The welfare of brain organoids

Abstract

One of the most urgent challenges arising in bioethics has been the ethical assessment of the use of brain organoids, largely because of the possibility of sentience and the potential that if they can feel, then they might suffer. But while there is a growing literature on the possibility of sentience in brain organoids and why we should take a precautionary approach towards them, there is very little guidance on what it would mean to protect their welfare. In this paper, we address this omission by exploring the question of what the welfare of an organoid might be like, and how we could scientifically assess this question. As we will show, these are difficult questions to answer, given the current lack of empirical data on many of the important features of brain organoids, but we will provide some principled empirically-informed speculation on possible answers, as well as suggestions for future research directions.