When the parts of an old fountain pen used in the Blue House are replaced with new ones, does the historical value lie in the new fountain pen or in the replica fountain pen made from old parts, raising questions about the choice between natural and customized humans.
In the presidential office of the Blue House, there is an old fountain pen. It has been used by past presidents of South Korea for generations, mainly when the president was taking notes during meetings or signing off on something. Over time, several presidents have changed, but this fountain pen has been passed down from one president to the next under the care of the Cheong Wa Dae, and has been used in meetings dealing with important national issues. However, the fountain pen, which has been a part of South Korea’s history, recently broke down from years of use and was sent to be repaired. The fountain pen was found to have more defects than expected, and almost all of its parts had to be replaced with new ones before it could be repaired.
Imagine that the repairman, who didn’t want to waste the parts of this historically significant fountain pen, made another fountain pen from the old parts. This new fountain pen uses most of the parts from the broken fountain pen and looks exactly the same. In this case, which of the two fountain pens has a meaningful place in Korean history? Which fountain pen should be considered the “real” fountain pen?
The movie Kataka asks the question, “If given the choice, would you choose a natural human being or a genetically engineered, customized human being?” It assumes that both humans have the same genes and traits, and that the only way to distinguish between them is whether or not their genes have been manipulated. The argument against the adoption of technology on the grounds that it would lead to a society that judges people by their genes is not relevant to the critique, because it is a societal argument, not an individual choice. There are many ways to answer this question from an individual choice perspective, but I have interpreted it as “can we distinguish between what is real and what is not real”.
The proponents of choosing natural humans say that custom humans are just fake humans derived from natural humans. They argue that natural humans are real humans, and that custom humans can be distinguished from fake humans. They also argue that the real always trumps the fake, and that the real is more valuable because of its stochastic scarcity of occurring “naturally”. By this logic, a fountain pen that has been replaced with new parts is superior to a fountain pen that has been made from old parts, and the fact that it happened to be used in the Blue House is also more valuable due to its stochastic scarcity. Therefore, the “fountain pen dilemma” mentioned above leads to the conclusion that the fountain pen that replaced the original fountain pen with new parts is the “real” fountain pen.
The position in favor of choosing the natural type of human is convincing based on many examples from everyday life. For example, replicas are not always superior to originals, and expensive precious metals are valued because of their scarcity. Ontologically and probabilistically, it’s hard to deny their logic.
However, if you were to transfer all the genes from a fertilized egg with wild-type genes into another empty fertilized egg, no one would argue that this is genetic manipulation, because all the genetic components have not been manipulated, only the houses that contain the genes have been replaced. And if the house that holds the genes looks the same, then the original value has been transferred. Isn’t this similar to taking the parts of a broken fountain pen and making another fountain pen? It’s like taking the original parts and putting them into a new shell with the same shape.
In other words, just as the original gene is worth the same as if all the genes were put into a different shell, the fountain pen is worth the same as if the parts of the broken fountain pen were put into the same shell. This conclusion negates the previous proposition, “A fountain pen replaced with new parts is worth more than a new fountain pen made with the original parts,” because the combination of the two propositions leads to the conclusion that the “new fountain pen replaced with new parts” is worth more than the “original broken fountain pen” that has the same value as the “new fountain pen with only the parts,” which leads to the logical fallacy that replacing something with something new always increases its value.
In the end, the fountain pen dilemma leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to distinguish which is the more valuable “real” fountain pen. Even if we put aside the issue of the superiority of the value of real versus fake, it’s a matter of not being able to distinguish between real and not real. If you can’t tell, then the answer is “it doesn’t matter which one you choose”. Applying the same logic to genes, we can’t say which one is “real”: the wild-type gene or the engineered gene. Since we can’t tell which gene is real and which is fake, we can’t think of a difference in value.
The “fountain pen dilemma” is a fictional thought experiment; we don’t know if such a fountain pen actually exists in the Blue House. However, by using a similar example to our argument, we can see that there is a lack of reason to choose between a natural human being and a customized human being. Therefore, if we can choose to live as a natural human being or a customized human being, it doesn’t matter which one we choose because there is no difference in value between the two.
