Colin Farrelly - Genetic Ethics: An Introduction

Dedicated to my parents, Patrick and Angela Farrelly

Colin Farrelly

polity

Copyright Colin Farrelly 2018

The right of Colin Farrelly to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9507-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Farrelly, Colin Patrick, author.
Title: Genetic ethics : an introduction / Colin Farrelly.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007933 (print) | LCCN 2018023953 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745695075 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745695037 | ISBN 9780745695044 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Human genetics--Moral and ethical aspects. | Genetic engineering--Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC QH438.7 (ebook) | LCC QH438.7 .F37 2018 (print) | DDC 174.2/96042--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007933

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Advances in the biomedical sciences, especially our understanding of the role genes play in the development of different phenotypes that is, observable characteristics such as health, disease and behaviour might help us advance important moral aspirations. Those aspirations range from preventing and treating specific diseases to realizing greater equality of opportunity, the healthy aging of a population, and expanding the scope of reproductive freedom.

The Constitution of the World Health Organization defines health as follows: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Gene editing was utilized to target a mutation in a gene called MYBPC3, a gene that causes the heart muscle to thicken. Such thickening can lead to a fatal heart condition in young athletes. This early experiment of gene editing in human embryos raises the prospect of being able to correct potentially deleterious germline mutations before a child is even born.

Advances in our knowledge of genetics might go much further than simply allowing us to treat and prevent disease via gene therapy or genome editing. An understanding of the role genes play in human intelligence, memory, emotional resilience, moral behaviour and happiness could expand the domain of interventions (both environmental and genetic) at our disposal to improve our opportunities for living flourishing lives. Advances in screening human embryos prior to implantation (known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD) for sex or a higher propensity towards desirable behavioural characteristics could expand, for better or worse, the discretionary power parents have in shaping the potential identify of their offspring.

Is the prospect of genetic engineering humans something to be hailed or feared? Will it improve our prospects for living flourishing lives and creating more fair societies or will it threaten our very survival and/or create greater inequality and other grave societal problems? These are among some of the most pressing, and novel, societal concerns of the twenty-first century. And these are questions we shall address, and attempt to answer (even if only provisionally), in the chapters to follow.

One could explore the ethical and societal implications of advances in our understanding of genetics from many different moral lenses and principles. For example, suppose one started from a duty to aid (or principle of beneficence). Peter Singer, a utilitarian and arguably the most influential living philosopher in applied ethics, invoked what he called the principle of preventing bad occurrences to raise greater awareness about the problem of global poverty. This principle states:

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. (Singer 1972: 231)

Singer asked us to contemplate a now famous thought experiment to demonstrate the normative force of this duty to aid. The example concerns a child who is drowning in a shallow pond. You are walking past the pond and notice the distressed child in need of assistance. The child is not your child, nor a compatriot, but a citizen from a distant and far-away country. Nevertheless, the child is a human being in need of assistance. If the only burden to be incurred by saving the child is getting ones shoes and trousers wet, then there is, argues Singer, a stringent duty to do so.

Singer then drew an analogy between the example of the drowning child and global poverty. The rich living in the developed world have a stringent moral obligation, he argued, to donate a significant amount of their income to help those living in poverty in distant lands. Singers argument spurred much debate on the demands of global justice, a topic largely ignored by philosophers before the publication of Singers article. Questions such as Do national boundaries have any ethical significance? are still debated over forty years later.

Despite its potential usefulness, there are also significant limitations in invoking Singers principle of preventing bad occurrences. Most of the bad things in the world, including global poverty, are infinitely more complex and complicated than the example of helping a drowning child in a shallow pond. How do we ensure the actions we undertake to redress poverty actually help others rather than just wasting our time and energy or, even worse, making the situation even more dire (as can conceivably happen in the case of providing foreign aid)?

The problem of global poverty is not simply, or even primarily, a problem of the rich not donating money to the poor. But it is hard not to form that impression from Singers original article and moral argument. The central moves in his moral argument are (1) to invoke the principle of bad occurrences, then (2) to link that principle with the badness of poverty, and then (3) to conclude that the solution to this bad is for the rich to donate more money to foreign aid.

Suppose we ran a similar moral analysis to buttress the case for mitigating the genetic lottery of life. Imagine the child in need of assistance was not drowning in a shallow pond. Instead, the source of the threat of the child drowning was