The ethics of invertebrate research have largely been ignored compared to the consideration of higher order animals, but more recent focus has questioned this trend. Using biohybrid robotic jellyfish as a case study, we examine the ethical considerations of invertebrate work and provide recommendations for future guidelines. This paper starts with an overview of philosophical views of animal ethics, the current state of knowledge for invertebrate pain and nociception, and current ethical guidelines. Next, we delve into the case study and analogous precedents. Specifically, in prior studies, we developed biohybrid robotic jellyfish, which modified live moon jellyfish with microelectronic swim controllers for future applications in ocean monitoring. Although jellyfish possess no central nervous system, pain receptors, or nociceptors, we closely monitored their stress responses, using the precautionary and minimization principles in consideration of the 4Rs: reduction, replacement, refinement, and reproducibility. We also discuss ethical considerations related to our studies and suggest that public opinion of invertebrate research relies heavily on repugnance, including fears of ‘playing God’ or limiting the ‘free will’ of animals. These issues are also examined for prior bioethics cases, such as the RoboRoach, cyborg beetle, ‘microslavery’ of microbes, biohybrid robots incorporating tissues from sea slugs (which are known to possess nociceptors), and other tissue cutting experiments involving soft-bodied invertebrates. However, biohybrid robotic jellyfish pose further ethical questions of potential ecological consequences as ocean monitoring tools, such as the impact of electronic waste in the ocean. To conclude these evaluations, we recommend that publishers require brief ethical statements for invertebrate research, which can include the following: a scientific justification for the research, discussion of the 4Rs, and cost-benefit analysis. We also delineate the need for more research on pain and nociception in invertebrates, which can then be used to revise or validate current research standards. These actions provide a stronger basis for the ethical study of invertebrate species, with implications for individual, species-wide, and ecological impacts on animals, as well as for interdisciplinary studies in science, engineering, and philosophy.

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setback in our capacity to lead value-laden lives. In so far as we think that justice requires that we protect peoples' capacity to realize their conceptions of the good life, it seems to follow that we owe it to our contemporaries to care for future generations. This move would place the reasons Scheffler provides much more at the core of our reasons to act. They would not be reasons to think that we owe anything to future people, but they would ground obligations regarding future people (e.g. Gosseries, On Future Generations' Future Rights, 2008). If we have one serious misgiving about the book (and its predecessor), it is that it almost completely fails to engage with other scholarly work on its central question (see, for an excellent overview of previous literature, Davidson's review of Death and the Afterlife, 2015). This might create the impression that Scheffler has opened a new field of inquiry, whereas most of the ideas Scheffler presents have been discussed in detail. It would be a real loss if people new to these questions followed Scheffler in neglecting earlier work, for example David Heyd's remarkable Genethics (1992). This book presents a compelling case that we have many reasons to worry about future generations, and points to further fascinating questions about the role future generations play in our moral and ethical lives. The force of these arguments is that they do not appeal to abstract or complicated moral systems but embed these reasons in the structure of ourat least widely sharedevaluative attitudes. Strategically, this is an important contribution given the kind of challenges which face humanity. That alone is reason enough to hope that the book will be widely read.

While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his speculative views about the way in which this progress might have begun and the circumstances surrounding this beginning have been largely neglected. Implicit in such an omission is the assumption that Kant does not say much about the very beginning of human history or that whatever he says is of little philosophical value. This article challenges these assumptions. I reconstruct Kant’s account of the emergence of reason by looking at his various conjectural and more literal remarks about our species’ transition from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings possessing a rudimentary form of rationality. Next, I show how this account fits with Kant’s broader view of humankind’s rational progress and its subsequent stages. By doing so, I elucidate Kant’s guidelines for achieving this progress in the future by unifying them with his regulative view of reason’s past.