Ach! I was all over the place, drunk out my mind when I wrote that, apologies.
I jumped around way too much, I meant to imply that the stimulus of the tissue is a workable, ethical solution.
The engineering of a genome (with the potential for proliferation of genes into the environment) that constitutes a vegetated animal seems… ethically tricky to me.
Also, no need to denigrate philosophy! It’s quite good enough at that on it’s own, thank you very much. 
Of course, science should be bound by ethical considerations, but I’d like to explore your idea of using the vehicle of an engineered animal to act as the vat.
Surely these would be clones, or would we leave breeding instincts in the genome? Would they seek light and warmth, basic homoeostatic functions intact?
They could be stripped, I suppose, of anything approaching any kind of emotional sentience and left with basic motor functions… left in barns, to exercise the meat; or on the other end of the spectrum, totally vegetated, looking nothing like actual animals.
1000lb chicken lumps, growing like obscene cancerous tumours, twitching to the beat of the elctro-stimulus package. Internally engineered or applied surgically? Perhaps a separate technological system the meat is engineered to form a symbiotic relationship with as it grows?
It is within these boundaries I wish to explore the implied ethics. What constitutes sentience? Homoeostasis? Surely not. But why stop at engineering vegetated animals, when you can add just a little more neural complexity. A little self direction to do some of the work of the farmer. Internal functionality.
Boundaries are pushed, where are they in this case?
Hmm, still drunk. 
