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The impact of consumerism on the future society
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A real example of the consequences of therapeutic cloning was demonstrated in the spring term, 1999, when an advert seeking egg donors appeared in the ‘Cambridge alumni magazine’. In England however, there are laws which prohibit money being part of the transaction unlike in the US where egg donors from Ivy league college or Presidential candidates backgrounds, had sold their gametes for up to $50,000.
(Quintavalle, Josephine, 2002).
To put it another way, if we had the technology to clone in the 18th century, people
arguably would have cloned slaves. This would be done in order to save money from purchasing new slaves to replace the ones that would die. According to Marx and Foucault, the selling of the body then which became a metaphor for coercive exchanges that were largely invisible ‘has today become a toxic but remarkably well tolerated exemplar of the subordination of identity to commerce’, where about 20% of the human genome has now been patented for private commercial use. (Barber, Benjamin. R, 2007:17)
The human genome project is, one where all the genes in the body are mapped out. The partial original is stored in the Welcome Institute but has actually since been completed. As a result of globalization and its driving force to privatization within a capitalist economy, there is a race for the UK and America to patent genes before the Koreans, the French or the Chinese will. The patenting trend is accelerating within corporate hands, and the small independent geneticists cannot compete with them.
Within a more complicated post human society, this could mean that saving life in the NHS could be unsustainable. That is to say, would there be a universal agenda in the name of Bentham’s utilitarianism and efficiency, in which one would trade in genetic risks in terms of working out how much would be the cost to the country of developing Alzheimer’s in the future? In other words, this may sound flippant but a human being should be able to demand (indeed, consent to this) before naturally old enough to ‘succumb to their life’s end’ and have the cash payment now or well before. In this way, the clone would not be treated ‘merely’ as a means to an end. (Mackinnon, Barbara, 2007)
An argument used by some American slave owners was that the slaves experienced pain less than sensitive Caucasian humans. In this instance, there is a gap between the early Utilitarians’ argument of producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number by today, testing on animals such as scientists famously cloning a human ear on the back of a rat, which the slaves (as ‘animals’ or sub-humans) were associated with, and Benthams’
‘suffering’ response.
Peter Singer uses the word ‘Speciesism’ (Singer, 2001) to describe for example, this trait of the slave owners where one is biased in favour of the interests of who they believe to be members of one’s own species and who feel pain and pleasure equally. In this instance, ‘pure’ white Caucasians. The interesting thing now, is that most human beings are ‘speciesists’ by the previously mentioned fact that taxpayers money, funds to quote an early P. Singer: ‘the sacrifice of the most important interests of members of other species in order to promote the most trivial interests of our own species’.
Morrissey said making a stand for change, best – though, controversially last weekend when he compared the massacre in Norway to the daily slaughter of animals for fast food outlets: "If you quite rightly feel horrified at the Norway killings, then it surely naturally follows that you feel horror at the murder of ANY innocent being. You cannot ignore animal suffering simply because animals 'are not us'."
Barber, Benjamin. R, 2007, ‘Consumed: how markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole’, WW Norton and Company Ltd
Mackinnon, Barbara, 2007, ‘Ethics: theory and contemporary issues’, 6th edition, Wadsworth Cengage learning
Quintavalle, Josephine et al, 2002, ‘Better by accident than design’ – an essay, in the book ‘Designer babies: where should we draw the line?’, Hodder and Stoughton
Singer, Peter, 2001, ‘Writings on an ethical life’, Fourth Estate, Great Britain