Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.
🤓
This is simply not a good situation to have thought experiments about. The conclusion is purely based on how generous your assumptions are: any other mammal is conscious, just not sapient, so even that makes your thought experiment faulty. But the issue is that any set of assumptions will completely determine your verdict and there isn’t really even that much meat to the scenario outside of the assumptions: if it was possible to just make a piece of meat that is biologically compatible with human beings, great; if the piece of meat is stated to have the quality of being sentient by the premise, then not so great.