I will respond to your desire for serious debate! I enjoy the philosophical, logical debate.

As for cloning, I think the possibilities are too numerous for betterment of society to not delve into. For example, you could clone meat to produce pain/suffering/abuse-free meat products for vegans to enjoy so that their consciences would be soothed, and fight world hunger in the process.

It’s much cleaner to make meat in a lab than it would be to have a pasture as well, and in trial studies in which fish meat chunks were lab-grown, they tasted the same as regular fish, so it is possible.

Also, resurrecting extinct species by use of cloning is a great way to help offset the catastrophic damage we’ve done in the past to places like rainforests. Problem with that is that by isolating the genes of a single organism and making it the patron of the rest of the resurrected species, you create an intense genetic bottleneck that is the very reason inbreeding creates deformities. Any recessive or potentially damaging traits within the creatures’ genetic code would manifest in far greater numbers than it would’ve prior.

But, genetic issues > no animal. So that’s up to others to decide.

I think cloning things for testing is still not a great idea though. Creating something merely for the use of testing and pain is every bit as cruel as doing the same to a normal animal. So that’s a can of worms as well.