Recently, Dr. George Tiller was shot dead. Three hours after his assassination in Kansas, a pro-life activist was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Japanese researchers have genetically modified marmoset monkeys, and demonstrated that the modification can be inherited by their offspring. The modification was the standard green fluorescent protein making the monkey's glow green under UV light, a marker to demonstrate that the modification worked (BBC shows a picture of their feet glowing "an eerie green", while the picture in Nature's News and Views shows the cute monkeys in normal light and the original paper shows both). The long-term aim is to be able to produce transgenic primates that could act as disease models for humans - many conditions do not map well onto mice and rats. But is it acceptable to introduce heritable illness conditions into animals?
The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has recently declared that it is impossible to deny abortions to women who base their decision on the sex of the foetus. This ruling came about after a case where a woman twice aborted foetuses because they were female. This upset not only the medical personnel, but also social minister Göran Hägglund who declared that it was horrible that people valued sexes differently. But while the majority of Swedes probably do think sex selection is immoral, the right to free abortion is equally strongly held. This poses an interesting problem for socially and politically liberal societies like Sweden: allow gender selection, or try to restrict abortion?
Continue reading "Biting into the sour apple: liberal society, abortion rights and sex selection" »
Rubén Noé Coronado Jiménez is 25 and pregnant with twins. He is unusual in that he is a transsexual man, in the middle of hormone treatments and about to undergo a full operation to change his sex: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/30/transexual-man-pregnant-twins . The operation has, of course, been postponed while he and his female partner await the birth of their children.
Dr Josep-Luis Ballescà, a gynaecologist at the Clinical Hospital of Barcelona, has said that that the pregnancy is ‘not necessarily ethically acceptable: it is a contradiction.’
It’s hard to know quite what kind of contradiction Dr Ballescà has in mind. But it’s likely that part of what he means is that for a male to give birth goes against nature. And, if we assume that what is unnatural is morally wrong, we can draw the conclusion that Jiménez is acting wrongly. Either he should have had his children while still fully female, or he should have sought other means to have children, such as adoption.
The great C18 Scottish philosopher David Hume said that there is no word ‘more ambiguous and equivocal’ than ‘nature’ (Treatise 3.1.2.7). First, what’s natural can be contrasted with what is supernatural or miraculous. On the face of it, a man’s giving birth to a baby is a miracle, but of course on closer inspection we find that this pregnancy can be explained in purely naturalistic terms. Second, what is typical or usual can be called natural. Certainly what’s going on here is unusual. But why think that what is unusual is bad, regrettable, or wrong? Acts of very great heroism are unusual; but their being unusual if anything makes them more praiseworthy. Third, the natural can be contrasted with the artificial. Again, given the use of reproductive technology in this pregnancy, it could not be described as natural. But it would be hard to take seriously the idea that we should avoid the artificial. Most medical treatment would be forbidden, so it seems unlikely that it is that Dr Ballescà was thinking of.
It is most probable that behind Dr Ballescà’s remark lies a commitment to a kind of teleology: the idea that the world is to be understood in terms of certain purposes or goals, and that each being should seek to achieve the purposes specific to it. This form of naturalism is often tied to theology, and raises the question how we can know the purposes of God. There are certainly passages from the scriptures in various traditions which can be used to criticize Jiménez’s actions; but those passages themselves are open to different interpretations, often informed by other passages of scripture. We are anyway entitled to ask why God might have ascribed to women the role of giving birth. The obvious answer is to continue the species, and there seems no reason why men shouldn’t play the same valuable role.
Designer babies are in the news again. The LA Fertility Institutes, headed by a 1970s IVF pioneer, have offered the opportunity for potential parents to choose traits such as the eye and hair colour of their children: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7918296.stm
Unsurprisingly, slippery slope arguments have already begun to appear: http://www.theage.com.au/world/la-delivers-first-designerbaby-clinic-20090302-8meq.html Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Centre for Genetics and Society, has said: ‘The concern is that we'll be creating a society with new sorts of discrimination. Now it’s eye and hair colour. What happens if it’s height and intelligence?’
Slopes can be slippery in different ways, and they can be more or less slippery. The strongest form of slippery slope argument points to a logical implication: if you accept A (which you seem to think is good), then you must accept B (which presumably you think is bad). Pretty clearly, we don’t have an argument of that kind in the present case. There’s no logical inconsistency in being in favour of parents’ being allowed to select certain traits of their children, while being against discrimination. Nor of course is the existence of selection itself inconsistent with the absence of discrimination.
A more common form of the argument appeals to the lack of a non-arbitrary stopping point. The idea is that you should not accept A because A might conceivably lead to B, and you could find no non-arbitrary place to draw the line between A and B. That doesn’t seem to be Darnovsky’s argument, however, since it wouldn’t be arbitrary to stop selection if it were clearly leading to discrimination, but to permit it up to that point.
The argument here is essentially an appeal to consequences. As stated, however, it is clearly too strong. The concern cannot plausibly that we will be creating a society with new forms of discrimination. Rather, the idea must be that trait-selection may lead to these new forms of discrimination. So we can imagine a world in which people whose parents haven’t selected for certain eye or hair colours are discriminated against, which we can certainly accept would be undesirable.
The main issue here is how likely it is that discrimination on grounds of eye or hair colour will arise. On the face of it, it looks rather unlikely. People’s tastes in eye and hair colour vary a lot, so not everyone would go for (say) blue-eyed and blond children. And these kinds of characteristics anyway do not at present seem to be the basis for any systematic discrimination.
But, the argument suggests, selection for eye and hair colour may lead to selection for height and intelligence, and these may provide the basis for new kinds of discrimination. Again, however, it’s not clear why trait-selection even of these characteristics would lead to new forms of discrimination. There may be discrimination against short people now, in which case trait-selection wouldn’t be creating anything new. And if there isn’t any, then it’s not clear why it should be created merely through there being more tall people around.
Appeals to slippery slopes often rely on the idea that things could get out of control. Once you’re on that slope, you’re just going to keep slipping down and there’s nothing you can do. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with trait-selection. If it does turn out to have consequences we’d prefer to avoid, then we can stop doing it. Fertility clinics do not operate in a legislative vacuum.
So there’s no strong argument here for preventing those few parents who want to choose the eye or hair colour of their children to get on with it. Even if there is a slope, it is not especially slippery -- we can get off at any time.
As the Guardian reports, what started out as the more usual happy, wonder-of-modern medicine story of octuplets born in California has turned a little bit sour. It turns out that the 33 year old single mother of the eight newborns who lives with her parents, has six children already, the eldest of whom is seven. That’s 14 children below the age of eight. The story gets more difficult. Apparently, the mother is a self described ‘professional student’ who lives on “education grants and her parents’ money” and plans on becoming a “television childcare expert.” Further, the woman’s parents have recently filed for bankruptcy and her mother has previously consulted a psychologist about her daughter’s obsession with children.
In an opinion piece on the BBC website this week Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has questioned the wisdom of adopting pre-natal screening for autism, raising the possibility that it would prevent the existence of future great mathematicians. This is a variant of a common objection to pre-natal testing or to genetic enhancement.
Continue reading "The Lost Genius objection to pre-natal testing for autism" »
We are surrounded by many ethical issues, and their complexity makes it tempting to treat each in isolation. But we need to remember that to justify any position requires reference to universal principles, and these principles may well have implications in other areas we find uncomfortable. It’s also the case that thinking about one topic can provide helpful angles on others.
