Thursday, June 21, 2012

Technology, qua transhumanist hype-conventionality, has an ever growing appeal, more than the vision of the robotics of the Asimovian past, and this may be, perhaps, traced to certain persistent limitations in cognate fields.  


 Practically minded as this author is, I like to suppose that this may be because the biological business of genetic engineering, retro fitting genes, and such like, has not been going as well as anticipated —  this is on the reality side of things — arguably, or perhaps owing to the pesky detail that genes work badly on the model of add-a-gene-and-stir varieties of genetic engineering but also that cloning adult organisms seems to produce young organisms that senesce and die markedly faster than young organisms usually do, no matter whether they be sheep or mice or cats or Korean puppies for the clone-your-Shih-Tzu market, your Fluffy market, Woolly mammoth or what have you.  Because where decimating the female dogs needed for the cloning business hardly matters in terms of time, count thirteen months and a lot more space and suffering for the elephants.  Because we can. 
However badly we do it, we can.  Deaf cats and all.


Forgetting about our fascination with "upgrading" ourselves, improving ourselves, we are all sure that we'd do so much better with that second chance, especially after a make-over, and all the born-again religiousity of the same, cloning dogs is probably the most practicable because abuse-preconditioned, abuse-predicated. 

The dog market in science is like the dogmeat market, except that it is the most egregious, and thus and at the same time seemingly most harmless. Brought to you by South Korea, like North Korea home to an industry of dog torture of all and every kind, culinary, fur and leather industry, and of course, the biggest abuse industry of all: that of science.

For what science does to dogs, and has done from the start with Claude Bernard and his enduring contribution to vivisection (called "research") does not bear thinking about. 


So we don't think about it. 

Thus we ignore, rather especially as philosophers interested in moral questions, the ethically catastrophic dog cloning commercial enterprise, speaking not of whether one should but of the consequences for those who do, quite apart from the dozens and dozens of dogs killed to ‘manufacture’ this one quasi-identical dog — but what is identity? the philosophers ask?  As it was the philosophers, think of Descartes, who empowered animal vivisection from the start with the egoist, humanist distinction between animal or beast and the human being's scientific bestiality. 
Scientific bestiality? Or should we just say bestialism? 



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