Moral Status and Slippery Slope Concerns about Bodyoids

Rodger et al. (2025) examine the emerging proposal to create "bodyoids"-human bodies engineered to lack the neural structures required for consciousness and sentience.These entities, the proposal suggests, could serve as ethically acceptable sources of transplantable organs, research material, or cadaver substitutes.The authors argue, however, that bodyoids are both technologically infeasible and morally dubious.The paper helpfully highlights several concerns with the bodyoid proposal.While I share many of the authors' doubts on the feasibility front, I focus in this commentary on aspects of their moral case against bodyoids that strike me as less convincing.The core of their moral argument is this: First, bodyoids may possess moral status, in which case creating and using them would be morally problematic.Second, whether or not bodyoids possess moral status, deliberately producing and treating human bodies solely as instruments risks an erosion of respect for the human body generally and a slippery slope toward dehumanization of actual persons.I will express some concerns about both points.On the issue of moral status, the authors do not assess or survey all competing views of moral status in detail, nor is it reasonable to expect them to.Instead, what they need to do is identify some ethical views that are generally regarded as credible that would grant bodyoids moral status despite their lack of consciousness and sentience.The authors begin by mentioning the substance view of persons (George & Tollefsen, 2008) and the Christian idea that all human beings have inviolable worth as examples of such views.The trouble with these views is that most experts in phi-