Consider first climate change. European leaders have just announced a climate change pact (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/13/carbon-emissions-eu). One central concern of those advocating measures to slow down and ultimately stop climate change is the well-being of future generations. But, as Derek Parfit brought out especially clearly in his classic Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, ch. 16), we have here a ‘non-identity problem’. Imagine that we allow the climate to change to the point that conditions on earth are significantly less conducive to human habitation than now. It might seem that future generations would be able to complain about our actions now. But in fact these individuals will exist only because of those actions. If we’d adopted different policies, then different individuals would have been born. The only complaint the future individuals might have would be if we had created conditions such that the value of their lives to them was lower than a life of no value at all – that is, a life which would have been better had it ended just as soon as it began. And even that doesn’t seem such a serious wrong, if the future individuals have the opportunity to end their lives in some not too painful a way.
But surely there is something wrong with damaging the environment so that the value of lives lived is much lower than that of lives that might have been lived? This suggests that an important element in ethics is impersonal. By harming the environment, we are doing something very wrong. But we are not wronging any particular persons. Our wrong consists in making the world – in terms of the quality of lives lived within it, independently of exactly who lives those lives – worse than it might have been.
Now consider abortion, which is condemned in the latest Instruction from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae: http://www.usccb.org/comm/Dignitaspersonae/Dignitas_Personae.pdf . The official Catholic view here is that a fetus, because it is a human being (which of course it is – a human being at the fetal stage), has the same dignity and moral status as any other human being. So abortion is on the same moral level as the murder of a child.
A common liberal view in our society is that abortion is entirely morally acceptable, while the murder of a child is very wrong. Here the liberal faces a serious problem which the Catholic does not: where to draw the line between a fetal human being and a young child at which moral status emerges. Liberals often claim that moral status develops gradually, but there is something unsatisfactory about this. What seems to make the murder of a young child wrong, as regards the child itself, is that it deprives the child of the rest of its life. But that is true of abortion. Indeed a murdered child may have had at least some valuable life before it is killed.
Ethical impersonality provides a way for liberals about abortion both to accept the Catholic view on moral status and to allow abortion while forbidding the murder of post-birth human beings. The moral wrong done to a fetus through abortion is indeed on roughly the same level as that done to a murdered post-birth human being. But it is very hard to say, from the impersonal point of view, whether either abortion or murder is wrong. We do not know what the optimum population level at any time is, so whether cutting short any particular life is, in itself, good or bad is unclear. But the effect of a murder on the overall level of well-being in the world is significantly greater than that of an abortion. Not only does it cause painful grief among relatives and friends of the murdered, but it increases fear and a sense of insecurity among many people. Murder on a large scale can even make life intolerable for just about everyone concerned, as recent events in the Congo have illustrated.
The idea of reproductive cloning can easily be perceived as offensive, as a practice that constitutes the dark side of cloning and should be prohibited under all circumstances, by contrast with therapeutic cloning, the benefits of which are increasingly acknowledged. However, such reactions typically assume that it is human cloning we are talking about. Regardless of how we should assess this latter practice, it seems difficult to make a plausible case for a complete ban on reproductive cloning of nonhuman animals. On the contrary, such a technique appears to open up exciting prospects. A group of Japanese scientists, as recently reported in the press (by the BBC and the Guardian, among other sources) have thus managed to produce clones from dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years. According to the aforesaid scientists, this achievement raises the possibility of re-creating extinct species such as mammoths from their frozen remains – a bit like what happens in Steven Spielberg’s movie Jurassic Park.
Continue reading "Re-creating mammoths and the family dog: two different cases" »
Prospective parents will be able to screen embryos for almost any known genetic disease using a revolutionary “universal test” developed by British scientists, led by Prof Alan Handyside
The £1,500 test, called karyomapping, which should be available as early as next year, will allow couples at risk of passing on gene defects to conceive healthy children using IVF treatment. The “genetic MoT” will transform the range of inherited disorders that can be detected. Currently only 2% of the 15,000 known genetic conditions can be detected in this way. Not only can it test for muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, but it can be used for testing for the risk of developing heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's in later life.
Continue reading "Preimplantation Genetic Screening: One Step Closer to the Perfect Baby?" »
Stumble It!
Recent Comments