Emerging moral status issues
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Emerging moral status issues Julian J. Koplin1,2 · Christopher Gyngell2,3 Accepted: 23 November 2020 / Published online: 4 December 2020 © Monash University 2020
Abstract Many controversies in bioethics turn on questions of moral status. Some moral status issues have received extensive bioethical attention, including those raised by abortion, embryo experimentation, and animal research. Beyond these established debates lie a less familiar set of moral status issues, many of which are tied to recent scientific breakthroughs. This review article surveys some key developments that raise moral status issues, including the development of in vitro brains, part-human animals, “synthetic” embryos, and artificial womb technologies. It introduces the papers in this Special Issue, contextualises their contributions to the moral status literature, and highlights some enduring challenges of determining the moral status of novel types of beings. Keywords Moral status · Embryo research · Cerebral organoids · Ectogenesis · Animal ethics Bioethics has a longstanding fascination with issues of moral status. To possess moral status is to be the kind of being that is worthy of moral consideration; it matters, morally, how we treat beings with moral status (Warren 1997). Rational human adults are a paradigm case of an entity with moral status. For those who think moral status comes in degrees, human adults can moreover be considered a paradigm case of a being with the highest possible level of moral status, or “full” moral status. When we say that normal human adults have (full) moral status, we are saying that the interests of normal human adults are morally important. A rock, conversely, is a paradigm case of an entity without moral status. This is not necessarily to say we may treat rocks in any way we wish; it would be wrong, for example, to throw a rock at the head of a normal human adult. But the wrongfulness here has everything to * Julian J. Koplin [email protected] 1
Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, 185 Pelham St, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia
2
Biomedical Ethics Research Group, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Carlton, VIC, Australia
3
Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia
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do with the moral status of the human, and nothing whatsoever to do with the moral status of the rock. Between adult humans and inanimate rocks lie a range of beings whose moral status is unclear or contested. How we ought to treat such beings is often deeply controversial. Consider some of the debates surrounding those David Degrazia (2002, p. 28) has described as “non-paradigm humans.” The category of “non-paradigm humans” includes human embryos and foetuses, which are unquestionably human but lack many or all of the emotional, experiential, and cognitive capacities of human adults. Debates on abortion and embryo research are, in large part, debates about the moral status of humans at early stages of development (Lagercrantz and C
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