We already use domesticated animals to perform work for us, and to perform dangerous tasks, such as draft animals, using canines and dolphins in warfare, etc… Many feel this is unethical, but the vast majority of the world’s population is apparently OK with it.
So…
Would it be immoral or unethical to genetically engineer a creature for the specific purpose of doing physically difficult or dangerous tasks for their human “masters”? If the technology were available that would allow us to build a creature specifically suited to perform a task better than any currently available animal could, would it be wrong to do so, and why?
For this debate, I’m thinking about a higher order mammal, something ape-like (as opposed to algae that cleans up oil spills, etc…).
We’ve already done so, many times. Most domestic animals were genetically engineered thousands of years ago to be better at various tasks than any natural animal was. A natural horse can’t take the weight of a human on its back, a natural dog is more likely to attack the flock than defend it, a natural cow doesn’t produce enough milk to share with humans, and so on.
IIRC, that’s a rather grim anthropomorphic-animal strip where the reason the world has no humans is that the title character killed them.
As for me; it depends on the intelligence of the creature in question, and whether it suffers or not. Human level or close to it would be unethical. And for animal level creatures, the question is whether they suffer or not. Considering how nasty nature can be, a happy animal created as a tool is better off than a wild animal being torn apart alive by wolves, or dying slowly of disease or starvation.
Suppose we can genetically engineer a human such that it goes down to the intellect of this genetically modified creature you propose and is incapable of very little besides sewing together soccer balls. Is that okay?
(This is not a rhetorical question, but to me it’s an equivalent one to yours.)
Just to clarify, I guess what I was thinking, and should have stated in the OP, is something created from scratch that is high intelligence (ape, dolphin, etc…). Something about as close to human, without actually having any human genetic material, other than what is common to all mammals.
How “close” to human, is too close? And why is “close” necessarily a bad thing?
Smart enough to have ideas of its own about how its life should go and what it should be like. It’s not wrong for us to make the decisions for, say, dogs and cows because they aren’t capable of asking questions like “What should my species be like? What should I do in life?” They run on instinct, sensation and what they are taught. Since they cannot make such decisions, it isn’t wrong for us to make them instead.
Because that bumps up against stupider humans - who do have civil rights. And it’s a small jump from enslaving smart animals, to enslaving stupid humans as Zephyurs pointed out.
Yeah it would be immoral. We humans do immoral things (like slavery), but by and large once we develop technology in the form of machines or robotics that can do the work instead, we switch to that. We’re cool like that as a species. We’re only evil until we don’t need to be to get what we want. After that it becomes a luxury and condemned.
There are fewer domesticated horses compared to 100 years ago because now we have cars and tractors. As in vitro meat advances, there will be fewer CAFOs and animal farms.
So I think the same would apply to these animals. There really isn’t any use for them. Bipedal humanoid robots are (from what I have read) only 30-50 years away from being affordable and mainstream. There really is no task that a domesticated animal could perform that couldn’t be done by a robot or machine.
Errmm, you do know what happened to all those domesticated horses when automobiles came on the market, don’t you? They weren’t put out to pasture or given to petting zoos or turned loose to run free on the Great Plains. They were simply slaughtered by the tens of thousands.
Yep. But we didn’t replace them with new domesticated animals since we didn’t need them anymore. My statement about us being evil was sarcastic. We do bad things until we find ways to get what we want that don’t require us to be destructive.
If we knew how to power our civilization for the same or less money as polluting it does, we’d do that. Until then, we burn coal.
In seriousness, cats are a lot closer to their wild form than most domesticated animals, since they were already pretty good at what we wanted them for when we found them. They’re not completely untouched, though: Domesticated cats are smaller and stupider than their wild kin.
And if we’re talking about high-intelligence animals, then the definitive SF treatment is probably Heinlein’s short story, “Jerry was a Man”, about just such a laborer-creature who ends up being recognized in a court of law as having human rights.