CHAPTER 18

Clones and Free Will

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is
determinism; the way you play it is free will.”
—Jawaharlal Nehru

So much of our personality and character is fixed by our genes and our upbringing that, from the time of the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, philosophers have speculated as to whether free will exists or is just an illusion. Circumstances, also, can limit our sense of freedom: An intelligent, fit child born to an upper-middle-class, white family with loving parents has more freedom in life than a disabled child born to a poor single mother with seven other children.

On top of the normal constraints on free will, people created by cloning would seem to have special problems. They have not only the determinism of their genes to contend with, but also the life of their ancestor. If this ancestor died from a genetic disease like early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, is it a foregone conclusion that the clone would also die this way? Suppose, too, the ancestor was a talented singer. Would the cloned woman have any choice in also becoming a singer? Certainly expectations would be great that she would, as we have discussed. So would she really be free to shun singing and instead become a nun or an elementary school teacher?

This question of free will also appears, if in an understated way, in Orphan Black. After arranging Helena’s capture and imprisonment, Dr. Coady explains to her why she is so valuable: “Helena, you have overcome so much: your upbringing, your biology, your fate. This makes you quite a special case. We are going to find out how.” Of course, Helena is so special and free that she also escapes her captors. So perhaps there is room in cloned people for free will, after all.

BASIC PHILOSOPHICAL POSITIONS ON FREE WILL

Thinking in the history of philosophy about free will has revolved around five basic stances: fatalism, determinism, indeterminism, incompatibilism, and compatibilism. Within the last, compatibilism, there are also significant variations.

Fatalism holds that no matter what you decide, certain key events in your future are fixed. Oedipus might try not to sleep with his mother or kill his father and sail away to avoid his fate, but when he returns many years later, he does exactly that. Similarly, if you have certain autosomal dominant hereditary diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, then—absent a miraculous cure in the coming decades— you are going to get this terrible disease.

Clearly some things are fixed, no matter how hard we try to avoid them. We are mortal. Our bodies age and our minds decline. By age sixty, we will likely look a lot like our mother or father, or a combination of the two, at that age, so if both were thirty pounds overweight and if mom’s dad was bald and dad was bald, you are likely be thirty pounds overweight and bald as well. We can fight these processes, but only so far.

However, just because some things in life are fixed doesn’t mean that everything is. Fatalism is often confused with determinism, the view that nothing happens randomly and every event has a cause. Fatalism focuses on causes outside our control, such as a driver who runs a red light and hits our car.

Determinism is an operational thesis in science and ordinary life: If a tree suddenly falls on a playground in California, we assume something caused the tree to fall, such as water-soaked earth and strong winds. If my tooth starts to hurt, I look for the cause of that new phenomenon; perhaps something I have recently eaten has caused this change. If I cannot discover the cause on my own, I will see a dentist.

Indeterminism holds that some events are uncaused. In the free will debate, it then equates “uncaused” with “free.” This view is associated with existentialism and especially the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who wrote that humans are “condemned to be free,” meaning that free will is a burden that inauthentic people seek to escape.

Compatibilism holds that determinism can be true and we can still have a range of free will. Incompatibilism claims that free will and determinism are incompatible. Defenders of compatibilism include the English empiricist David Hume and the modern philosopher Robert Kane.

In the case of my hurt tooth, I could be fatalistic and assume I have no control over my teeth, or I could decide that I have a choice and try to discover the cause. Even if something has injured my tooth, compatibilists think I still have some control over my life and body. If the tooth is broken, I can choose to have it fixed.

Compatibilism sees indeterminists’ demand that free actions have no causal antecedents as unjustified. For compatibilists, free decisions do not occur in a vacuum; they just proceed from our desires and decisions.

Indeterminists might retort, “But can you choose your own desires? Who shaped them? If they are not self-chosen, you are unfree.”

Suppose that I recall eating hard candy the day before the pain began in my tooth. Now I infer that eating the hard candy may have caused my tooth to break. Suppose I then vow, to save my teeth, to never eat hard candy again. Am I then free?

Some determinists say I am not because I cannot choose to like hard candy or not and cannot choose whether I want to avoid pains in my teeth. These are just “given” desires. As an adult, I like sweets and I also dislike pain in my tooth. If I must be able to choose such desires to be free, then I am not free.

On the other hand, what most people want from free will is not the ability to choose their desires from a buffet of possible desires, but instead to be able to act to satisfy the desires they have. I’d like to keep my teeth and eat hard candy, but if I can’t do both, I can decide to do one or the other. If I can do that, I’m free enough for me.

In general, by the time we arrive as adults, most of our desires, such as our sexual orientation, are fixed, and not only are we not free to change them, it is not necessarily good or desirable to do so. What we want, when we say we wish to be free, compatibilists assert, is a non-fatalistic open future where, say, our desire to take a walk in the evening is not thwarted by external events beyond our control. If a violent storm begins and we cannot walk, we are not as free as we thought—but even then, if we are so foolish, we are free to take the risk. In the same way, we are free to determine if eating hard candy has caused our teeth to break, and to refrain from eating such candy in the future.

So when Helena is caged by Tomas, or imprisoned in a cell in the desert by Dr. Coady and the Castors, she has little freedom because she cannot act on her desires to immediately escape, to eat what she wants, and so on. She is unfree because external events control her range of choices.

But she still possesses some small range of free actions, as evidenced by her hoarding of butter packets in Mexico and her eventual escape from both jailers. In the same way, even though Sarah is strapped down to a gurney before her impending oophorectomy, Cosima arms Sarah with a gun that shoots a sharpened pencil into Rachel’s eye, giving Sarah a triumphant free action.

