[JellyBeanThief]

>That's dystopian. Maybe I'm assuming bad faith on the part of the author.

I think you are. Because while your examination of the logic is sound as far as it goes, I think you stop where the author trusts you to continue.

The idea that humans don't deserve full moral rights is so unpopular that author trusts you to infer that they hold some other view. Along the lines of "maybe there are non-human species which deserve full moral rights as well."

I will deliberately not get more specific than that about what the author, because if I did I would probably be bringing the details of my own views rather than theirs. But for myself, it seems highly plausible that other species with highly sophisticated individual social behavior may be able to suffer in ways we're used to thinking of as unique to human experience. And I think there are other people, maybe not yourself, who might accept this plausibility if they are forced to confront the reality of human chimeras.

Of course, there's also the priests, and I expect a very different reaction from them.