Journal article
Will human-animal chimeras cause moral confusion? Exploring public attitudes
- Abstract:
- Recent medical research involving human-monkey chimeras, human brain organoids in rats, and the transplantation of a gene-edited pig heart and gene-edited pig kidneys in living human beings have intensified the debate about whether we should create human-animal chimeras for biomedical purposes and, if so, how we should treat them. Influential views in the debate frequently appeal to assumptions regarding how people will react to such chimeras. It has, for example, been argued that the most important objection against creating such chimeras is that this will result in inexorable moral confusion about species boundaries and will, as a result, threaten the social order. But is this indeed the case? We conducted three empirical studies to examine laypeople’s views on the creation and treatment of various types of human-animal chimeras. Our studies indicate that laypeople find typical cases of xenotransplantation (i.e., the transplantation of an animal organ into a human patient) morally unproblematic. They assign the same moral status to humans with animal organs as to non-chimeric humans. By contrast, they sometimes (but not always) assign slightly higher moral status to animals with human organs than to non-chimeric animals. Overall, however, there is little indication of chimera technology blurring the line between humans and animals, and thus of the technology causing moral confusion.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 575.8KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11673-024-10413-4
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
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- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Grant:
- 208189/Z/17/Z
- 203132/Z/16/Z
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Journal of Bioethical Inquiry More from this journal
- Volume:
- 22
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 733–744
- Publication date:
- 2025-08-12
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-11-16
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1872-4353
- ISSN:
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1176-7529
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2063319
- Local pid:
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pubs:2063319
- Deposit date:
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2025-01-07
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Devolder et al
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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