Robert Streiffer

Moral status is the moral value that something has in its own right, independently of the interests or concerns of others. Research using human embryonic stem cells implicates issues about moral status because the current method of extracting hESCs involves the destruction of a human embryo, the moral status of which is contested. Moral status issues can also arise, however, when hESCs are transplanted into embryonic or fetal animals, thereby creating human/ nonhuman stem cell chimeras. In particular, one concern about chimera research is that it could confer upon an animal the moral status of a normal human adult, but then impermissibly fail to accord the animal the protections it merits in virtue of its enhanced status. Understanding the public policy implications of this ethical conclusion is complicated by the fact that certain views about the moral status of the embryo cannot legitimately be used to justify public policy decisions. Arguments like those employed in the abortion debate for the conclusion that abortion should be legally permissible even if abortion is not morally permissible also support, to a more limited degree, a liberal policy on hESC research involving the creation of chimeras.

According to Autumn Fiester, the Presumption of Restraint—the thesis that an application of biotechnology to an animal is unethical unless backed by morally compelling reasons—is justified by five ethical claims. In this commentary, I explore the relevance of what Derek Parfit has dubbed the Non-Identity Problem for the implications of one of these claims, the Animal Welfare Claim. I conclude that while the Animal Welfare Claim condemns the alteration of founder animals in ways that are bad for them when there is no important human or animal health benefit in the offing, it fails to condemn the alteration of animals in the context of important research projects, even if the alteration causes some animal suffering, and, given the Non-Identity Problem, it fails to condemn the subsequent creation of animals bred from the founders, so long as the subsequent animals have a life worth living.

: Experiments involving the transplantation of human stem cells and their derivatives into early fetal or embryonic nonhuman animals raise novel ethical issues due to their possible implications for enhancing the moral status of the chimeric individual. Although status-enhancing research is not necessarily objectionable from the perspective of the chimeric individual, there are grounds for objecting to it in the conditions in which it is likely to occur. Translating this ethical conclusion into a policy recommendation, however, is complicated by the fact that substantial empirical and ethical uncertainties remain about which transplants, if any, would significantly enhance the chimeric individual's moral status. Considerations of moral status justify either an early-termination policy on chimeric embryos, or, in the absence of such a policy, restrictions on the introduction of pluripotent human stem cells into early-stage developing animals, pending the resolution of those uncertainties