Abstract
Although the philosophical literature on the ethics of human prenatal genetic alteration (PGA) purports to inform us about how to act, it rarely explicitly recognizes the perspective of those who will be making the PGA decision in practice. Here I approach the ethics of PGA from a distinctly virtue-based perspective, taking seriously what it means to be a good parent making this decision for one’s child. From this perspective, I generate a sound verdict on the moral standing of human PGA (research): given the current state of the art, good parents have compelling reason not to consent to PGA (research) for their child, especially as part of the first wave(s) of PGA research participants and especially for non-medically oriented purposes. This is because doing otherwise is inconsistent with a plausible and defensible understanding of virtuous parenting and parental virtues, founded on a genuine concern for promoting the overall flourishing of the eventual child. In essence, given the current and foreseeable state of the art, parents who allow prenatal genetic alteration of their children are less-than-virtuous parents to those children, even in cases where they have a right to do so and even if PGA turns out to be beneficial to the eventual child.
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Notes
There is also an argument along these lines to suggest that, given the current state of the art, children who have been prenatally genetically altered have good reason not to be grateful to their parent(s) for the PGA and to be resentful of the way that they were treated during the prenatal stages of their development. If children ought to be grateful to their parent(s) and if PGA puts pressure on the child’s ability to feel filial gratitude, then this would make PGA morally suspicious from a different direction as well.
For example, nothing in this understanding of flourishing necessarily denies autistic children from being able to flourish, qua autistic child.
A parent is justified in being primarily (not to say exclusively) concerned with the well-being of his or her child, before s/he is required to concern him- or herself with the prospect of bettering future generations of humans, especially if this requires subjecting one’s child to unprecedented experimental genetic research.
Habermas does not defend a virtue-based approach to PGA but rather a Kantian-inspired deontological account. However, his discussion on informational disclosure in the post-PGA context is helpful for understanding the shape of (the virtue of) parental honesty in this context.
This may work the other way as well; we may expect some placebo effect to occur if the non-altered child is told of having an “augmented” genetic code, even in cases where the child does not.
It is worth noting that this aspect of Habermas’ theory has been the target of bountiful criticism. Moreover, as Harris (2007) and others have argued, there is no reason to believe that sustained and targeted psychological counselling could not help the child overcome this sort of maladjusted self-understanding, founded as it is on an untenable genetic determinism, i.e., the (false) belief that we are determined by our genes—genes ground predispositions, which may or may not manifest themselves phenotypically, depending on environmental influences, diet, etc.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Duff Waring, Alice MacLachlan, Robert Myers, Udo Schuklenk, Françoise Baylis, D. Robert McDougall, Tamara Kayali, Tim Krahn, Jacqui Shaw, and four reviewers at the JBI for their engaging and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work was supported (in part) through a Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant, FRN 111389.
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Tonkens, R. Parental Virtue and Prenatal Genetic Alteration Research. Bioethical Inquiry 12, 651–664 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9650-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9650-8