[cercatrova]

It depends on which ethical viewpoint you have. There are two major ones:

The deontological (Kantian) view is that anything that is wrong is so implicitly such that anyone doing something wrong is morally wrong regardless of consequences; murdering a criminal to save thousands in the future would be wrong implicitly.

The utilitarian one says that the ends justify the means, that if one were to murder a criminal to save thousands, it would be morally right.

There is not necessarily a right answer as this argument has been going on in philosophy for a long time, but I'm a utilitarian. If people need to be experimented on in order to advance science, then let it be so. You seem to be less so on this side or even on the deontological side.

[DistressedDrone]

I have a hard time imagining anyone commenting about the moral implications of the article would be unaware of the difference between deontological and utilitarian ethics.

Personally, I find your defense of the idea betrays a naive view of utilitarianism. We must take into account not just the immediate consequences of our actions but also the long-term ones. Any society where people may be experimented upon is one where people must live in fear of being experimented upon. To fail to take into account human dignity is tantamount to disregarding human nature, which just means your formula is wrong.

For the case in TFA, the consequences could be dire. I challenge anyone to reference a society where some people can be seen as subhuman and say they would rather live there. One might argue that the chimera is not a person, but that would still, in my opinion, fail to account for all the variables, as the current paradigm where anything with human DNA is considered human is what makes this debatable in the first place.

In short you may say that anything is acceptable but you can't declare it so, and you must also consider that there would be blood in the streets if science had no deontological bounds. You must also account for this in your utilitarian calculation, regardless of how you yourself view morality.

[cercatrova]

> We must take into account not just the immediate consequences of our actions but also the long-term ones.

Indeed. But we may not necessarily know the long term results of such actions. For example, we might experiment on people for some time in order to advance science to the point that we can cure all people, say for example, 100 years of experimentation for 1000 years thereafter of saving people. Is that enough? Is the suffering of 100 years worth of people enough to overcome the salvation of 1000 years' worth? I don't know, nobody could know, it's still a moral question. You seem to be presupposing a deontological viewpoint from my understanding given the specific sentence "Any society where people may be experimented upon is one where people must live in fear of being experimented upon."

> I challenge anyone to reference a society where some people can be seen as subhuman and say they would rather live there.

One could argue that this is current society, and it has been throughout human history if you take slavery into account; many people did in fact want to live in such societies, given that they were not slaves.

> To fail to take into account human dignity is tantamount to disregarding human nature, which just means your formula is wrong.

Why? This still seems like it comes from a deontological viewpoint. Why must we consider human dignity? It does not necessarily follow from your argument.

> you must also consider that there would be blood in the streets if science had no deontological bounds.

Again, this does not follow. Why would there be "blood on the streets" if "science had no deontological bounds?"

> I have a hard time imagining anyone commenting about the moral implications of the article would be unaware of the difference between deontological and utilitarian ethics.

Perhaps. Most people don't have academic or rigorous philosophical ethics knowledge.

[DistressedDrone]

I'm unsure if you're saying I'm coming from a deontological viewpoint (I'm not), I'm assuming you are a utilitarian, as you said.

Remaining in a utilitarian paradigm, I hardly think societies with slavery maximized utility, this was more or less my point.

More to the actual point, science must have deontological ethics for science to, well, exist. Any world where science has no moral rules is a fantasy, and a rather dystopian one. There must be some sort of social contract between scientists and the general population for it to actually be useful. We are already witnessing a rise in anti-scientific sentiment even with the rigorous reviews we currently have. And it has led to many deaths, directly or indirectly.

Now imagine that scientists are allowed to conduct experiments purely for the sake of progress without consideration of absolute morality. People would actively be burning down science labs, and science itself would be seen akin to witchcraft. This would no doubt slow progress to a halt.

To summarize, the idea of a world where we can have science without deontology is fictional, you seemed to argue it should be this way, I'm arguing that it can't, in practice, be this way.

There just has to be rules, man.