Marxism, Alienation, Cloning, and Descartes’ Philosophy
Classification of Types of Alienation: Karl Marx
Karl Marx distinguishes several types of alienation:
Religious Alienation
Religious alienation is a psychological state stimulated by the priests, who encourage belief in a perfect afterlife. This serves to alleviate the hardships of the present. The radical problem with this is that subjects seek happiness in the hereafter and neglect to change the material circumstances of real life, as this belief encourages conformity.
Economic Alienation
Some social classes hold goods and services privately, alienating others. The rich are not alienated by this, but those who are deprived of goods that should belong to everyone equally are. Marx denounced the expropriation of farmers by landowners, which causes rural exodus. For example, the Andalusian estates are based on a right that oppresses the great majority of farmers who use the land.
In an industrial context, alienation occurs because the means of production belong to the capitalist, while the worker offers their labor as a commodity. The worker’s situation is similar to that of a prostitute. Furthermore, the surplus value, i.e., the profit made by the employer, is fundamentally unjust since the worker is paid a salary that does not reflect the full benefit from the sale of their work.
Legal Alienation
Marx argued that laws are not designed to be equal but have an imbalance in favor of the rich. In the 19th century, stealing a piece of string cheese was punished with a life sentence in Australia. Most of Australia’s initial population of migrants were ex-convicts who were punished for insignificant offenses. Today, the criminal code still exhibits the same asymmetry. Small crimes are punished disproportionately and are unfairly valued monetarily.
Political Alienation
Political alienation is characterized by the democratic system, which in theory represents the interests of the citizens but in reality only represents those who have property.
Reproductive and Therapeutic Cloning
The reproductive cloning of animals or people and therapeutic cloning are methods to obtain organs and tissues for transplantation. They begin the same way: a cell is taken, but then they diverge. One leads to a living human embryo, and the other is a solution to an illness. As there are very few donors and long waiting lists, cloning is presented as a solution to keep many people alive.
To make a clone, the genes are extracted from a cell and introduced into another, modifying the genetic instructions. Cloning could potentially involve removing water from cells. Reproductive cloning only requires a healthy cell. However, reproductive cloning can be dangerous because it may lead to slavery or genocide. A clone is not the same as the cloned person; it does not feel, think, or act the same way, nor will it have the same friendships.
17th-Century Discourse on Method
Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas were philosophers and believers of the Middle Ages who believed that the soul had to do with God. Descartes thought similarly and raised a hypothesis: the difference between thought, ideas, and feelings with matter. According to him, animals belong to the realm of automatic “res extensa,” meaning they are biological machines.
In his thesis, he asks whether we could create machines that might think. He supposed that they could not have articulate speech, that machines could not understand our complex language or reproduce it, nor could they keep a conversation with us. They also could not multitask. He predicted that machines tuned to specific tasks might be better than us but rigid, meaning they will be designed for a single purpose.