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ОглавлениеNever Let Me Go: A Cautionary Tale of Human Cloning
“Who’d make up stories as horrible as that?”
—Ruth
Sins of Futures Past
In 2002, the birth of the first human clone was announced. Baby Eve was born on December 26, 2002, and weighed seven pounds. Or so it was claimed.
The announcement attracted media attention from around the world, and spawned story after story of the birth. Since then, no proof has emerged that baby Eve was anything other than a publicity stunt. But the furor at the time demonstrated how contentious the very idea of creating living copies of people can be.
There’s something about human cloning that seems to jar our sense of right and wrong. It instinctively feels—to many people, I suspect—as if it’s not quite right. Yet, at the same time, there’s something fascinating about the idea that we might one day be able to recreate a new person in our own likeness, or possibly “resurrect” someone we can’t bear to lose—a child who’s passed, or a loved relative. There’s even the uneasy notion that maybe, one day, we could replicate those members of society who do the work we can’t do, or don’t want to—a ready supply of combat personnel, maybe, or garbage collectors. Or even, possibly, living, breathing organ donors.
As it turns out, cloning humans is really difficult. It’s also fraught with ethical problems. But this hasn’t stopped people trying, despite near-universal restrictions prohibiting it.
On December 27, 2002, Brigitte Boisselier, a scientist working for the organization Clonaid, announced that a cloned baby girl, Eve, had been delivered by cesarian section to a thirty-one-year-old woman. Clonaid was founded in 1997 with the express aim of cloning humans. But the company’s mission was far more ambitious than this. The organization had its roots in the ideas and teachings of one-time racing car test-driver, and subsequently self-proclaimed religious leader, Claude Vorilhon. Vorilhon, who later renamed himself Raël and went on to establish the Raëlian religious movement, believes that we are the creations of a “scientifically more advanced species.” These aliens—the “Elohim”—have, he claims, discovered the secret of immortality. And the key to this is, apparently, cloning.
You could be forgiven for feeling a little skeptical at this point. Raël’s stories and beliefs come across as fantastical and delusional, at least when they’re boiled down to their bare bones. But they offer a window into the world of cloning that bizarrely echoes some of the more mainstream ideas of transhumanists, and even some technology entrepreneurs. They also create an intriguing canvas on which to begin exploring the moral dilemmas presented in the movie Never Let Me Go.
Never Let Me Go was never intended as a science fiction movie. Its scriptwriter (and the author of the novel the movie’s based on), Kazuo Ishiguro, was interested in what it means to live a meaningful life, especially if that life is short and limited. Ironically, the setting he used to explore this was a society that has discovered the secret of a long and disease-free life. But the technology this secret depends on is a program of human cloning, developed for no purpose other than to allow the clones’ organs to be harvested when the appropriate time came to keep others alive and healthy.
To Ishiguro, the clones were simply a plot device. Nevertheless, the characters he created and the circumstances of their lives reveal a dark side of how technologies like cloning can, if not used ethically and responsibly, lead to quite devastating discrimination and abuse.
Never Let Me Go is set in a fictitious England in the 1970s to 1990s. On the surface, it reminds me of the England I grew up in; the settings, the people, and the culture all have a nostalgic familiarity to them. But, unlike the England I remember, there’s something deeply disturbing under the surface here. What unfolds is a heart-wrenching story about dignity, rights, and happiness, and what it means to have value as a person. And because the movie is not focused on the technology itself, but on the lives it impacts, it succeeds in providing a searing insight into the social and moral risks of selling our collective souls as we unquestionably embrace the seeming promise of new technological capabilities.
At the center of Never Let Me Go are three young people, bound together by a common experience. The story starts with them as young children, at what looks at first glance like an exclusive private school in the English countryside. They seem like ordinary kids, with all the usual joys, pains, and intrigues that accompany childhood. Except that these children are different.
As the movie unfolds, we begin to learn that these particular students have been “bred.” They don’t have parents. They don’t even have full names. Instead, they’re destined to give their short lives for others as part of the National Donor Program, “donating” their organs as they become young adults until, around the third or fourth donation, they will “complete” and die on the operating table.
