Analyzing Moral Disengagement in Never Let Me Go and Nine Lives through Political and Economic Lens
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Analyzing Moral Disengagement in Never Let Me Go and Nine Lives through Political and Economic Lens
Fig 1. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Nine Lives by Ursula K. Le Guin
Odds are we have to make decisions in daily life that conflict with certain ethics more frequently than we might be aware of. Shall I buy cheaper goods that may have been produced under unethical labor conditions or opt for pricier, fair-trade alternatives? Shall I still visit zoos or circuses for my entertainment or not in order to stop encouraging the businesses to exploit animals for profits? If we ask such questions to ourselves, it’s often harder to opt for the ethical option especially when that option requires us to stop something that we are currently indulging ourselves in. Trying to understand how people justify opting for the path that they know is unethical or how they try to mitigate their guilt is enlightening in that it reveals much of nature about humans. Never Let Me Go and Nine Lives are perhaps two of the best stories that enable us to explore these ideas in nuanced settings. In each story, ethical questions are implied through a plot built around human cloning. To explore humans’ behaviors in response to moral dilemmas in both stories, the nuances of the setting in which cloning takes place must be understood. Therefore, this essay will first analyze the political and economic landscapes that the human clones have to deal with, after which it will discuss how unethical the cloning initiative is and how humans in the stories attempted to justify, in varying degrees, their moral misconduct.
To see how ethical dilemmas are portrayed in Never Let Me Go, it’s necessary to first examine the political and societal context shaping the treatment of clones. It can be found that the little opportunity provided by the likes of Hailsham for the clones to secure a proper life is highly dependent on the dynamism of two layers of support, public societal support and politicians/corporate’s financial support.
The central reason behind the fragility of the support Miss Emily’s movement received was most likely that the majority of the supporters who actually made financial contributions (sponsors) were the politicians and corporations, whose main interest lay in pleasing whatever momentary sensation that the public had instead of genuinely caring about the clones’ lives. This phenomenon is encapsulated in Miss Emily’s words, “So long as the climate was in our favor, so long as a corporation or a politician could see a benefit in supporting us, then we were able to keep afloat”. They leveraged this humanitarian movement by supporting it as a way to manifest themselves as being aligned with public perception and, therefore, to gain public favor. It is somewhat analogous to cosmetic firms’ response to evolving public perception towards animal cruelty. Just to market their products in alignment with customers’ values, many cosmetic firms strive to put a cruelty-free label on their products by aiming to just pass the bare minimum definitions of “cruelty-free” instead of ensuring that no animal testing has been used in any phase of their product development and their suppliers [1]. Unlike the public perception of animal cruelty, public perception towards the clones came to experience a complete reversal due to several factors, among which only the Morning Dale Scandal and a television series were mentioned. Being superficial supporters of the movement, politicians and corporations halted their support when contributing to the movement went against public perception and stopped bringing a political or economical advantageous edge to them. In fact, the nature of those sponsors is hinted at in a slightly sarcastic way when Miss Emily told the line, “All of those influential people who’d once been so keen to help us, well of course, they all vanished.”
When it comes to societal support by the public, their favor for the humanitarian movements to raise the clones properly is likely their way of making themselves feel less guilty for their exploitation of the clones, thereby justifying, to some extent, their continuation of exploitation. While there must be people like Miss Emily and Madame who genuinely care about the clones, there must also be those who chose to prioritize humanity’s health benefits over the clones’ suffering, albeit with some guilt, after battling with their dilemma. From “…by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late”, it’s clear that their sympathy wasn’t sufficient enough to stop them from reversing what they’ve started. In order to keep indulging in exploiting the clones more comfortably, they would need to make themselves feel less guilty by supporting the likes of Miss Emily’s movements. This action basically manifests itself as the process of rationalizing unethical behavior to reduce guilt, which is formally termed “Moral Disengagement” [2]. In particular, their support can be seen as an attempt to reduce their guilt by coming up with an action that they can trivialize (harvesting organs from well-raised clones) by contrasting with a more immoral behavior (harvesting organs from hostilely raised clones). It is similar to a hypothetical situation where a company that exploits labor in developing countries compares itself to competitors that use outright child labor, saying, “At least we pay our workers minimum wage, unlike Company X, which employs underage workers in hazardous conditions.” Although this “advantageous comparison” definitely makes them look less unethical, it doesn’t change the fact that their labor exploitation from developing countries is a questionable corporate behavior. Likewise, the net suffering of the clones has never been really less no matter the tide of public perception. After all, being educated to form high ambitions only to realize in the end that their ambitions are not achievable and being nurtured to be able to form love for one another only to be separated in the end are devastating for the clones in a different pain if not as a severe pain as being reared badly and kept uncivilized. Therefore, by the time they stopped feeling guilty due to the Morning Dale Scandal and other factors, they no longer felt the need to compensate for their guilt, and the clones were brought back into the dark.
