system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If an organism sexually reproduced with itself, would the offspring have greater chances of genetic weakness compared to asexual reproduction or cloning?
gpt
The answer really depends on the organism. As you quite rightly point out, several taxa are locked into life strategies which call upon self fertilisation. These species have a few ways to avoid paying the cost of inbreeding depression.

Most taxa which rely on self fertilisation produce very large numbers of offspring, which allows for sucessful reproduction in spite of large numbers of expressed harmfull recessives.

One approach used by occasional self fertiliers is to selectively abort defective offspring, thus limiting the investment in defectives. In some cases, an individual will abort the whole inbred seed set if it subsequently comes in contact with pollen from a non related plant (ex: ceiba pentandra).

When it comes to obligate self-fertilisers, such as peas and Pyemotes mites, one finds that harmfull recessives are surprisingly rare. This is presumed to result from the fact that several generations of self fertilisation have brought those specific taxa through inbreeding depression, out to the "other side", so to speak, thus flushing out harmfull genetic variants from these species genetic pool. They paid the cost, in other words, by exposing all of their recessives to natural selection in order to adapt to systematic self fertilisation..

So to come back to your question, you have to factor in the effect of self-fertilisation as a breeding strategy across a whole species. The mid to long term efffect is to pay the price of inbreeding depression, in exchange of a cleaned up genome. So these taxa should have less harmfull genetic outcomes than clones, which will maintain whatever expressed recessives the parent had.