As the students get older, they are made increasingly aware of their fate. They’re taught that they need to look after their bodies, that this is their purpose in life—that their role is to die so others can live. And most of them accept this fate.
Yet, despite their being treated as a commodity by the society they’re created to serve, we begin to learn that not everyone is comfortable with this. Their principal, Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), is concerned about the ethics of the National Donor Program. But, as we discover, she is less concerned about the existence of the program than about how it’s run. She wants to find evidence supporting her gut feeling that her students should be treated as people, rather than walking organ donors. It turns out that her school, Hailsham was set up as a progressive establishment to explore whether these clones have that (apparently) quintessential indicator of humanity, a “soul.” This, from the perspective of Miss Emily and her supporters, is essential in determining whether the students are worthy of being treated with the dignity and respect afforded other members of the human race.
Against this backdrop, a deeply moving story of love, empathy, and meaning plays out. Ultimately, the three clones we follow become a yardstick of what constitutes “being human” against which their creators are measured.
Standing at the core of Never Let Me Go is the relationship between Kathy (played as a child by Izzy Meikle-Small, and as an adult by Carey Mulligan), a kind, empathetic young woman trying to make sense of her life, and Tommy (Charlie Rowe/Andrew Garfield), a troubled young man whom she cares deeply for. Then there is Ruth (Ella Purnell/Keira Knightly), a sometime-friend of Kathy and Tommy’s who desperately wants to fit in with those around her, and who selfishly robs those close to her of what’s precious to them as she does.
As the three children grow toward adulthood, they begin to hear talk of a “deferment program,” a means of delaying the start of their donations. It’s rumored that, if a couple can show that they truly love each other, they can request a deferment from donating. This would provide them with a short stay of execution before they give up their organs and ultimately die in the process. And, according to rumor, Miss Emily, their former principal at Hailsham, has some influence here.
As they enter adulthood, the three young people move on from the small community they live in together, and lose touch. Kathy becomes a “carer,” looking after other donors as they move toward completion. But some years after the three of them have gone their separate ways, she runs across Ruth. Ruth is recovering from a donation which hasn’t gone well, and Kathy steps in as her carer.
As the two rekindle their old relationship, they reconnect with Tommy, who has also begun his donations. Ruth has been keeping track of both Tommy and Kathy, in part because she is wracked with guilt about how she treated them. She admits that she was jealous of the deep bond between Tommy and Kathy when the three of them were together and, because of this, stole Tommy away from Kathy.
As she nears completion, Ruth’s guilt becomes all-consuming. To try to set things right, she provides Kathy and Tommy with what she believes is the key to the rumored deferment program.
Ruth completes on her next donation, and after her death, Kathy checks out the information she passed on about deferment. Ruth has given her the address of a woman simply known as Madame, who used to visit the now-closed Hailsham, and is possibly the person one needs to approach to be admitted into the rumored program. Filled with hope, Kathy and Tommy decide to visit her and request a deferment. But there is a problem.
While at Hailsham, the students were encouraged to express themselves through art. Periodically, Madame visited the school and selected the best of what they’d created. Kathy and Tommy deduce that Madame holds the key to deferment, and convince themselves that the way Madame tells whether two donors are truly in love is through their art. The trouble is that Tommy never had any art selected by Madame. It seems that their fragile hope is about to be dashed because Tommy didn’t do enough when he was younger to prove his worth.
Despite this, the two lovers think they see a way forward. Tommy starts afresh developing his art portfolio, so he has something (he believes) to demonstrate his “worthiness,” and the two of them set out to visit the address provided by Ruth. Yet, on getting there, the couple are devastated to discover that Madame has no ability to grant a deferment; she never did.
It turns out that Madame and Miss Emily were working as a team at Hailsham, but not to seek out evidence for true love. Rather, they were using the students’ art to determine if they had souls, if they had human qualities worth valuing beyond a working body and healthy organs.
The two women earnestly wanted to find a way to show that these children were capable of human feelings, and that they had validity and worth beyond the organs they were carrying. Yet for all their moral angst, Madame and Miss Emily turn out to be all mouth and no backbone. They lament Kathy and Tommy’s plight. But they also dash their fragile hopes, claiming there’s nothing they can do to help.
