If you drop all the science fiction and other baloney, clones are, biologically, nothing more or less than identical twins.
One of the big differences between a clone and an identical twin would be a difference in the time they were born: clone a 40-year-old man, and you'll have an identical twin who is 40 years younger. The clone would have a completely different life experience from the original, would have his/her own personality and memories and education and will and thoughts and, indeed, his/her own soul and mind. They'd even have different fingerprints, retinas,etc. from their originals. Certainly, the clone will have his/her own wants, needs, desires, will, and decisions.
A clone is, in short, his/her own person.
The harder you try to change that by conventional education and psychological means, by trying to brainwash or manipulate the clone into trying to think exactly like the original, the more you'll screw him/her up psychologically: it would be like trying to force someone to think exactly like his/her brother, or father, or whatever. You can try to force that horse to water, but the harder you try to make that horse drink, the more it's going to fight you.
In the case of a clone, if you didn't perform the cloning at birth, then you'll end up with the original at whatever age the cloning was performed, and an infant clone... say, that hypothetical 40-year-old man, and his infant clone... the clone will grow up with a life experience 40 years out of sync from the original. It would be like expecting someone born in the 1970s to have the same experiences and outlook and so on as someone born in 2010!
That might not take into account any sort of science-fiction plot devices like a technology that artificially ages the body of the clone effectively overnight, wipes its brain of memories, then copies the original's memories artificially into the new brain like copying a hard drive or something, but I don't think I've seen any convincing evidence that such technology exists, and I don't trust that they can make it work well enough to produce a healthy result: an artificially aged clone body would not be a healthy thing, it would not be a biological exact match for the original body, having grown up under very different conditions, and the "hard drive copy" of the mind and memories would be a very different thing from copying data under precise manufacturing conditions from one electronic device to another - the brain would be different, and the transfer of brain data would be imperfect and flawed, maybe psychotically so, or worse if the artificially aged brain were damaged in the process of rapidly aging the body to match the original. You'd produce a feeble idiot of a copy, a badly-forged duplicate.
And then, there's the difficult questions of what exactly a person is, how life works, and whether there is actually a discrete soul that can be copied by science: it's one thing to artificially create a slab of meat and animate it, but is it really the same as the person it was copied from, no matter how closely it was copied? Can you transfer the soul of the original into the new body and mind? Have we developed any science that can answer such questions, or technologies that can take advantage of the science of the soul? I would say that based on what I know of our current science and technology, we cannot create an exact duplicate of a person, cannot transfer souls, cannot do much more than produce an uncannily identical twin, with its own motivations and agendas.
SO, the best you could hope for would be to produce a startlingly identical body to kill, to cook up a plausible cover story so that you can change your face with plastic surgery, change your name, then disappear to Argentina to live out the remainder of your life under an assumed identity. Basically, a very rich man's body double, without many of the benefits of a real body double: you'd have to find a way to artificially age that body in a convincing way, care for and control it until needed, then deploy the equivalent of a birth-defective infant in an old-man's body at just the right time and place for a scripted death, where a traditional body double would simply be motivated by money, extortion, or whatever self-interest and self-preservation are needed to get him to choose to lay down his life for the person he's doubling for (see the life story for Qusay Hussein's body double, for example, who basically did the same job we'd be asking of our clones, much more cheaply and practically, and just as effectively....)
In short, I don't think clones are going do much in the proposed scenario, except provide expensive meat to stage someone's death with.
If you drop all the science fiction and other baloney, clones are, biologically, nothing more or less than identical twins.
One of the big differences between a clone and an identical twin would be a difference in the time they were born: clone a 40-year-old man, and you'll have an identical twin who is 40 years younger. The clone would have a completely different life experience from the original, would have his/her own personality and memories and education and will and thoughts and, indeed, his/her own soul and mind. They'd even have different fingerprints, retinas,etc. from their originals. Certainly, the clone will have his/her own wants, needs, desires, will, and decisions.
A clone is, in short, his/her own person.
The harder you try to change that by conventional education and psychological means, by trying to brainwash or manipulate the clone into trying to think exactly like the original, the more you'll screw him/her up psychologically: it would be like trying to force someone to think exactly like his/her brother, or father, or whatever. You can try to force that horse to water, but the harder you try to make that horse drink, the more it's going to fight you.
In the case of a clone, if you didn't perform the cloning at birth, then you'll end up with the original at whatever age the cloning was performed, and an infant clone... say, that hypothetical 40-year-old man, and his infant clone... the clone will grow up with a life experience 40 years out of sync from the original. It would be like expecting someone born in the 1970s to have the same experiences and outlook and so on as someone born in 2010!
That might not take into account any sort of science-fiction plot devices like a technology that artificially ages the body of the clone effectively overnight, wipes its brain of memories, then copies the original's memories artificially into the new brain like copying a hard drive or something, but I don't think I've seen any convincing evidence that such technology exists, and I don't trust that they can make it work well enough to produce a healthy result: an artificially aged clone body would not be a healthy thing, it would not be a biological exact match for the original body, having grown up under very different conditions, and the "hard drive copy" of the mind and memories would be a very different thing from copying data under precise manufacturing conditions from one electronic device to another - the brain would be different, and the transfer of brain data would be imperfect and flawed, maybe psychotically so, or worse if the artificially aged brain were damaged in the process of rapidly aging the body to match the original. You'd produce a feeble idiot of a copy, a badly-forged duplicate.
And then, there's the difficult questions of what exactly a person is, how life works, and whether there is actually a discrete soul that can be copied by science: it's one thing to artificially create a slab of meat and animate it, but is it really the same as the person it was copied from, no matter how closely it was copied? Can you transfer the soul of the original into the new body and mind? Have we developed any science that can answer such questions, or technologies that can take advantage of the science of the soul? I would say that based on what I know of our current science and technology, we cannot create an exact duplicate of a person, cannot transfer souls, cannot do much more than produce an uncannily identical twin, with its own motivations and agendas.
SO, the best you could hope for would be to produce a startlingly identical body to kill, to cook up a plausible cover story so that you can change your face with plastic surgery, change your name, then disappear to Argentina to live out the remainder of your life under an assumed identity. Basically, a very rich man's body double, without many of the benefits of a real body double: you'd have to find a way to artificially age that body in a convincing way, care for and control it until needed, then deploy the equivalent of a birth-defective infant in an old-man's body at just the right time and place for a scripted death, where a traditional body double would simply be motivated by money, extortion, or whatever self-interest and self-preservation are needed to get him to choose to lay down his life for the person he's doubling for (see the life story for Qusay Hussein's body double, for example, who basically did the same job we'd be asking of our clones, much more cheaply and practically, and just as effectively....)
In short, I don't think clones are going do much in the proposed scenario, except provide expensive meat to stage someone's death with.