Human Rights By John Harris

John Harris claims that to be transgressive is to be moral. His argument centres on the rejecting the objections raised by those who reject the crossing of specie boundaries. In the footstep of Jonathan Glover’s, Harris raises the question of “what role “humanity”, species membership, being a human being, in short the descriptive sense of being human, plays in our evaluative use of that term”.
For Harris, the claims that humans unique or the characterization of human beings as moral agents with the capacity to sympathize, empathize, or having creative abilities which are species specific – not shared by non-human kinds – are chauvinistic claims which are not grounded in scientific knowledge. Consequently, reference to terms like “human uniqueness”
In fact, in so far human and animals are concerns, Harris claim there are necessary benefits if the ethical concerns of blurring species boundaries are violated. Opponents, he explains, must be aware that thousands of cell lines which involve the mixture of the genes from different species have already been created. In addition, in the future, therapeutic reasons might necessitate the creation of hybrid creature that would be allowed to grow into adulthood – in fact, considerable moral reasons might necessitate such. Supporting his argument with duties of “beneficence and nonmaleficence”, Harris writes: “Assuming the possible enhancements leave the animals short of personhood then, in so far as we have moral reasons to create better-off rather than less-well-off beings […] it seems that we would have a moral reason to create advantaged animals using human genetic material.” Indeed there are intellectual, social, and moral challenges to creating creatures that are less-well-off; however, the creation of cells or even embryos does not hold similar
For instance, we will have to wrestle with weather rights that are conferred on human beings should be accorded to the creation of human-animal creatures. Harris admits that deep reflection would indeed be needed when faced with such moral issue; however, it is the work of moral philosophers to reflect on how rights and respects are to be accorded to such creatures and, holding unwavering faith in human capacity, he believes that people would be able to think their way through such dilemma. For Harris, Robert and Baylis notion of bafflement, although it can be seen as an indication of their failure to reason morally, is not a “moral falling”. The feeling of bafflement, argues Harris, does not mean the creation of “humananimal” is wrong – rather, it reveals the deficit in our current moral theory. We need to refine our moral theory so as to enable us incorporate “transhuman entities” into our societies. The creation of humananimal specie is tantamount to “moral responsibility”. It follows that we ought not to abandon this research if we want a better understanding of our relationships with non-human