What's Wrong with Confusion?

In their thought-provoking paper, Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) argue that

the engineering of creatures that are part human and part nonhuman animal is objectionable because the existence of such beings would introduce inexorable moral confusion in our existing relationships with nonhuman animals and in our future relationships with part-human hybrids and chimeras.

It is not clear to me whether Robert and Baylis endorse this objection or offer it as an explanation of why chimeras worry other people. In either case, however, it is worth asking whether it is a good objection. In what follows I raise three questions about it.

First, how confusing will human-nonhuman chimeras actually be? Some of the more outlandish chimeras—for instance, a human being with the brain of a mouse—might be quite confusing. However, it is not clear that this is true of chimeras per se. As Robert and Baylis point out, there is no commonly accepted account of what marks one species off from another. We simply "know a human being when we see one." Our rough division of animals into species has, thus far, been able to accommodate human-nonhuman chimeras. Most people seem quite comfortable with the idea that Jesse Helms is human, even though, as a recipient of a transplanted pig valve, he is technically a human-nonhuman chimera. And most people would probably count the OncoMouse as an unusual sort of mouse. While I am no more qualified than any other philosophy professor to say what people are likely to find confusing, I would guess that in order for a human-to-nonhuman chimera to cause serious moral confusion, it would have to involve the introduction of substantial numbers of human neural cells into a nonhuman embryo. If so, then Robert and Baylis's conclusion would apply only to these cases, not to chimeras generally.

Suppose I am wrong and people do find the creation of any human-nonhuman chimera confusing. In this case we must ask a second question, namely, would that make creating such beings objectionable? One might object to causing moral confusion if one thought that in our confusion we might do something wrong. In the case at hand, for instance, one might worry that our confusion about the moral status of chimeras might lead us to treat some being that is in fact a person as if it were not. However, since Robert and Baylis do not suggest that this possibility is what they are worried about, I will disregard it. One might also think it wrong to try to create confusion for its own sake, but human-nonhuman chimeras are not likely to be created for this reason. Assume, then, that scientists are considering creating chimeras in order to achieve some worthwhile goal and that the existence of these chimeras will confuse people. Is this a reason not to create them?

Confusion is clearly an undesirable state when compared to secure knowledge of the truth. However, in all likelihood the creation of human-nonhuman chimeras would not confuse those who possess such knowledge on the question of the moral status of nonhuman animals. Rather, it would confuse those of us whose views on this topic do not allow us to answer questions about chimeras' moral status in a way that satisfies us. Human-nonhuman chimeras would lead us to recognize that the apparently clear distinction between human and nonhuman animals can be blurred and that it is not easy to say how we should treat beings that do not obviously fall into either category. They might also lead us to wonder whether our views about the moral status of human and nonhuman animals, and the forms of treatment appropriate to them, are in fact defensible. In either case chimeras do not introduce confusion into our moral views. They reveal ways in which those views are inadequate and make us think about how we might improve them...