Don't be a schmuck.

In our philosophy unit at school, we are beginning to read books that will get us to ponder philosophical issues. The book that my group has decided to read is The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. this book is about a young boy names Matt who discovers he is a clone of a powerful drug lord. The book then follows Matt's life from then on.
As a clone, Matt is generally regarded as a unholy limb of Satan. In fact, in one chapter of the book, he is living in the equivalent of a chicken pen, if not in worse conditions, for several weeks.  This got me thinking as to why he was treated so badly. Yes, Matt is a clone, but he is generally a nice person, tries to do what is right, and has an ethics code of his own. He only represents the drug lord in appearance and DNA, not in personality, so if they don't like the drug lord then why should they hate him as well? Yes, he was created in a rather unusual way for a human, but is everyone's hatred of Matt just born out of ignorance of cloning? I believe that everyone doesn't like Matt just based on their beliefs that he was created in an unnatural and immoral way. If everyone that hated Matt thought about how many identical copies of organisms are out there, Matt would  have less of a hard time. Asexual reproduction (I'm using this as the rough equivalent of cloning) is used for the production of millions upon millions of plants and billions upon billions of bacteria. It's a completely natural thing that provides us with, for one, medicine. Also, without asexual reproduction, it is likely that ecosystems everywhere would fall apart without their base layer, plants. Cloning is helping us test products more efficiently, create cheap food, and is helping the world.