Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design (Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics)
Jonathan Glover
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 0199238499
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Progress in genetic and reproductive technology now offers us the possibility of choosing what kinds of children we do and don't have. Should we welcome this power, or should we fear its implications? There is no ethical question more urgent than this: we may be at a turning-point in the history of humanity. The renowned moral philosopher and best-selling author Jonathan Glover shows us how we might try to answer this question, and other provoking and disturbing questions to which it leads.
Surely parents owe it to their children to give them the best life they can? Increasingly we are able to reduce the number of babies born with disabilities and disorders. But there is a powerful new challenge to conventional thinking about the desirability of doing so: this comes from the voices of those who have these conditions. They call into question the very definition of disability. How do we justify trying to avoid bringing people like them into being?
In 2002 a deaf couple used sperm donated by a friend with hereditary deafness to have a deaf baby: they took the view that deafness is not a disability, but a difference. Starting with the issues raised by this case, Jonathan Glover examines the emotive idea of "eugenics", and the ethics of attempting to enhance people, for non-medical reasons, by means of genetic choices. Should parents be free, not only to have children free from disabilities, but to choose, for instance, the colour of their eyes or hair? This is no longer a distant prospect, but an existing power which we cannot wish away. What impact will such interventions have, both on the individuals concerned and on society as a whole?
Should we try to make general improvements to the genetic make-up of human beings? Is there a central core of human nature with which we must not interfere?
This beautifully clear book is written for anyone who cares about the rights and wrongs of parents' choices for their children, anyone who is concerned about our human future. Glover handles these uncomfortable questions in a controversial but always humane and sympathetic manner.
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Their lives, this approach has great appeal. Surely what is bad must be bad for someone? Earlier, I mentioned Derek Parfit’s well-known Non-Identity Problem. His argument suggests that, when policies affect future generations, an approach based entirely on whether there will be people harmed by us is inadequate. Our environmental policies may make the world a worse place for our descendants in several generations’ time. At first sight it may seem that we owe it to our descendants not to harm them.
Disability, precisely because all its disadvantages are entirely socially imposed. In theory, social input 8 Disability and Genetic Choice is not in the same way essential for something to be a disability. Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island and unable to walk properly after a stroke, would still be disabled. (Of course in practice most disability has a social input.) Disability requires failure or limitation of functioning. But a limitation of functioning creates disability only if (on its.
About our own nature: the psychology that may cause our destruction. The self-confidence is about our capacity to understand the world. No other species, at least on our planet, has come anywhere near our capacity for increasing our intellectual grasp of what the world is like. In two or three thousand years we have transformed our understanding and we still seem to be on an accelerating upward curve. