Agency, moral worth and the legal status of human cerebral organoids

Abstract

Human cerebral organoids are an emerging medical technology whose development raises ethical questions pertinent to debates regarding how regulators ought to respond to research that makes use of them. The sentience of a non-human entity is a common focus of work exploring how moral status ought to be reflected in the law, but it is not the only threshold for moral worth suitable for this purpose. This paper considers the problem of the moral status of human cerebral organoids from the Gewirthian perspective – which holds that a special moral consideration ought to be afforded to agents through a principle of reciprocity, the Principle of Generic Consistency. This alternative framework may be preferable to the sentience-based approach due to the fact that it is proceeds from the bare agency of the observer, which provides a more certain foundation for assessments of moral worth than attempts to ascertain sentience in an observee. The paper will proceed in three main steps. It will first provide an outline of the moral writing of Alan Gewirth, which, through a dialectically necessary argument, imposes an obligation on all agents to ensure that the freedom and wellbeing of all other agents is protected from non-consensual interference. It will then turn to consider whether human cerebral organoids may be considered agents for the purpose of the Gewirthian ethical framework, and thus deserving of this special moral consideration. Lastly, the paper will outline two potential legislative responses with regards to their legal status and legal protection of any interests they may possess. These will be offered from the perspective of two competing theories of legal validity – those that hold that the moral permissibility of a legal rule is a necessary condition of its validity, and those that may see such moral permissibility as desirable though not necessary.