Genetic engineering will make suffering-based moral standing a matter of design choice, not ontology

Evidence

It is precisely in this decentered context that utilitarians such as Singer hope to use an empirical demonstration of suffering by animals to make the case for their moral standing and eligibility for legal protection. Future ge ne tic engineering techniques will reveal the shortcomings of such an approach, as humanity will be asked to consider the ethicality not simply of how it treats a lifeinbeing or a life whose biological constitution is thought to be only marginally under humanity’s control, but of how it goes about creating entirely new forms of life. With what characteristics and capacities will those new lives be endowed? Faced with that question, we will no longer be able to rely on Singer’s philosophical strategy of comparing human and nonhuman life forms according to some naturalized distribution of attributes in order to determine whether an entity qualifi es as an interest holder. Instead, we will be equipped to design new lifeforms that either meet or fail the tests for recognition that we have established, whether those tests involve the capacity to feel pain, to perceive an external environment, to communicate with other beings, or to exhibit any other empirically demonstrable characteristic. Through technical means, we will be able to bring those lifeforms within or without the sphere of interest holders; the extent of their suffering will therefore depend not on supposed ontological givens, but on moral will stripped of theoretical apology. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 486

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the argument that empirical ‘suffering’ tests break down entirely when we design the attributes being tested — powerful and under-explored.
• STORYSTEM: Could seed speculative fiction about a society that engineers creatures to fail or pass the tests of who counts as a legal person.
• XREF: connects to: Autonomy’s deontological shell is already compromised by parental, cultural, and environmental influence — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 502; Ethical obligation arises from the other’s unknowability, not its measured capacities — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 503; An ethics cannot be derived directly from ontological descriptions (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Biology represents what social engineering cannot yet alter #contradicts (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 186
• An ethics cannot be derived directly from ontological descriptions #complicates (0.80)