As Kathy and Tommy return to the care home that night, Tommy calmly asks Kathy to stop the car, and gets out. The whole weight of the despair and injustice he’s carrying crushes down on him, as he screams and weeps uncontrollably for the hope and the future that society has robbed him of. In that one stark, revealing moment, Tommy shows the full depth of his humanity, and he throws into sharp relief the inhumanity of those who have sacrificed him to the gods of their technology.
As Tommy and Ruth complete, and Kathy becomes a donor herself, we realize that asking whether they have souls was the wrong question. We’re left in no doubt that these young people deserve respect, and dignity, and autonomy, and kindness, irrespective of what they have achieved. And we realize that, through them, the society that created the technology that produced them has been judged, and found wanting.
Never Let Me Go is a movie that delves deeply into the questionable morality of convenient technologies. It’s also a movie that challenges us to think about how we treat others, and what separates humanity from inhumanity. But before we get there, it’s worth diving deeper into the technology that underpins the unfolding story we’re presented with: cloning.
Cloning
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep was born. What made Dolly unusual was that she didn’t have regular biological parents. Rather, she was grown from a cell that came from a single animal.
Dolly the sheep was the first successful clone of a domesticated animal from an adult cell. And the proof that this was possible shot the possibility of cloning from science fiction to science fantasy almost overnight.
In Dolly’s case, the DNA from an ordinary, or somatic, cell—not a reproductive cell or stem cell—was injected into an unfertilized egg that had had its nucleus removed. This “clone egg” was then electrically shocked into starting to divide and grow, after which it was implanted in the uterus of a third sheep.
Dolly was born healthy and lived for nearly seven years before she was put down due to increasingly poor health. But the legacy of the experiment she was a part of lives on. What her birth and life demonstrated without a shadow of doubt is that it’s possible to grow a fully functioning animal from a single cell taken from an organ, and presumably to keep on doing this time and time again.
It’s easy to see the attraction of cloning large animals, at least on the surface. Loved pets could be reproduced, leading to a never-ending cycle of pup to adult and back to pup. Prize livestock could be duplicated, leading to large herds of prime cattle, or whole stables of thoroughbreds. Rare species could be preserved. And then there are people. Yet cloning human from scratch is harder than it might at first seem.
In July 2016, there was a flurry of articles marking the twentieth anniversary of Dolly’s birth. In one of these, bioethicist Hank Greely astutely pointed out just how hard cloning still is, even after two decades of work: “Cats: easy; dogs: hard; mice: easy; rats: hard; humans and other primates: very hard.”18 The trouble is, while the concept of cloning is pretty straightforward, biology rarely is.
The basic idea behind cloning is to remove the DNA from a healthy non-reproductive cell, insert it into a viable egg cell, and then persuade this to develop into a fully functional organism that is identical to the original. The concept is seemingly simple: the DNA in each cell contains the genetic code necessary to create a new organism from scratch. All that’s needed to create a clone is to convince the DNA that it’s inside a fertilized egg, and get it to behave accordingly. As it turns out, though, this is not that easy. DNA may contain all the right code for creating a new life, but getting it to do this is tricky.
This trickiness hasn’t stopped people from experimenting, though, and in some cases succeeding. And as a result, if you really want to, you can have your dog cloned,19 or pay a company to create for you a clone-herd of cattle.20 And there continues to be interest in cloning humans. But before we even get to the technical plausibility of whether we can do this, there are complex ethical challenges to navigate.
Despite advances in the science of cloning, the general consensus on whether we should allow humans to be cloned seems to be “no,” at least at the moment, although this is by no means a universally accepted position. In 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a “Declaration on Human Cloning” whereby “Member states were called on to adopt all measures necessary to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.”21 Yet this was not a unanimous declaration: eighty-four members voted in favor, thirty-four against, and thirty-seven abstained. One of the more problematic issues was how absolute the language was in the declaration. A number of those member states that voted against it expressed their opposition to human reproductive cloning where a fully functioning person results (human reproductive cloning), but wanted to ensure that the way remained open to therapeutic cloning, where cloned cells remain in lab cultures.