CLONED HUMANS AND FREE WILL

So what choices do Ledas and Castors have? First, let’s reiterate something we established early on in this book: Clones are not zombies. Zombies have no souls, hence, they have no free will.

Second, Ledas and Castors are persons. If persons have free will, then human clones have free will.

Third, notice that genetic essentialism—which asserts that “Genes ‘R’ Us” for all people (clones included)—is a version of fatalism, one that puts all the weight of formation of character on what we inherit biologically. Yet we already know that genetic essentialism is false, because our environment affects the expression of our inherited genes. So we can toss genetic essentialism out the window, which allows free action to enter.

PSYCHOLOGICAL UNFREEDOM

When we move from genetics to psychology, the discussion about free will shifts from genes to expectations and reinforcement. Seminal psychological thinkers like Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner assert that although humans may be free or unfree in other senses, in their emotional and mental states, they are completely determined and unfree because of the influence of their parents or the conditioning of their upbringing. It is here that cloned humans may also be especially vulnerable to charges of being unfree.

For example, most of us in early childhood want to please our parents, whether our parents’ desire for us is athletic prowess, financial success, or educational attainment. Suppose, as a clone, you only have one parent, your ancestor, a great piano player, and she desires that you learn to play the piano. How free would you be to resist?

One problem here stems from only having the one parent. The more control a person has over a child, the less free the child. This is why some people wish to homeschool their child—because they want complete control over how and what their child learns. This is also why others object to homeschooling—because they want to ensure that all children get a broad education.

Let’s imagine that all of a cloned child’s “mothers”—the genetic ancestor, the egg donor, the surrogate, and the raising mother—were both part of her life and conspired to urge her to play the piano. Assume also the child is homeschooled by one of these women. Would the girl have much of a chance of resisting learning to play the piano?

Probably not.

Okay, let’s make it even worse. Instead of homeschooling, suppose that a twelve-year-old cloned child is sent to the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Magnet School for the Performing Arts. Suppose her ancestor is Beyoncé. Suppose every child and teacher at this school knows that she is a clone of Beyoncé. At this school, she meets a twelve-year-old boy whose last name is Mozart and who made his debut on the piano at age four, reinforcing the idea that cloned children are obligated to develop their God-given talents.

Here the child is faced with the expectations not only of her ancestor parent, but also her entire school and, quite possibly, her entire community. Could that mini-Beyoncé really resist if the voice teacher asked her to sing? To try out for a role in the upcoming school musical?

Chances are very high that a cloned child, so long as she and those around her knew she was cloned, would enjoy a smaller range of free acts than a normal child. I don’t see any way around this conclusion, unless you were to deny that the reason to clone Beyoncé is for her most well-known qualities.

Despite this, some wiggle room for free will remains. After all, not every daughter of a Baptist minister becomes a devout Baptist—and, in fact, the wild minister’s daughter who revolts against her father is downright cliché.

Amazingly and famously, birth order may even be important to the development of personality and to how much free will children exhbit. Firstborn children notoriously seek to please their parents. Less time is spent on second-born, who tend to be contrarians, partly in order to get attention. After the French Revolution, firstborns famously favored not executing aristocrats and preserving the social order, while almost all the second-borns (who were in control) favored sending them to the guillotine to start over with a new social order.

The most dramatic diminution of free will in Orphan Black is seen in the Castors. Because they were raised together and in isolation, and for a specific purpose, their range of free actions seems much smaller than the Ledas, who at least were raised (mostly) by normal families and only monitored, not controlled. So we can’t imagine the Castors training to be cellists or flutists in an orchestra, nor can we imagine them wanting to be school counselors. They are human “action figures”—primed for quick strikes, taking orders, and acting like a military platoon on patrol in enemy territory.

ELBOW ROOM

The philosopher Daniel Dennett, famous for his writings on free will, argues that “the kind of freedom worth having” does not require us to choose everything (our desires, our parents, whether to be born, etc.) but simply requires us to have some real choice in our actions, which he refers to as having some “elbow room” to act.

Based on having inherited genes from one ancestor, and the expectations by those who raise them based on that ancestor’s genes, cloned children may be less free than normal children. (It is also true that similar parental expectations on children created sexually might equally limit any child’s range of free action.) But even cloned children have some elbow room, such as rebelling against expectations thrust on them. It is also theoretically possible that a child cloned from a certain kind of ancestor might be as free, or even more free, than normal. Suppose the ancestor was a notorious freethinker, rebel, or contrarian. And suppose the child’s creators went to great pains not to manipulate the child into any outcome. In that case, it would be very interesting to see what occurred.

As some philosophers have emphasized, what is most important for free will is degrees of self-awareness. In one sense, this is the whole point of most forms of psychotherapy: to give you insight into why you feel and act the way you do, say, from a desire to please your hard-to-please dad. Only by becoming aware of the forces controlling your actions, therapists say, can you choose to go against them or continue to let them control you.

In the same way, a self-aware Leda such as Rachel has more choices and more freedom than Krystal Goderitch, a non-self-aware clone. Though the other Ledas, such as Cosima, Helena, Sarah, and Alison, became aware of their origins later in life, the events of the show are a testament to their free choices ever since.

Deep down, anyone can resist expectations placed on them. Once adults are on their own, especially if they achieve insight through reflection and counseling (or, say, discovery of their origin as a clone), anyone can be free.