Human‐Animal Chimeras, “Human” Cognitive Capacities, and Moral Status

Abstract

In “Human‐Animal Chimeras: The Moral Insignificance of Uniquely Human Capacities,” Julian Koplin explores a promising way of thinking about moral status. Without attempting to develop a model in any detail, Koplin picks up Joshua Shepherd's interesting proposal that we think about moral status in terms of the value of different kinds of conscious experience. For example, a being with the most basic sort of consciousness and sentience would have interests that matter morally, while a being whose consciousness featured the riches of loving affection, say, might have greater moral status and therefore deserve some sort of priority if the interests of the two beings conflicted. This approach represents an improvement over the more common, transparently anthropocentric habits of thinking about moral status, whether in connection with evaluating human‐animal chimera research, deciding what one can ethically eat, or pursuing some other moral inquiry.

Bioethical issues in genome editing by CRISPR-Cas9 technology

“…The others state that chimeric organisms containing human cells cannot turn into humans and therefore will not affect human dignity. They also argue that the humanlike features imparted to chimeras will neither affect the biological environment nor the moral status of animals and will never reach human consciousness (Koplin, 2019;Degrazia, 2019).…”