This concern over human reproductive cloning seems to run deep. Certainly, it’s reflected in a number of the positions expressed within the UN Declaration and is a topic of concern within plenty of popular articles on cloning. The thought of being able to grow people at will from a few cells feels to many people to be unnatural and dangerous. It also raises tough questions around potential misuse, which is something that Never Let Me Go focuses our attention on rather acutely.
In 2014, the online magazine io9 published an article on nine “unexpected outcomes of human cloning,”22 keeping the fascination we have with this technology going, despite the deep moral concerns surrounding it. These unexpected outcomes included ownership of clones (will someone else own the patent on your body?), the possibility of iterative improvements over generations (essentially a DNA software upgrade on each cloning), and raising the dead (why not give Granny a new lease on life?). The article is admittedly lighthearted. But it does begin to dig into the challenges we’ll face if someone does decide to buck the moral trend and start to turn out human facsimiles. And the reality is that, as biomedical science progresses, this is becoming increasingly feasible. Admittedly, it’s incredibly difficult at the moment to reproduce people. But this is not always going to be the case. And as the possibility comes closer, we’re going to face some increasingly tough choices as a society.
Yet despite the unease around human cloning, there are some people who actively suggest the idea shouldn’t be taken off the table completely. In 1997, not too long after Dolly’s birth, a group of prominent individuals put their name to a “Declaration in Defense of Cloning and the Integrity of Scientific Research.”23 Signatories included co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick, scientist and writer Richard Dawkins, and novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
This Declaration acknowledges how knotty an ethical issue human cloning is, and it recognizes up front the need for appropriate guidelines. But where it differs from the later UN Declaration is that its authors suggest that human cloning isn’t as ethically or morally fraught as some people make out. In fact, they state:
“We see no inherent ethical dilemmas in cloning non-human higher animals. Nor is it clear to us that future developments in cloning human tissues or even cloning human beings will create moral predicaments beyond the capacity of human reason to resolve. The moral issues raised by cloning are neither larger nor more profound than the questions human beings have already faced in regards to such technologies as nuclear energy, recombinant DNA, and computer encryption. They are simply new.”
The Declaration doesn’t go so far as to suggest that human reproductive cloning should proceed. But it does say that decisions should be made based on science and reasoned thinking, and it cautions scientists and policy makers to ensure “traditionalist and obscurantist views do not irrelevantly obstruct beneficial scientific developments.”
In other words, the declaration’s authors are clear in their conviction that religious beliefs and mystical thinking should not be allowed to stand in the way of scientific progress.
Ironically, one of the easiest places to find a copy of the “Declaration in Defense of Cloning…” is, in fact, in a treatise that is infused with religious beliefs and mystical thinking: Claude Vorilhon’s monograph Yes to Human Cloning.24
Vorilhon, better known these days by his adopted name of Raël, published the monograph Yes to Human Cloning as a wide-ranging treatise on technological innovation and humanity’s future. And at its center is his rationale for why cloning is not only acceptable, but in fact essential to us achieving our destiny as a species.
Despite its rather unusual provenance, I’d recommend reading Yes to Human Cloning, although I would suggest you approach it with a critical mind and a good dose of skepticism. Raël is a clear and engaging writer, and he makes his case with some eloquence for adopting emerging technologies like nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. In fact, if parts of this work were selectively published with the “I talk to aliens” bits removed, you’d be forgiven for thinking they came from a more mainstream futurist like Ray Kurzweil, or even a technology entrepreneur like Elon Musk. I’d go so far as to say that, when stripped of the really weird stuff, Raël’s vision of the future is one that would appeal to many who see humans as no more than sophisticated animals and technology as a means of enhancing and engineering this sophistication.