On the other hand, Nine Lives portrays human cloning more as an urgent need to fix humanity’s decline in terms of natural resources and genetics pool rather than as humans’ greed to improve their well-being as in Never Let Me Go. The lack of national governments especially after global catastrophes like Famines reflects a society unified by a common goal of sustaining humanity in contrast to a society with patriotic goals of maximizing their own group/nation’s profits. In such a setting, it’s natural to assume that there’s one singular “global organization” that takes over functions previously managed by national governments. Looking at the use of ‘taxpayer’ instead of ‘investor’ in “They’ve worked these matters of technique and function out carefully. The taxpayer wants the best for his money, and of course clones are expensive.”, the cloning initiative is observed to serve societal needs rather than a handful of interested individuals, and it is likely taxpayers who mostly foot the bill for whichever humanity-sustaining initiatives that the global organization operates.
Since the global organization had discovered the immense benefits the clones can bring and they wanted to make the best of taxpayer’s money, there was probably a need for justification for the ethicality of cloning initiatives to the public, which could urge them to frame cloning as the necessity for survival or progress. This sense of necessity alone was already enough to incentivize the public to support the cloning program just as the ability to cure cancer was. But, unlike Never Let Me Go, there was no portrayal of people’s ethical dilemma whatsoever in the story although the way that the clones had been raised is inherently unethical. To see why, the creation of the clones and the training that they receive were optimized to work efficiently for resource exploitation through collective identity with their twins. As depicted in the words, “But we think alike. …. . Explanations are easy — don’t even have to make them, usually. We seldom misunderstand each other. It does facilitate our working as a team.”, collective identity offers the clones enhanced work efficiency. However, it presumably came at the cost of having to avoid training them to accept other selves’ perceptions and feelings (apart from their twin clones) that can fundamentally change the way a clone thinks. A clone’s thinking should not be diffused by other selves’ philosophies in order to maintain a shared thinking pattern among their twin clones. This is apparent when a John Chow’s clone, Kaph, became the sole remainder among their twins, and Owen makes the remark, “He never had to see anyone else before. He never was alone before. He had himself to see, talk with, live with, nine other selves all his life.” Basically, this extreme optimization for teamwork efficiency among the clones undermines their flexibility to work with other selves and the ability to live independently. This might contrast with Pugh’s initial impression of the clones, “A clone, he thought, might indeed be the first truly stable, self-reliant human being.” But, it is questionable whether an individual clone can be truly called “self-reliant” if they have to be physically and emotionally dependent on its twin clones on an extreme level. It is akin to parents nurturing their child in a way that the child becomes too reliant on their parents and doesn’t know how to live without them. Instead of parental love in this analogy, the optimization towards reliance on one another (collective identity) among clones is driven by efficiency. Meanwhile, the work they’re supposed to carry out as an Exploit team is inherently dangerous, which can potentially separate the twin clones by death. This contrast between their nature and the work they were supposed to do is what makes cloning in Nine Lives unethical.
Humans in Nine Lives don’t seem to feel guilty about using the clones as mere tools or about the potentially tragic life of the clones after they’re separated from their twins. An obvious reason is that they were not raised hostilely or guaranteed to be brutally dissected as in Never Let Me Go, and their misfortune is subtle instead. Besides, the government body likely created the clones such that they sought their purpose through work, and were, therefore, happy with their work. To be fair, cloning is described as monetarily costly, and if they were created to just live as a normal human being with full autonomy, it wouldn’t be worth the cost. The fact that the clones were specially designed for work efficiency allows humans to perceive them as lesser sub-humans. This method of moral disengagement called “Dehumanizing” lets humans remove their guilt and emotional discomfort about using the clones with collective identity by stripping them of humanity. Although the clones were also dehumanized in Never Let Me Go, the brutality might have been still too significant to not feel guilty, which led humans to support movements like Hailsham as a compensatory mechanism for the period of time the clones were not deemed as a threat to humanity.
It’s easier said than done to always choose an ethically right option, but if the decision can fundamentally change one’s life, it’s extremely tempting to allow practicality or necessity to override ethics, which I can well vouch for from my first-hand experience. When the universities in my country, Myanmar, reopened after the coup in 2021, I faced a dilemma of whether or not to join a local university given my family’s inability to afford my tertiary education in a foreign country. At that time, there were citizens who chose to give up their higher education to exercise the civil disobedience movement by not participating in any machinery that the illegal government operates. My justification mechanism when I initially decided to join a local university took the form of, “The political situation cannot be any better just because I choose not to engage in their system”. Even though I was aware that there would be many individuals reasoning like me, not just a single ‘I’, I still clung to my justification for a period of time, trying to make it feel valid. In hindsight, this experience reflects how moral disengagement can feel deeply personal yet mirrors broader societal patterns. Recognizing these justification mechanisms not only helps us navigate our own ethical dilemmas but also helps us evaluate the broader systems that allow such moral compromises. Ultimately, the nuanced portrayal of cloning in “Never Let Me Go” and “Nine Lives” urges us to confront uncomfortable truths about our treatment of other living beings in the name of progress.
References
[1] The Problem with “Cruelty-Free” Cosmetics – Rise for Animals](https://riseforanimals.org/news/the-problem-with-cruelty-free-cosmetics/)