Cloning rights

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Violentidiot
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Cloning rights

Post by Violentidiot »

In episode 13 "SA: Unequal Terrorist – NOT EQUAL" Motoko and Togusa have a conversation about clones and they mention that by law, clones can't inherit property.
Why is that?
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Freitag
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Post by Freitag »

Racisim?

It's unspecified as far as I know.
People tend to look at you a little strangely when they know you stuff voodoo dolls full of Ex-Lax.
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Violentidiot
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Post by Violentidiot »

Just wondering how stripping a clone of that right would possibly benefit someone politically/economically. Why did the creators of GITS predict this to be the case in the distant future (if cloning was accepted)? If anything, a clone is a human being. It seems unethical to take away their power to hold property.
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Freitag
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Post by Freitag »

They are coming at this from an eastern pov. We're looking at this from the west.
Violentidiot wrote:... stripping a clone of that right ...
Here in the States we view rights as inalienable and that government has the task of securing those rights, but we do not derive our rights from government.

A friend related a story about a friend of his with whom he had a political difference. My friend is a Libertarian and his friend is a Liberal Democrat. They had a discussion in which they explored what was the supporting foundation for the difference in their beliefs. The Libertarian said pretty much what I have said above about where rights originate. The Liberal Democrat (sorry for labels, I don't know the LD guys name so this is the easiest way for me to differentiate them) believes that rights are derived from government and you have only those rights that your government says that you have.

So perhaps instead of stripping the rights from the clones they have merely not granted those rights to the clones in the first place.

We actually have precedence for that in the West in the practice of primogeniture. The eldest male child would inherit all of the parents wealth. The female children could not own property and were provided for only if they were married. Younger male children would have to seek their own fortunes. While we might consider these practices barbaric, we're not that far downwind of similar things ourselves. Black men could not vote until 1870 (with the passage of the 15th amendment) and women could not vote until 1920. Going further back to 1534 the list of crimes against man and God attributed to the Anabaptists in Munster, Germany included helping the poor, the requirement to live a clean life, and a host of other things that we pretty much take for granted now. The "humane" laws concerning execution in those days limited the amount of torture the condemned could be treated with to 1 hour before being killed by a knife through the heart.

So you have to look at not only the data point of clone property rights (or the lack thereof) but also at the direction from which they came. If they came from some kind of collective mentality where anyone owning property takes away from the group as a whole, then that is a different thing than taking the right from the clone.

A lot of modern anime has the feel to me of a rebellion against the old ways. Some show a guy successfully pulling away and some show him coming around in the end. But their old ways include ancestor worship, a pantheon of spirits, demons, and gods. So seeing someone reject that doesn't look odd to western eyes, it looks normal. We stick to one God and call those Paranormal Investigator guys kooks.


But yes, it's weird that was in there. It has to be part of a larger cultural picture that is being painted. It's not just that they have the technology and makes me want to ask, if you can put a brain in a robotic body, why not clone a 'natural' body and put the brain in that instead?
People tend to look at you a little strangely when they know you stuff voodoo dolls full of Ex-Lax.
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