Abstract

The advent of current and emerging biotechnologies has placed greater levels of control in the hands of parentsParents and prospective parentsParents to shape their children’s physical, cognitiveCognitive, and emotive traits. Ethical questions initially formulated around the selection of embryos or fetuses that have certain desirable versus undesirable traits are now being applied, alongside novel questions, to whether parentsParents have an ethical obligationObligation, or at least a rightRight, to enhance their children to endow them with traits they would not naturally possess. This chapter elucidates how the ethics of enhancementEnhancement have developed, yet differ in important ways, from the ethics of selection. It then canvasses three primary ethical questions regarding enhancementEnhancement: whether parentsParents have an ethical obligationObligation to enhance their children when it is safe, effective, and feasible for them to do so; if not an obligationObligation, whether parentsParents have a rightRight to enhance their children and how their exercise of such a rightRight may alter the nature of the parentParents/child relationship; and what wider societal concerns might mitigate against such a parental rightRight or obligationObligation, at least not without significant socioeconomic restructuring. While this chapter is focused on specific ethical questions raised by the prospect of parentsParents making enhancementEnhancement choices on behalf of their born or preborn children, the conclusion highlights how such questions arise within a wider debate concerning whether biotechnological forms of human enhancementEnhancement should be freely allowed, universally restricted, or permitted on a limited basis for specific traits and purposes.