A Child’s Right to a Decent Future?: Regulating Human Genetic Enhancement in Multicultural Societies
- A Child’s Right to a Decent Future? Regulating Human Genetic Enhancement in Multicultural Societies
Should significant enhancement of human capacities using genetic technologies become possible, each generation will have an unprecedented power over the next. I argue that it is implausible to leave decisions about the genetic traits of children entirely up to individuals and that communities will sometimes be justified in intervening to protect the interests of children against their parents. While a number of influential authors have suggested that the primary interest that the community should aim to protect is the child’s right to “an open future”, when we examine closely what we desire for our children, it is clear that sometimes we have good reasons to try to restrict their opportunities to pursue dangerous, corrupting, or meaningless projects. Rather than maximise the openness of their future, then, we should strive to ensure that children have access to sufficient opportunities to make available a reasonable range of valuable life choices. Importantly, both the assessment of what counts as a reasonable range and our judgements about which forms of life are valuable must inevitably make reference to substantive notions about the nature of human flourishing. A more appropriate formulation, then, of what should be protected by law and/or regulation, is the child’s right to a “decent future”, understood as a future which promises a reasonable range of opportunities to lead a life of human flourishing. I then proceed to highlight the challenge posed by the task of settling upon an idea of what counts as a decent future, for multicultural societies wherein ideas about the standards against which we should evaluate human flourishing are likely to be highly contested. [End Page 355]
Introduction
The debate about the ethics — and regulation — of human enhancement is actually at least two different debates. There is a debate about enhancing existing people using drugs, brain-machine interfaces, and advanced medical technologies, et cetera (Buchanan 2011; Jotterand 2008; Lin and Allhoff 2008; Roco and Bainbridge 2002). Given the kind of liberal democratic public political cultures in which these debates are taking place, the basic structure of this debate involves balancing respect for individual autonomy with concerns about risks, the social consequences of enhancement, and the possibility that collective action problems might effectively require people to engage in enhancement. However, there is also a debate about enhancing future individuals using various genetic technologies.
It is this second debate that is my concern in this article. In particular, I will be concerned with the debate about the ethics and regulation of the use of Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) to bring into existence individuals with “enhanced” genomes. I will argue that it is implausible to leave the decisions about the genetic traits of children that are made possible by this technology entirely up to individuals and that communities will sometimes be justified in intervening to protect the interests of children against their parents. A number of influential authors have suggested that the primary interest the community should aim to protect is the child’s right to “an open future”. Yet when we examine closely what we desire for our children, it becomes clear that, rather than maximise the number of options available to them, we should strive to ensure that children have access to sufficient opportunities to make available a reasonable range of valuable life choices. Importantly, both the assessment of what counts as a reasonable range and our judgements about which forms of life are valuable must make reference to substantive notions about the nature of human flourishing. A more appropriate formulation, then, of what should be protected by law and/or regulation, is the child’s right to a “decent future”, understood as a future which promises a reasonable range of opportunities to lead a life of human flourishing. I will then proceed to highlight the challenge involved in settling upon an account of what counts as a decent future in multicultural societies, wherein ideas about the standards against which we should evaluate human flourishing are likely to be highly contested.
Before I proceed to my main argument, it is first necessary to discuss the “how”, “what...
