Abstract

The creation of human-animal chimeras involves complex ethical issues. First, they sometimes involve harming animals, which can only be justified under some special circumstances. Furthermore, the entities created might not be treated according to what their special statute demands. This would have a negative impact on their quality of life, depriving it of many of the factors that usually bring happiness to living beings. On the other hand, there are substantive concerns about the safety of the research or the allocation of resources to a practice that might not justify such expenditure. Above all, however, chimeras are extremely challenging creatures, since they defy the fundamentals of the anthropocentric ethics that still prevail in our culture. They blur the boundaries between species and introduce moral confusion due to their particular features. A superchimp able to show rational attitudes could create an impossible dilemma for an ethical paradigm based on the idea of human dignity. However, none of these reasons seems strong enough to ban all types of human-animal chimeras.