More questions than answers? From Brave New World to The Empire Strikes Back, science fiction surrounds us, pervading all aspects of culture. Just because the settings can be alien, doesn’t mean that the plots are. Time and again we see ethical questions rearing their heads in films and books: should clones have the same rights as everyone else? Are mind-altering drugs acceptable? Should we talk to aliens? Science can be billed as a solution to all our woes, but it often seems to raise more questions than it answers.
Clone wars Science fiction often visits the idea of clones: whether to create an army, supply spare body parts or just for some company. In creating our own clones, we thrust upon it incredibly high expectations: to act exactly like us, but at the same time, to do our bidding. Uncomfortably, this ignores the human right to self-determination. Terrifyingly, if this clone is our identical equal, who’s to say we are in charge? Will they share equal rights to our possessions? Soon there could emerge racial tensions between original humans and clones. Not to mention the problem of overpopulation.
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I, Science
SIX Moral dilemmas written by ALex Gwyther, Jade Cawthray, Josh HowGego
Teleportation: a whole new you? Teleportation would be an ideal tool for a fugitive; the ability to instantly appear anywhere in the world could be handy for lots of illegal activities (prison breaks would certainly become easier!) And that’s ignoring the – frankly terrifying – privacy issues. Disturbingly, the process of teleportation also involves your atoms being disassembled at your original location and then reassembled at your destination using local atoms (kind of like sending a fax rather than a physical letter). Thus teleportation effectively makes a copy of you, while the original you is destroyed. Even after sidestepping the tricky question of whether this counts as murder or suicide, there still exists the problematic assumption that the new you will hold true to your original intentions.
I, (evil?) Robot We are already surrounded by machines that exist to serve us, but we are fast developing increasingly human-like robots. Are we comfortable with the idea of one day creating sophisticated android servants to follow their master’s every command? As possessions they would effectively be slaves. As increasingly clever and self-aware androids (potentially with artificial intelligence) there would be a blurry distinction as to what basic rights they would enjoy. Whilst we might create emotionally neutral and uninhibited roboslaves, what’s to stop immoral owners from using their android to fulfil their evil intentions?
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