EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. We tend to hold people responsible for their choices, but not for what they can’t control: their nature, genes or biological makeup. This thought-provoking collection redefines the boundaries of moral responsibility. It shows how epigenetics reveals connections between our genetic make-up and our environment. The essays challenge established notions of human nature and the nature/nurture divide and suggest a shift in focus from individual to collective responsibility. Uncovering the links between our (...) genetic makeup, environment and experiences, this is an important contribution to ongoing debates on ethics, genetics and responsibility. (shrink)

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors look (...) more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

In recent years, the question of whether prospective parents might have a moral obligation to select against disability in their offspring has piqued the attention of many prominent philosophers and bioethicists, and a large literature has emerged surrounding this question. Rather than looking to the most common arguments given in support of a positive response to the abovementioned question, such as those focusing on the harms disability may impose on the child created, duties and role-specific obligations, and impersonal ‘harms’, a (...) less commonly made set of arguments is focused upon which looks to the harms that a decision not to select against disability may impose on others. Three different possible arguments supporting a limited duty of disability avoidance are thus identified and subsequently explored: harms to parents themselves, harms to existing family members, and harms to other existing members of society. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungZumindest bei bestimmten Gruppen kann die Aneuploidietestung im Rahmen der PID für die Schwangerschaft medizinisch sinnvoll sein. Die gegenwärtige Rechtslage in Deutschland scheint die PID auf eine Chromosomenfehlverteilung im Embryo nicht auszuschließen; diese Testung muss aber im Einzelfall begründet und von der Frau bei einer PID-Ethikkommission beantragt werden. Der Artikel untersucht die Frage aus ethischer und rechtlicher Sicht, ob prinzipielle Gründe dagegen stehen, dass die zuständigen Ethikkommissionen Anträgen auf die Durchführung von Aneuploidietests zustimmen. Es können drei verschiedene Fallkonstellationen unterschieden werden, (...) in denen Aneuploidietests Teil von unterschiedlichen Handlungen werden und entsprechend unterschiedliche ethische Implikationen aufweisen: Das Ziel der IVF kann (i) der Aneuploidietest selbst sein, oder (ii) die IVF kann eine indizierte Unfruchtbarkeitsbehandlung sein, bei der man auch PID und Aneuploidietests durchführen kann, oder (iii) die PID ist indiziert zur Vermeidung einer Erbkrankheit oder Chromosomenschädigung und Aneuploidie kann in dieser Situation ein Zufalls- oder ein Zusatzbefund werden. Ethische Argumente, die grundsätzlich gegen eine Zulässigkeit von Aneuploidietests sprechen könnten, sind die Vermeidung einer Diskriminierung von Menschen mit Aneuploidien und der Embryonenschutz. Sie könnten gegen das Fallszenario (i) erhoben werden, aber nicht gegen (ii) und (iii). Es gibt aber mindestens drei ethische Argumente, die für die Zulässigkeit sprechen: die „gute Praxis“ der IVF, die Pflicht gegenüber dem entstehenden Kind und die Mitsprache des Paares. Ergebnis: Es ist aus rechtlichen und ethischen Gründen nicht ausgeschlossen und deshalb in Deutschland durch die zuständigen PID-Kommissionen offen zu diskutieren, ob Aneuploidietests in der PID möglich werden. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this paper I explore some of the moral issues that could emerge from the creation of human–nonhuman chimeras capable of human gamete production and human pregnancy. First I explore whether there is a cogent argument against the creation of HNH-chimeras that could produce human gametes. I conclude that so far there is none, and that in fact there is at least one good moral reason for producing such types of creatures. Afterwards I explore some of the moral problems that (...) could emerge from the fact that a HNH-chimera could become pregnant with a human conceptus. I focus on two sets of problems: problems that would arise by virtue of the fact that a human is gestated by a nonhuman creature, and problems that would emerge from the fact that such pregnancies could affect the health of the HNH-chimera. (shrink)

In ordinary language, in the medical sciences, and in the overlap between them, we frequently make claims which imply that we might have had different gametic origins from the ones we actually have. Such statements seem intuitively true and coherent. But they counterfactually ascribe different DNA to their referents and therefore contradict material-origin essentialism, which Kripke and his followers argue is intuitively obvious. In this paper I argue, using examples from ordinary language and from philosophy of medicine and bioethics, that (...) statements which attribute alternative material origins to their referents are useful, common in political and medical reasoning, and in many cases best interpreted literally. So we must replace the doctrine of material-origin essentialism with one that can make sense of ordinary discourse and the language of the medical sciences. I propose an anti-essentialist account of such counterfactuals according to which individuals’ modal properties are relative to a given inquiry. (shrink)

The non-identity problem arises when our actions in the present could change which people will exist in the future, for better or worse. Is it morally better to improve the lives of specific future people, as compared to changing which people exist for the better? Affecting the timing of fetuses being conceived is one case where present actions change the identity of future people. This is relevant to questions of public health policy, as exemplified in some responses to the Zika (...) epidemic. There is philosophical disagreement about the relevance of non-identity: some hold that non-identity is not relevant, while others think that the only morally relevant actions are those that affect specific people. Given this disagreement, we investigated the intuitions about the moral relevance of non-identity within an educated sample of the public, because there was previously little empirical data on the public’s views on the non-identity problem. We performed an online survey with a sample of the educated general public. The survey assessed participants’ preferences between person-affecting and impersonal interventions for Zika, and their views on other non-identity thought experiments, once the non-identity problem had been explained. It aimed to directly measure the importance of non-identity in participants’ moral decision-making. We collected 763 valid responses from the survey. Half of the participants (50%) had a graduate degree, 47% had studied philosophy at a university level, and 20% had read about the non-identity problem before. Most participants favoured person-affecting interventions for Zika over impersonal ones, but the majority claimed that non-identity did not influence their decision (66% of those preferring person-affecting interventions, 95% of those preferring impersonal ones). In one non-identity thought experiment participants were divided, but in another they primarily answered that impersonally reducing the quality of life of future people would be wrong, harmful and blameworthy, even though no specific individuals would be worse off. Non-identity appeared to play a minor role in participants’ moral decision-making. Moreover, participants seem to either misunderstand the non-identity problem, or hold non-counterfactual views of harm that do not define harm as making someone worse off than they would have been otherwise. (shrink)