Bodyoids and Moral Status: a Response to Wagner

Bodyoids are human organisms engineered to lack consciousness and have been proposed as a potential solution to the shortage of bodies available for use as organ donors, cadavers in medical education, and as human research participants.In our bodyoids article (Rodger et al., 2025), we argued that creating bodyoids is ethically dubious.First, we explain that some accounts of moral status entail that bodyoids will possess full moral status, which is problematic.Second, we argue that the creation of bodyoids could initiate a slippery slope towards the dehumanization of other human beings, especially the most vulnerable.Isaac Wagner (2025), in his recent commentary on our article, expresses scepticism that either of our arguments is convincing.First, let's examine our argument regarding moral status.In our article, we note that accounts of moral status based on consciousness or sentience entail that bodyoids have no moral status.However, we explain that there are alternative accounts of moral status that entail that all human beings have full moral status, including bodyoids, such as the substance view of persons and religious accounts grounded in human dignity.We will refer to these alternatives as 'person-at-conception' accounts.On these accounts, the creation and use of bodyoids is ethically problematic, and so this should make us cautious.Wagner, however, does not regard such accounts as