maluses of unemployment that can easily and directly be blamed on an 'other' group, and the social or criminal problems that result from such.

Assuming you mean that memories are transferred to a younger clone body routinely, the major differences are:

>Lichhood is inherently Evil-aligned in most settings, and is thus a morally inferior choice
>Cloning doesn't offer the safety and security of being able to respawn after death, unless memories are somehow backed up on an external system, to be transferred into a new body upon death
>Lichhood doesn't preserve sexual organs
>Depending on the physical development and structure of the recipient clone body, age or size-related paraphilias can be indulged in as long as one has a willing (or unwilling) partner
>Clone immortality doesn't let you make bone puns.

>>Lichhood doesn't preserve sexual organs
>he doesn't cast Gentle Repose daily

You're the smelly neckbeard of liches

Also don't forget that in D&D liches need souls to keep themselves sane

Which edition? I know that's not true in 3.5 but I'm woefully unfamiliar with some of the others you might be referencing.

DO you ever met a twin pair? They are evil. Clones and twins are the same thing basically.

Only identical twins. They are pretty creepy, maybe they actually are evil.

>The country with one of the highest populations on the planet is researching ways to make more people
i don't even

Go play SOMA, or watch the last episode of Black Mirror season 2. Yes, the Christmas one.

Only one twin is ever evil, this is basic twin knowledge.

You are now aware that fertility clinics have thousands of fertilized, frozen zygotes that will never be implanted in a uterus. Legally, they're no different from medical waste. Thousands of so-called lives, created out of expediency, that will inevitably be quietly disposed of.

The only reason cloning is a controversial is because the public (as demonstrated in threads like this) largely knows nothing about it beyond cimic books and cheesy sci-fi tv shows. Hence why it's illegal to varying degrees, while creating disposable test-tube zygotes is just part of "the miracle of life."

If you copied every single neural connection from the adult exactly, you'd wind up with severe neural problems at a comparatively young age, since the brain also runs into aging trouble too.

If you made an exact copy of that person's neural architecture when they were themselves a fetus (And I have no idea how the fuck you'd do that, since actively fucking with neurons on that scale at that age while knowing what it'll do is about as close to medically impossible at the moment as it gets, but whatever, Clarke's Third.) then you still wouldn't get the same person out of it, but I imagine it would be closer, since the neural connections vary from the experiences of the person and such IIRC. The closer to the person's current age the neuro-architecture is mapped off of, the closer a match you'll get, but the more health problem's you'll run into unless you went all Truman Show and recreated that man or woman's life exactly in real time to develop the brain identically.

t. A rather basic understanding of neurology.

I more meant like 3D printing an entire adult human, brain and all.

ok, so printing the brain of the 80-year old into a 25-year old body.
That could work.

A clone is nothing more than a belated identical twin.
The only difference between cloning and IVF is that in the latter you use the genetic data of two individuals and in the former the genetic data of one.

I don't get why people treat cloning like it's some borderline supernatural "we created life and are spitting in the face of God!" matter.

because creating life from only one parent isn't natural
and it's eerily close to jesus' conception, perhaps making them uneasy?

But in those 'evil' comes only from treating copies as disposable. You can do same to regular people as well, no cloning required.

1000 dollars?

Selling your services a bit cheap there don't you think?

...

How much profit would you realistically make back on such a venture?

>because creating life from only one parent isn't natural
Neither is IVF.

>and it's eerily close to jesus' conception
Because we all know Jesus is a clone of Mary, right?

A lot of the cloning scare is based around misinformation about what cloning is. It's effectively "autofertilization" and it's nowhere near abiogenesis.

It would still do nothing wrong.

They want to kill them off and make better people. Imagine having a billion einsteins or simo hayhas.

You could sell it for millions to rich jews, literally 41% of them in the states are in the "one percent". There goes your legal issues too.

My point was if you are interested in the morality of cloning and the concept of self, look into those sources.
Actually just do that anyways. They're both amazing.

Don't forget The Swapper, user.

