| Description |
Six miles from Reno, Nevada, a flock of sheep gather behind the fence of a farm. Although they look like ordinary sheep, their livers, hearts, brains and other organs contain a large percentage of human cells. In California, human neurons are inserted into mice. In Minnesota, pigs are born with human blood in their veins. These are biologically engineered animals, commonly referred to as "part-humans." The label comes from the assumption that they are neither fully human nor fully nonhuman. Instead, they are a new kind of being. But are animals partially composed of human parts part-human? In my dissertation, I introduce a number of methods available to make this distinction but, upon scrutiny, eliminate each one. Instead, I argue that whether an animal is part-human or merely partially composed of human parts depends on the transposability of parts. A suitably transposable part gives rise to analogous characteristics in both recipient and donor. The reason why it is important to establish the exact humanness of these animals is because various ethical and legal regulations are grounded in the human/nonhuman distinction, e.g., patenting regulations, regulations for conducting research on human and nonhuman subjects, etc. Hence, my requirements have practical applications. However, they are only useful insofar as our ethical and legal regulations give preferential treatment to humans over nonhumans. Yet many ethicists-most famously, Peter Singer-have argued against the normative value of the human/nonhuman distinction. Those who oppose giving preferential treatment to humans over nonhumans generally prefer some version of the person/nonperson distinction, where a person has moral status in virtue of having morally relevant characteristics. While it may seem obvious that a proponent of the personhood view ought to find the humanness of part-humans irrelevant to how we ought to judge their moral status, I argue that this need not always be the case. Whether a morally relevant characteristic came about as a result of a human rather than a nonhuman transplant can make a moral difference. |