In Raël’s mind, human cloning is a critical technology in a three-step program for living forever.25 Some transhumanists believe the route to longevity involves being cryogenically frozen until technology advances to the point at which it can be used to revive and repair them. Others seek longevity through technological augmentation. Raël, though, goes one step further and suggests that the solution to longevity is disposable bodies. And so, we have his three-step program to future immortality, which involves (1) developing the ability to clone and grow a replacement human body, (2) developing the technology to accelerate the rate of growth, so an adult body takes weeks rather than years to produce, and (3) developing the technology to upload our minds into cyberspace, and then download them into a fresh new (and probably upgraded) cloned version of yourself.
Stupendously complex (not to mention, implausible) as this would be, there are people around who think that parts of this plan are feasible enough that they’re already working on it, as we’ll see in later chapters. Raël’s plan would, naturally, require the ability to grow a body outside of a human womb. But this is already an active area of research, as we saw in chapter two. And, as we’ll explore in later chapters, neuroscientists and others are becoming increasingly excited by the prospect of capturing the essence of the human mind, to the point that they can reproduce at least part of it in cyberspace.
What particularly fascinates me here is that, beneath the Raëlian mysticism and UFO weirdness, this movement is playing with ideas that are increasingly garnering mainstream attention. And this means that, even if we won’t be growing bodies in our basements anytime soon, we have to take the possibility of human reproductive cloning seriously. And this means grappling not only with the ethics of the process itself, but also the ethics of how we chose to treat and act toward those clones we create.
Genuinely Human?
Louise Brown was born in the year 1978. What made Louise unique was that she was the world’s first child to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF).
I was thirteen at the time, and not especially interested the bigger world of technology innovation around me (that would come later). But Louise’s birth stuck with me, and it was because of a conversation I remember having with my mother around about this time.
I don’t remember the details. But what I do remember is my mother wondering if a child conceived in a test tube would be like other people as they grew up—most especially, whether they would have a soul.26
Of course, Louise and all the millions of other IVF-conceived babies that have been born over the years, are just as complete as every other of the seven billion plus people living on this planet. There is nothing about the mode of conception that changes the completeness or the value of a person.
This should be self-evident. But as a quick Google search reveals, there are still more people than I would have imagined who are worried about the “humanity” of those conceived outside of biological intercourse.
One example in particular stood out to me as I was writing this chapter. In 2015, a contributor with the alias “Marie18” wrote on the website Catholic Answers Forum:
I learned today that my parents had me and my twin through IVF, and I just feel kind of devastated. Do IVF babies have souls? I would think so, but I just feel really uneasy that I was conceived through science, and I wasn’t in God’s plan for my parents.
So, pretty much what I’m asking is if we have souls or not. I know in my heart that I do, but I’ve read some very upsetting things on the internet by Christians and Catholics.27
It’s heart-rending that anyone should even have to ask this question. But it suggests that the premise of Never Let Me Go isn’t as far-fetched as it might at first seem.
In Never Let Me Go, society absolves itself of the guilt of treating children as a commodity by claiming that clones are somehow less than human, that they are merely human-created animals and no more. It’s a convenient lie—much like the one underpinning the Precrime program we’ll encounter in Minority Report (chapter four)—that allows the non-clones in the movie to tell themselves it’s okay to grow clones for their organs and kill them when they’re done.
What the movie so eloquently illustrates is that, far from being somehow less than human, Tommy and Kathy and Ruth are as human as anyone else in the society they live in. In this respect, Never Let Me Go challenges us to think critically about what defines our humanity and our “worth” as Homo sapiens.
What gives us worth, or value, as individuals, is an increasingly important question as we develop technologies that enable us to not only redesign ourselves, but also use what we know of ourselves to develop new entities entirely. Human enhancement and augmentation, the merging of human and cybernetic systems, artificial intelligence, and cloning, all potentially threaten our sense of identity. And yet we stand at a point in human history where, more than at any previous time, we have the means to alter ourselves and redesign what we want to be.
In this emerging world, “different” is no longer simply something we’re born with, but something we have the means to create. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that our growing technological abilities are heading toward a point where they threaten to fundamentally challenge our identity as a species. And as they do this, they are forcing us to reconsider—just as Never Let Me Go does—what “human” means in the first place.
