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I recently posted a question on the bioethics of brain organoids and was confused by a comment about bioethics being off topic? What does the community think? Is biology stack exchange not for bioethics questions?

https://biology.stackexchange.com/tags I also noticed bioethics wasn't a tag.

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https://biology.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic says explicitly that "off-topic" includes:

philosophical or ethical questions related to biology

I'd have to dig into the history, but I'm guessing the prohibition against those topics is mostly because we're not going to weigh-in on topics like abortion and eugenics, or any argument purporting to use biology to support some political stance ("Social Darwinism", for example).

Maybe there's some space to carve out exceptions when involving techniques in a biological laboratory if the questions are more about applications of those techniques rather than the underlying ethics, but yours is probably still across the line. It might have a better home at Philosophy.SE but I'd check with their policies before posting there.

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    $\begingroup$ I agree with Bryan's thoughts here. If your post was about how certain explicit ethics might impact application, that could potentially find a home here; however, if the topic of discussion is the ethics themselves they're unfortunately off-topic here. (though, I'm sure a number of us would engage bioethics discussions in chat $\endgroup$
    – theforestecologist Mod
    Apr 25 at 18:36
  • $\begingroup$ If that’s what it says, that’s what it means. $\endgroup$
    – David
    Apr 29 at 16:55

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