I did, but it felt like pointless cruelty. So you have uploaded mind in digital form, then surely only way to extract information from it is to set up simulation space and use good old torture/deception/whatever. At least in SOMA with hero being unfamiliar to setting he couldn't think of anything better, but in Black Mirror? No such excuse, and it's shown as mass scale solution.

From a Christian point of view, cloning can be seen as the sin of pride, as you're playing God, but so is attacking people because you made yourself judge and jury. In D&Desque settings neither of those things are usually evil on their own since there's a lot of gods and something like cloning is rather mundane compared to the shit powerful wizards can accomplish. I don't know jack about what good is in your setting but the DM was right and your friend shouldn't argue over stupid shit or go hacking his way through things because he assumed the worlds morality is his personal morality.

You would also make great fortune by selling child age Hitlers for mass purchase.

How many Nazis and WNs would pay out the ass to have their own baby Fuehrer?

Or better yet, actually produce ubermensch children. I know I would want an Aryan son, despite my dirty Hispanic blood which makes it impossible.

(Maybe an Aryan woman to be my waifu?)

Ah, Genejacks, how I love thee

Well that pretty much depends if the person they're cloning had done a worldwide disaster that qulifys as something of a bad guy and such

Probably because your state is run by god fearing idiots.

Theoretically you could just use a Polymorph type spell to turn "living" again when you want to do something a rotting corpse can't do.

That said, depending on the setting/DM you may not be able to get it up, food might taste like ash, you may continue aging if it's a long term transformation and run into problems there (like respawning as an old man, only to die again almost immediately), or they may just nix the idea entirely.

You have three or four options, and they depend on on how Hispanic. Option one: If you can convince people you're just a white guy with a tan during summer? Yeah, you'll have white kids. Just make sure if they start asking about their heritage you explain that your family were landowners who used to shoot Mestizos for fun.

Second, cloning, as above. I recommend seeing if you can get ahold of a chunk of Dolph Lungdren's flesh.

Third, you could wait. I still maintain that Hispanics who are fluent English speakers, and pass the tan test above are going to be the next white people. You hate the blacks as much as anyone, you're not easily mistaken for Muslims, and hell, we let the half-moor papist Dagos, the degenerate simian micks, the mongrel asiatic Slav, and even the freaking jews be white. Just wait a few decades.

Fourth, kill black people. Remember Zimmerman? Dude's mom is Peruvian and slap a flannel shirt and a bandanna on his ass and you could cast him as 'hispanic thug #2'. Shoots one black kid? He's white first class. He's so white republicans are giving money to his legal defense fund.

And I have no goddamn clue how many concentric layers of Irony and racism I'm working on right now.

>Probably because your state is run by god fearing idiots

i fucking wish.
The entire fucking country is ran by people too afraid to jeopardize their positions in the next election to do anything that could be seen, by anyone, as "offensive"

Thanks for the wise advice Mr. user.

Concerning your last few sentences, I personally am not ironic concerning my own post. Veeky Forums is pretty liberating when it comes to safely voicing my opinion without risk of career or family.

(Plus I'm not mocha brown skin, but definitely not white enough for a Klan tier rally).

Oh well.

Why would it? I doubt most gods would really give a fuck save for now they have a new follower to convince. If it goes against the specific teaching of a god (or their clergy) I guess it would ruffle some feathers.

What if you're using cloning to well create organs for those who are failing, does the sin dissipate or is it still considered bad?

Cloning people is not evil, no.
DON'T GIVE EVIL PEOPLE CLONING HOWEVER.
If I had the capability, I would have a gaggle of slaves too hamstrung to escape who are forced to do nothing but produce amazing fantastical worlds for me to explore.

Agreed. But I would only really apply "born evil" to a small subset of evil monsters. Aberrations, undead, and outsiders, most likely. For e.g. goblins, kobolds, etc I would definitely expect that the jury's still out when they're impressionable young newborns.

why does the pc care if its evil? normally evil chars dont give a shit what alignment people they try to kill are.