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Comment by ativzzz | Hacker News Reader

So what exactly is inherently unethical about letting this engineered organism live? Is it a violation of "Christian" ethics of playing God? If so, we've already gone way past that point with modern medicine and things like genetic engineering of mosquitoes.

If it's a fear of how society reacts to the organism surviving and causing an upheaval of life philosophy, isn't all science then unethical?

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The "science ethics" system looks uncomfortably like an awkward religion to me.

People will claim that certain things "are unethical", as if that is a simple uncomplicated fact.

I think it's less about any societal reaction and more about the organism's experience.

It would be more useful to perform similar genetic experiments on human beings, in any case. But I imagine that you would be opposed to that?

I mean we've collectively decided that we do not care about the experience of mice and rats as we kill and perform all kinds of experiments on them in the lab, not to mention the meat industry. I'm not anti-meat or anything, just pointing out that we've chosen that certain living beings do not have the right to a good life. Why would this science experiment be treated differently?

And no, I wouldn't be opposed to human testing if there were humans who were willing to sign up for it, but it could be worrisome to take care that vulnerable people are not taken advantage of.

Why would you be opposed to that?

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