Interrogating the Boundary of Human-Level and T Moral Status

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Acknowledgments

Research funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research, MOP 77670, Therapeutic Hopes and Ethical Concerns: Clinical Research in the Neurosciences, and NNF 80045, States of Mind: Emerging Issues in Neuroethics. Thanks are owed to the Novel Tech Ethics research team as well as Samantha Copeland for feedback on previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Basl's concern that cognitively enhanced, and therefore morally enhanced, beings might have moral capacities that go unnoticed by researchers because the research subjects do not have the same capacities as other humans to make known to others their moral status contains a possibility already realized in the lives of many disadvantaged and vulnerable human populations. The failure to communicate is more often a failure to receive and recognize, not to make knowable, the moral status of these disadvantaged populations. What is more, without assuming a speciesist moral framework, there is nothing prospective or novel about the “magnitude” or “significance” (see Basl 2010, 41) of this kind of moral danger. The potential practical effects of the novel technologies discussed in this paper, outside the amoral—and some would say immoral—worry of upsetting speciesist reliant moral thresholds, are not all that new either. Consider mental training exercises, and associated forms of education, that are incompletely self-critical and what these have done for oppressed populations (human and nonhuman alike). Individuals (supposedly at the margins of the moral community) are enculturated in ways that build expectations for proper treatment but whose power is suppressed in ways that conceal their existent forms of communication and enable those with power over them to ignore their interests or preferences. See Kittay (2008, 218–237).

2. We make two relevant claims here: Humans enjoy full moral status, nonhuman animals do not. Should Basl mean something weaker, he needs to be clearer. Basl notes that he is “assuming … a difference in moral status between humans and nonhuman animals” (41, note 4). Also, Basl later distinguishes between human-level moral status and T moral status on the basis that the former is full while the latter is graded. For these claims to be true, the moral status accorded those who qualify as human is never reached by nonhuman animals. There are hints that Basl is uncomfortable with such a strong stance on the moral status of nonhuman animals. Nevertheless, they frame the later discussion of the paper.

For a useful, if truncated, critique of these appeals see DeGrazia (2002).

4. A feature of Basl's discussion continues to trouble us. Basl's worry concerning cognitive enhancements that, though raising the moral status of the relevant animals, go unnoticed because the enhanced animals cannot adequately communicate seems to miss a disturbing feature of our contemporary relations with such animals as chimpanzees used in biomedical research. Chimpanzees are highly communicative animals. Primatologists like Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall speak with ease of the expressed preferences or emotions of their chimpanzee subjects (see de Waal 1990; Goodall 1990/2000). We know these animals can plan, create and use tools, form alliances with fellow chimpanzees, and enforce behavioral norms within the group (Matsuzawa et al 2006; Tomasello and Call 1997). Yet they continue to be used in invasive research we would not conduct on humans. It seems odd in the extreme to concern ourselves with the interests of future (i.e., nonexistent), cognitively enhanced nonhuman animals while the basic interests (e.g., to have a life free of pain, unnecessary distress, or unnecessary restrictions of movement) of these cognitively complex, communicative animals are effectively overlooked by those who use them in invasive research. Surely our contemporary use of chimpanzees in invasive research is a better stimulus for the kind of moral horror Basl is trying to evoke with his thought experiment involving cognitively enhanced nonhuman animals?