Planet of the Apes and Philosophy by John Huss

decides to test ALZ-112 on his father, after his research program at Gen-Sys has been shut down (having in the meantime inadvertently caused permanent enhancements in Caesar). We can look at this decision from the starting assumptions of three standard ethical theories: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, working our way from those assumptions through the ethical consequences that follow from them.
    Consequentialist ethics begins with the assumption that—as the name clearly hints at—what matters in moral decisionmaking is the consequences of one’s action. Nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill is one of the most influential consequentialists, and for him a good action has the consequence of increasing overall happiness, while a bad action has the consequence of increasing overall pain. So, for Mill it does not really matter what Will’s intentions were (they were good, we assume, as he was both concerned with his father’s health and with a potential cure for Alzheimer’s for all humankind), what matters is what happened as a result of his action. And what happened was a disaster. Not only did his father actually die of the disease, but Will’s attempt to solve the problem that led tothe failure of his cure will eventually condemn the human race to extinction. That’s as bad as consequences can possibly be, I’d say. There is a caveat, however. If the totality of chimp happiness outweighs the pain caused by humanity’s extinction, Will may still be vindicated on consequentialist grounds. That, unfortunately, isn’t going to help Will or anyone he cared for, except perhaps Caesar.
    Deontological ethics is the idea that there are universal rules of conduct that govern our ethical judgments. Religious commandments are an example of a deontological moral system. The most important secular approach to deontology is the one devised by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, and is based on his idea that there is only one fundamental moral rule, which he called the categorical imperative (it’s not only an imperative, but no exceptions are allowed!). In one version, the imperative essentially says that we ought to treat other people never solely as means to an end, but always as ends in themselves. In other words, we must respect their integrity as moral agents distinct from but equal to ourselves.
    It’s not exactly clear how Kant would evaluate Will’s actions towards his father. On the one hand, Will attempted the cure on his father because he was genuinely worried about the latter’s health, so Will clearly valued his father as an individual for his own sake. On the other hand, if part of Will’s goal was to find a general cure for Alzheimer’s, then by using his father as an experimental subject, he was using him as a means toward a further end. Moreover, he did so without obtaining his father’s explicit consent—indeed, he never even attempted to inform his father about the treatment before or after it was administered. For a deontologist, the consequences aren’t what determine the rightness or wrongness of an action at all, so even if Will had succeeded in liberating humanity from Alzheimer’s (instead of starting a chain of events that eventually leads to the extinction of the entire species), he would still have done the wrong thing. You can see why Kant was well known for being a bit too strict of a moralist.
    Finally, we get to virtue ethics, an idea that was common in ancient Greece and was elaborated in particular by Aristotle. Virtue ethicists are not really concerned with determining what’s right or wrong, but rather with what kind of life one ought to live in order to flourish. This means that Aristotlewould consider neither the consequences of an action per se, nor necessarily the intentions of the moral agent, but would look instead at whether the action was the reflection of a “virtuous”