We are not Nature, and thus these existential defining issues should at least give us some pause to debate and evaluate the moral quandaries and responsibilities that this level of engineering power wields.
This is not a tool that "Nature" has in its toolbox. Nature has, natural selection. The random smatterings of dice throws that takes place trillions of times per day over the course of billions of years. The equivalent of throwing paint against the wall for a millennia to eventually recreate a Picasso.
This is not how humans work. Our efforts are efficient (at least more so than Nature's efforts), and when honed and optimized can be made into machines of frighteningly impressive efficiency.
There is certainly a difference between the creative and destructive processes of Man vs Nature.
Of course we are Nature. We came to being the exact same way every other current living species did, thru natural selection. So then how can we be living, as you say, somehow outside this "Nature" you speak of?
Hell, I know I may be in a small minority who says, by definition, nothing that we do is "wrong" because we are simply doing what our brains, which are 100% a product of this Nature, are telling us to do.
Post-modernism is quick to tell us there are no absolute rights and wrongs...that only culture makes it so. So why then can some say that its immoral to create and study these creatures that our nature-created brains have led us to create?
On your morality lines: Morality is a personal concept in people, but it is influenced by society and the people they interact with. There doesn't have to be some objective right/wrong, and so people can say that the scientists were being immoral (according to the person's own moral ideas). The scientists may very well believe they were being moral, or perhaps they didn't think about it (people do that!)
> that our nature-created brains have led us to create? Well, as stated before, morality isn't the same between humans. There's no objective authority that decides X is right or Y is wrong, simply social/cultural influences throughout the world.
You could view morality as a way that you think the world/people should behave to maximize some value you hold. Perhaps you value sentient life, and so you hold self-sacrifice to save a dozen people to be a moral good as it continues more sentient life.
Worth remembering that it's also not the case that every person has different morality, and everyone's moral values are uniformly distributed across the space of possible values.
No, the moral values of humans are all very strongly correlated, both within and across societies. We spend a lot of time bikeshedding the details, but we essentially have a shared sense of what's right and wrong.
(I hypothesize it's because we all have the same brain architecture - the basic moral sense is encoded in firmware, and through culture we adapt it to fit the environments and societies we live in.)
Sparta is another example. The Nazi regime in Germany too. Slavery in the US. I could keep going for another hour.
Moral values are highly dependent on you environmental influences.
Nevertheless you are totaly correct, that the majority of people in a single society shares similair views on moral rules.
“Nature” may not care what happens to the human species, but we do!
Humans comes from nature, and the building blocks of a human are the same as everything else in the universe (as far as we know).
Recent studies have shown that "choice" is made before we are even conscious of it (so byebye free will?), and no studies have shown that we are the only living creature able to make "choices".
"Humans are special", "Humans are different", "Humans are smarter" is the perfect example of arrogance and ignorance of humans.
"Humans are different" isn't arrogance, it's observable reality. And we need some words to separate the categories of "things done / caused by humans" vs "things done / caused by everything else" - hence the common meaning of "natural" and "nature".
> the building blocks of a human are the same as everything else in the universe (as far as we know).
Building blocks of everything in the universe are the same, but there's still meaningful difference between things.
We humans wield great power over other life. With great power comes great responsibility, and just as much as we should humbly recognize our origins and common ancestors with other life, we should also recognize the immense responsibilities over other life that we have.