I'm pretty sure the idea that drawing a line somewhat arbitrarily implies there shouldn't be a line is a straw man. Who is arguing this? The quote from the article advocates for more stringent morals--that beings that aren't fully human should be given similar moral weight as humans. It also suggests, more broadly, that we should reconsider both where these lines are drawn and if they should really be lines instead of gradients. But I see no indication that the lines should become less restrictive or any trend toward barbarism.
I took issue with the quoted part: "it is unclear why it is important for us to preserve the view that biological humanness is both necessary and sufficient for full moral status."
Notice how they said both "necessary and sufficient"? When both are included, there's an implication here that it might be possible for someone to be fully biologically human and yet without full moral rights - that, for example, someone with a different number of chromosomes isn't entitled to life - that someone can be a human and that being human is not "sufficient" for them to have human rights. That's dystopian. Maybe I'm assuming bad faith on the part of the author.
>That's dystopian. Maybe I'm assuming bad faith on the part of the author.
I think you are. Because while your examination of the logic is sound as far as it goes, I think you stop where the author trusts you to continue.
The idea that humans don't deserve full moral rights is so unpopular that author trusts you to infer that they hold some other view. Along the lines of "maybe there are non-human species which deserve full moral rights as well."
I will deliberately not get more specific than that about what the author, because if I did I would probably be bringing the details of my own views rather than theirs. But for myself, it seems highly plausible that other species with highly sophisticated individual social behavior may be able to suffer in ways we're used to thinking of as unique to human experience. And I think there are other people, maybe not yourself, who might accept this plausibility if they are forced to confront the reality of human chimeras.
Of course, there's also the priests, and I expect a very different reaction from them.
I think the other direction is implied, that is someone not being biologically human can be considered conscious and “human” like a chimp, or some hybrid chimera monkey-human.