On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.28 In its first Article, this historic declaration states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
This, and the following twenty-nine Articles of the Declaration, establish a moral and ethical basis for attributes we as a society believe are important: equality, dignity, freedom, and security for all people. But the Declaration doesn’t actually define what “human” means.29
Ask most people, and I have a feeling that the answer to “What is it to be human?” would include attributes such as being self-aware, being able to think and reason, having human form, being the product of a female egg and a male sperm, or being a member of a distinct biological species.30 These seem a not-too-bad starting point as characteristics that we can measure or otherwise identify. But they begin to look a little weak as we develop the ability to reengineer our own biology. They also leave the door open for people or “entities” that don’t easily fit the definition conveniently being labeled as “less than human,” including those that don’t fit convenient but arbitrary norms of physical and intellectual ability, or who are simply perceived as being “different.”
This is not a new challenge, of course. Ironically, one of our defining features as a species is an unerring ability to label those we don’t like, or feel threatened by, as “less than human.” Through some of the most sordid episodes in human history, distinctions of convenience between “human” and “not human” have been used to justify acts of atrocity; it’s easier to justify inhuman acts when you claim that the focus of them isn’t fully human in the first place.
We can surely learn from cases of socially unacceptable behavior that have led to slavery, repression, discrimination, and other forms of abuse. If we cannot, cloning and other technologies that blur our biological identity are likely to further reveal the darker side of our “humanity” as we attempt to separate those we consider worthy of the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from those we don’t.
But in a future where we can design and engineer people in ways that extend beyond our biological origins, how do we define what being “human” means?
As it turns out, this is a surprisingly hard question to answer. However you approach it, and whatever intellectual arguments you use, it’s too easy to come down to an “us versus them” position, and to use motivated reasoning to justify why our particular brand of humanity is the right one. The trouble is, we’re conditioned to recognize humanity as being “of us” (and whoever the “us” is gets to define this). And we have a tendency to use this arbitrary distinction to protect ourselves from those we consider to be “not us.”
The possibility of human reproductive cloning begins to reveal the moral complexities around having the ability to transcend our biological heritage. If we do eventually end up cloning people, the distinction between “like us” (and therefore fully human) and “not like us” (and therefore lacking basic human rights) is likely to become increasingly blurred. But this is only the start.
In 2016, a group of scientists launched a ten-year project to construct a synthetic human genome from scratch. This is a project that ambitiously aims to construct all three billion base pairs of the human genome in the laboratory, from common lab chemicals, and create the complete blueprint for a fully functioning person with no biological parents or heritage. This is the first step in an ambitious enterprise to create a completely synthetic human being within 20 years; a living, breathing person that was designed by computer and grown in the lab.31 If successful (and I must confess that I’d be very surprised if this can be achieved within twenty years), this project will make the moral challenges of cloning seem like child’s play. At least a clone has its origins in a living person. But what will we do if and when we create a being who is like you and me in every single way, apart from where they came from?
This may seem like a rather distant moral dilemma. But it is foreshadowed by smaller steps toward having to rethink what we mean by “human.” As we’ll see in later chapters, mind-enhancing drugs are already beginning to blur the lines between what are considered “normal” human abilities, and what tip us over into technologically-enhanced “abnormal abilities.” Movies like Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven) push this further by questioning the boundaries between machine-enhanced humans and machines with human tendencies. And when we get to the movie Transcendence (chapter nine), we’re looking at a full-blown melding between a human mind and a machine. In each of these cases, using technologies to alter people or to create entities with human-like qualities challenges us with two questions in particular: what does it mean to be “human”? And what are the rights and expectations of entities that don’t fit what we think of as human, yet are capable of thinking and feeling, that have dreams and hopes, and are able to suffer pain and loss?
The seemingly easy way forward here is to try to develop a definition of humanity that encompasses all of our various future creations. But I’m not sure that this will ultimately succeed, if only because this still reflects a way of thinking that mentally divides the world into “human” and “not human.” And with this division comes the temptation to endow the former with all the rights that come with being human and an assumed right to exploit the latter, simply because we don’t think of them as being part of the same privileged club.
