Bioethics Contra Biopower

This chapter engages two issues as they bear on genomic editing and the effects of biotechnology on human well-being: (1) how technology influences a reductionistic and manipulative understanding of biopower and biopolitics, fundamentally at odds with the worldview of bioethical humanism; and (2) how the reconceptualization of human flourishing in capability theories of justice bears on the ethics of biotechnology. The argument of this chapter appeals to a relational or “ecological” humanism that will assist bioethics in developing a critique of the technologies and knowledges of molecular reductionism. In the perspective of relational humanism, human beings are empowered as subjects of value and agents of self-realization, and mutual relations of interdependence and solidarity are affirmed. Along these lines, a reframed debate concerning the governance of biopower and the promotion of just human flourishing in an age of biotechnology can take place.

Reprogenetic Technologies Between Private Choice and Public Good

Much of the bioethical debate on reproductive and genetic technologies has focused on the potential risks and benefits for individuals. This chapter shifts the focus from the individualistic level towards a societal perspective. It explores how emerging reprogenetic technologies can both thwart and promote the flourishing of communities, and argues that these technologies can contribute to the public good only when certain social conditions and side-constraints are in place—which can sometimes entail influencing or even limiting individual choice. The chapter gives an account of how we should understand ‘the public good’ in this context, including values such as tolerance, inclusion, and solidarity. It explores how reprogenetic technologies can affect the public good, for better or worse. Finally it addresses the forms of governance—regulations, institutional checks and balances—we might deploy with regard to these technologies to ensure they contribute to both individual and collective flourishing.

“Good Parents” Can Promote Their Own and Their Children’s Flourishing

Advances in genetic technology, including new methods for gene editing, promise to provide parents and prospective parents with more information about and more control over the genetic make-up of their children. Information and control are both highly prized in our culture, and both could offer substantial benefits to parents and children. Yet offers of information and control that promise to benefit children can quickly generate new parental responsibilities, morphing from opportunities to obligations and raising the question whether refusing to use the technologies might one day be considered inconsistent with being a “good parent.” This chapter explores the idea of the good parent and argues that understandings of the good parent must evolve to take parents’ own flourishing into account. Only with this richer understanding of the nature and responsibilities of parenting can we adopt technologies such as gene editing in ways that benefit both parents and children.

The Politics of Intrinsic Worth

Talk of “protecting human dignity” has become a fixture of modern counterpolitics. Indeed, it has become so widespread, some in bioethics have suggested the term now means too little by being made to do too much. This chapter argues that however philosophically “thin” it has become, bioethics still needs talk of dignity. It proposes that the power of the concept lies less in clear philosophical definitions and more in how notions of intrinsic worth evoked by human dignity offer a language for critiquing the sometimes-violent ways science and technology have been used to “normalize” human life. Working historically, the chapter concludes that giving up on dignity would mean giving up a key resource for asking not only what we might gain in transforming ourselves with new biotechnologies, but also whether there is something inviolably precious we might lose.

Unraveling the Human Tapestry

If parents are choosing their children’s genes, there is a chance that they will all try to have healthy, long-lived, handsome, and intelligent children. While many have advertised a world of “perfect babies” as a utopia, to some critics the loss of diversity involved would be a disaster. This chapter distinguishes between different sorts of diversity, different putative beneficiaries of the existence of diversity, and different reasons for believing diversity to be valuable. Sparrow argues that the threat posed to valuable kinds of diversity by gene editing is less than critics often fear. He suggests that, where gene editing does pose a plausible threat to a valuable kind of diversity, it might be reasonable to limit the use of gene editing as long as conserving or securing diversity does not require sacrificing the welfare of any individual too much.

Can We Care about Nature?

The debate about human enhancement turns partly on the view we take about the ideal human relationship to nature, but those views are hard to articulate and are frequently misunderstood. Often, those who raise concerns about human enhancement on grounds of beliefs about the human relationship to nature are seen as holding that human enhancement is simply “against nature” and therefore flatly wrong. But there are alternative ways of describing the ideal human relationship to nature. The belief that enhancement is against nature requires understanding moral values, nature, and the human relationship to nature in rather rigid ways. Alternative ways of understanding those things can lead to a significantly more moderate view—that the concern about nature is not about violating nature but simply about striking a balance between remaking nature or preserving it.

Editing the Best of All Possible Worlds

It has been argued that we have a moral obligation to explore human germline modification in order to create the best possible children. In contrast, this chapter argues that in order to flourish as human beings we need to recognize that there are many different ways of being good and that the pursuit of happiness is most likely to succeed not in the extraordinary, the larger than life and better than human and beyond average, but in the ordinary life, which has enough scope and depth to provide us with all the happiness that a human life can possibly have.

Flourishing and the Value of Authenticity

This chapter examines the role of authenticity in well-being, focusing on issues raised by biotechnologies like gene editing. It is argued that there are good reasons to view authenticity as an aspect of well-being, and the chapter discusses some implications of this view for gene-editing technologies. Also briefly surveyed is the philosophical literature on well-being. The chief goal is to make the case that authenticity merits serious consideration as an aspect of well-being. Even if one concludes that it has no role in the best theory of well-being, the notion of authenticity is deeply embedded in ordinary thinking about the good life and merits attention from policymakers and others if only for that reason.

Introduction to Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing

In 2015, in the journal Science, a highly regarded group of scientists, science policy experts, and ethicists called for a public conversation about the ethical questions raised by a new technology that could be used to alter the genomes of human beings.1 Among these ethical questions were ones regarding safety. Most simply, could the new technology be deployed without posing an unreasonable risk of causing physical harms? The authors of the commentary in ...

Parental Responsibility and Gene Editing

Once genetic screening and intervention technologies become safe, effective, and inexpensive, should parents use them to safeguard their children’s happiness, and would parents who do not use them be reckless and irresponsible? This line of thinking is troubling for many reasons, but in particular because it overlooks that social pressure, not a sense of responsibility, is what will most likely lead parents to use such technologies. This matters because unless more attention is paid to how people’s choices are affected by group dynamics, then over time nobody may even notice when such technologies start being used in troubling ways. To address this concern, the chapter argues that social institutions are needed that enable society as a whole to reflect on its own evolution over time. Until such institutions are created—to oversee, to evaluate, and to control social factors that influence people’s choices—it makes little sense to debate parental responsibilities.