PT Do you think there could be a moral way to create a clone army?

I, like many other people, think that creating short-lived, deeply indoctrinated slave soldiers whose only purpose is to fight their owner's wars is deeply immoral...

But I wonder... among the hundreds of alien species created for novels, series and games, is there any species of innate natural soldiers whose only purpose in life is to fight, not because of some external manipulation or because of their culture, but because that is just what they are?

If there is a species like that... do you think it would have been okay to use them as template for a clone army?

 

Trandoshans maybe?

 

If you found a species that shares a hive mind it would be moral because anyone of them agreeing to be cloned would mean all of them agree. And once the clones were born/hatched/whatever, the new clone would immediately be okay with having been cloned and sent off to war because of the hive mind.

 

To create an army of clones with their own personalities and Individual consciousnesses, and to give them no other choice in their life but to fight, is immoral. I don’t think there’s really any way around it.

The fact that the Republic and the Jedi went along with it in the prequels illustrates how desperate things were getting and how clouded the judgment of the Order was getting. In my opinion.

 

Clone armies are essentially organic droid armies or slave armies. Ideally war and military service should be voluntary(or the cause should itself justify conscription).

The whole war was a one sided chess game. That isn't to say things were bad, but the conflict would not have happened without the Sith and Palpatine.

 

Even Ancient Sparta would balk at the concept of forcing a whole race to think nothing of battle. Sure they glorified battle in their mythologies, but they also believed in free will. There’s a difference between ‘a culture that decides for themselves to have pride in combat prowess’ vs. ‘a culture forced to fight for someone else regardless of personal choice’

For the Clones, I think it’s evident they didn’t have a hive mind. Wasn’t there an episode in The Clone Wars where one of them told Mundi, “We’re clones, sir. We’re meant to be disposable.” They don’t have a choice, and they know it.

 

I suppose that any species whose sole purpose was warfare would have wiped themselves out pretty quickly. So, I don’t think that such a species would have existed to be used as a template.

Even if such a species did exist, it would still have been immoral to use them in this way. I say this because they would have been manipulated to fight and die for the purpose of an alien government. Although the species would be fulfilling a natural urge, their natural behaviours would be directed and exploited by outside influences.

Regarding the clones, although I do agree that the Kaminoans were immoral in their creation of the clone army, I can imagine how they justified it to themselves. Without the Kaminoans, the clones would never have existed. The Kaminoans were given the genetic template and funds to create the clones for the sole purpose of creating an army. Therefore, in order to exist, the clones had to be part of the army.

The Kaminoans may have argued that it was better that the clones were given life and a purpose (regardless of how short and violent those lives were) than to have never existed at all.

 

This is a difficult question, but my instinct is that the answer is no, there was no moral way to create the clone army. In the specific instance of the Grand Army of The Republic (the clone army we actually got), you have to consider that they were indoctrinated for the purpose of carrying out Order 66. They were always designed to answer to a single, unaccountable autocrat, rather than a set of ideals or moral code. Now, even if you made them without the behavior inhibitor chips, they were still being designed to take orders from an elite leadership within the Republic. The whole point of creating a clone army is that they will not think for themselves, they will have perfect, monolithic loyalty. That doesn't always play out according to plan, but it's the objective. Otherwise, the Republic might as well have just raised a traditional army with its own officer corp and military code of justice.

But with all the fantastic science-fiction possibilities in Star Wars, maybe there could be a way to do it morally, idk. I thought this scene from the end of Clone Wars was especially moving, really capped off the journey of the clones and the moral dilemma at the heart of the issue. Fittingly, neither Rex nor Ahsoka have a definitive answer to the question:

 

The Republic could have sidestepped this whole morality issue if they had just used battle droids themselves. This is why I dislike battle droids...once you establish that your fictional sci-fi civilization has the technology to replace organic soldiers with battle robots, there's absolutely no reason not to use them.

 

The benefit of clones over droids is apparently, that they can "think creatively".

 

Yeah I know Lama Su says that in AOTC, but I don't see how that outweighs the fact that droid production vastly outstrips clone production. I'm pretty sure that factory on Geonosis can assemble a droid in a few hours...maybe a day at the longest? Meanwhile it takes something like ten years to grow a clone. Droid factories can be set up on hundreds of worlds, while there's only one Kamino (which is covered entirely by water btw). From what we've seen in the movies, video games, and TCW, I'm sure 10-20 battle droids can defeat one clone trooper, and if I'm correct then it takes far less time and resources to build those droids.

Getting back to the morality issue. Why send organic beings to fight, even if they're artificially cloned, only to watch the horror of them getting incinerated and blasted to pieces on the battlefield? The only possible justification would be if those clones were vastly superior to droids...but if they aren't, then why? Even if droids were only about 80% as effective as clones, I would say there's still a strong case in favor of droids.

 

I think it's safe to say that the real reason for the production of clones was that Palpatine wanted them there, behind every Jedi commander, to carry out Order 66.

Which was probably why he stopped production of new clones after the war - because Kamino clones aren't cost-effective.

 

Well...Order 66 would be even easier to carry out if it were done by droids. Inserting that into their programming would be infinitely simpler than designing that weird organic brain chip.

 

Maybe - but both sides having huge armies of droids would kind of have given the game away.

 

I think the clone army is one of the BIG missteps in the Prequels. And no, I am not a Prequel hater, by far.

If you clone a human being, you get a human being. If you manipulate that human being's genetic structure so that they more easily obey orders, crave hierarchical structure, and so forth, unless you do something WILDLY radical, you STILL have a human being. Even if you want to argue that the clone troopers aren't "really" human beings, because they have been tampered with so much, they are still clearly sentient, intelligent beings (and in the SW universe, what does "human" mean, or matter? We see dozens of "alien races" after all, with, I am sure, a wide range of temperaments, attitudes, emotions, etc). In other words, as has been discussed above and elsewhere, you are creating a slave army of "sentient beings" and using them, quite literally.

It's horrifying - and yet it seems to disturb almost no one. Granted, the movies only have so much time, they can only deal with so much, but this is such a huge and bizarre story element, I found it VERY hard to take all of the various "good guys" (not simply the Jedi) just buying in. I don't recall any character, balking, on screen, on simple moral grounds.

(In general, the military situations in the Prequels, and in the Sequels, are very poorly explained, IMHO. Painting the Republic into a corner so that they almost MUST adopt the clone army was, to me, really strange and very badly justified, and in the Sequels, the whole "the First Order is at war with the Resistance, not the actual New Republic government, was a real head scratcher).