Rather, I suspect that, at some point, we will need to transcend the notion of “human” and instead focus on rights, and an understanding of “worth” and “validity” that goes far beyond what we bestow on ourselves as Homo sapiens.
Making this transition will not be easy. But we’ve already begun to make a start in how we think about rights as they apply to other species, and the responsibility we have toward them. Increasingly, there is an awareness that being human does not come with a God-given right to dominate, control, and indiscriminately use other species to our own advantage. But how we translate this into action is difficult, and is often colored by our own ideas of worth and value. In effect, we easily slip into defining what is important by what we think of as being important. For instance, we place greater value on species that are attractive or interesting to us; on animals and plants that inspire awe in us. And we value species more that we believe are important to the sustainability of our world, or what we perhaps arrogantly call “higher” species, meaning those that are closer relatives to us on the evolutionary ladder. And we especially value species that demonstrate human-like intelligence.
In other words, our measures of what has worth inevitably come down to what has worth to us.
This is of course quite understandable. As a species, we are at the top of the food chain, and we’re biologically predisposed to do everything we can to stay there. But this doesn’t help lay down a moral framework for how we behave toward entities that do not fit our ideas of what is worthy.
This will be a substantial challenge if and when we create entities that threaten our humanness, and by implication, the power we currently wield as a species. For instance, if we did at some point produce human clones, they would be our equals in terms of biological form, function, awareness and intellect. But we would know they were different, and would have to decide how to respond to this. We could, of course, grant them rights; we might even declare them to be fully human, or at least honorary members of the human club. But here’s the kicker: What right would we have to do this? What natural authority do we have that allows us to decide the fate of creations such as these? This is a deeply challenging question when it comes to entities that are almost, but not quite, the same as us. But it gets even more challenging when we begin to consider completely artificial entities such as computer- or robot-based artificial intelligence.
We’ll come back to this in movies like Minority Report (chapter four) and Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven). But before we do, there’s one other insight embedded in Never Let Me Go that’s worth exploring, and that’s how easily we fall into justifying technologies that devastate a small number of lives, because we tell ourselves we cannot live without them.
Too Valuable to Fail?
Whichever way you look at it, the society within which Never Let Me Go is situated doesn’t come off that well. To most other people in the movie, the clones are seen as little more than receptacles for growing living organs in, waiting for someone to claim them.
In contrast, the staff at Hailsham are an anomaly, a blip in the social conscience that is ultimately drowned out by the irresistible benefits the Human Donor Program offers. But the morality behind this anomaly is, not to put too fine a point on it, rather insipid. Madame, Miss Emily, and others appear to care for the clones, and want to prove that they have human qualities and are therefore worthy of something closer to “human” dignity. But ultimately, they give way to resignation in a society that sees the donor program as too valuable to end.
As Tommy and Kathy visit Miss Emily to plead for their lives by showing that they are truly in love, we learn that they never had a hope. Miss Emily, Madame, and others were striving to appease their consciences by showing that the clones had a soul, that they were human. Maybe they thought they could somehow use this to change how the clones were treated. But the awful truth is that Miss Emily never believed she could change what society saw the clones as—living caretakers of organs for others. There never was a hope in her mind that the children would be treated as anything other than a commodity. Certainly, she cared for them. But she didn’t care enough to resist an atrocity that was unfolding in front of her eyes.
All of this—the despair, the injustice, the inhumanity, the cruelty—pours out of Tommy as he weeps and rages in the headlights of Kathy’s car. And, standing with him, we know in our hearts that this society has sold itself out to a technology that rips people’s lives and dreams away from them, so that those with the privilege of not being labeled “clone” can live longer and healthier lives.
This, to me, is a message that stays with me long after watching Never Let Me Go—that if we are not careful, technology has the power to rob us of our souls, even as it sustains our bodies, not because it changes who we are, but because it makes us forget the worth of others. It’s a message that’s directly relevant to human cloning, should we ever develop this technology to the point that it’s widely used. But it also applies to other technologies that blur our definitions of “worth,” including the use of technologies that claim to predict how someone will behave, as we’ll see in our next movie: Minority Report.
