Despite the overwhelming science behind that finding, industry and activists have called for a ban on cloned food products. Naturally, you might think that lockstep agreement from such unlikely bedfellows is a little fishy. And you'd be right. The losers would be American consumers, farmers, and the environment. -- Gregory Conko, AmSpec
Here comes The Science again, turning winners in yesterday's absolute terms into tomorrow's relative-gains losers. But relatively speaking, all the real reasons to clone are pointed squarely at satisfying the ever-expanding human demand for a cheap and steady diet of meats. Conko gets it wrong when he claims that the
abundant evidence of safety is why the critics have had to focus attention away from the science. Instead they ask, even if we can clone animals safely, why should we?
Maybe The Critics have done this to The Science, but the implication here is that any critic must make such a move. I however ignore the health-and-safety issue because it's irrelevant to the real argument, which has two parts. The motto that if we can do anything well we should do it merely begs the question. The first part can be illustrated like this: If we can safely produce towering udder-blobs, mutant vertical cows we can pack into warehouses like huge upright sticks of butter, then why shouldn't we? It's safe! The second part can be illustrated like this: it's a post-apocalyptic planet. Nuclear exchange has resulted in only five cows living on Earth. Clone gigantic cubic udders, or don't? Different calculus, isn't it, than one in which we clone out of boredom, or because we can, or because we want people to eat more hamburgers?
But of course the counterargument here is that if it's scientifically proven to be an acceptable risk to health, well then it's an acceptable risk to returns on investment, and send those piggies to market. It's easy for people with 'traditional values' to find cloning non-trivial on the theory that humans don't have the proper authority to machine multiply uniquely created beings. But clone boosters involve themselves in a dangerous game by pretending that cloning's a trivial exercise of power on its own terms, something we should readily do if the science tells us to. The logic of applied science pushes us progressively to take cumulative knowledge for granted. This is only natural as far as the logic of science itself is concerned. But when it's applied -- when it cashes out in power -- it becomes increasingly difficult to phrase any future arguments about restraint in terms of the abuse of power.
Which is where our new insect overlords come in -- a superintelligent visionary class of selectively bred human management-leaders who know what's best and have gamed out the next 10,000 years, to whom we've ceded the power to administer our own shared affairs on the basis of the organic judgments that politics can produce.
The scientific push for artificial social power opposes the natural social power of politics -- which, as history shows, can also produce some horrible things, when unchecked, but if power can't itself check power, then whatever can? Suddenly the argument from authority looks to have a practical force itself.
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