Ownership In Fact And Fiction
The relationship between the owner and the owned, the master and the slave, has been touched on in many science fiction works. This is an arena where the boundaries between the realms of fiction and theological debate dissolve, and the genre of science fiction merges gracefully into perceptions of reality. It is, in fact, the culmination of the growing idea that what was originally considered fantasy may eventually become a practicality.
To delve right into the heart of the matter, every individual defines a set of entities that are ‘owned’ by him or her. A house, a car, a pet – these are accepted as entities that may be owned or possessed. But morality and ethics come into play when the entity being discussed is capable of mimicking ‘human’ characteristics, viz. emotion and intelligence. If a robot could pass the Turing test, would it have to be treated with the same respect as a fellow human being? Isaac Asimov’s Robot series has this question as a persistent underlying theme. If we consider the real-life question of who should assume responsibility of a cloned human-being, we will have to resolve the issue of ownership, by deciding if a clone ought to be considered the property of another individual, or a human-being in its own right, no different from any other. Like the monster in Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, the clone may hold the scientist responsible for all the misfortune that it deems to have incurred at the hands of destiny.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the concept of individualism is anathema to the individual, a consequence of the strict code of behaviour enforced by society. The society behaves as if it were a self-propelled organism that evolves into a monstrosity where the religion of technology suppresses ethics to create a world of clinical precision.
Asimov’s Foundation series, with a timeline spanning more than twenty-thousand years, gives us an account of a future that is similar in many respects. In Foundation’s Edge, the author borrows from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, extending the societal construct to living organisms in general, and describing a world where the idea of society being greater than the individual results in a Utopian world.
In both these accounts, there is an underlying notion of the society as the owner or overseer of the individual, which is a plausible solution to the problem of defining boundaries of individual ownership. For instance, if we consider the currently ongoing debates on the ethical aspects of human cloning, the primary objection to the technology is that the individual is usurping the responsibilities of a higher power. This dissent is somewhat silenced in Huxley’s world where society, as a power greater than the individual, assumes the responsibility of the overseer or the parent.
The progress of science is towards creating a unified global community as evidenced by the development of communication, transport, global organizations and multinational corporations. Although science may not be the sole factor in these developments, it is the driving force, or the fuel that propels the ship. The scientific method, in a sense, is a religion of modern times, with the abstract society as an overseer or God. Whether this will lead to Huxley’s world or Asimov’s, only time will tell.