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Ask most scientists if we’re animals and you’ll get a funny look. Of course we’re animals! But very commonly, humans are set apart from animals using arbitrary delineations. Consider that in 2018, after many failed attempts, a lab in China created the first cloned primates, a pair of long-tailed macaques to be used in biomedical research. A few years earlier, the United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning stated that cloning people is “incompatible with human dignity.” That may be a good ruling. But what exactly is “dignity,” and why do humans have it while intelligent, aware primates such as macaques do not? A macaque may not think or talk about dignity, but does that mean it doesn’t possess it? The fact is, biology won’t leap to our assistance here because dignity is a human invention.
This is typical of how philosophy and value assumptions creep into ...
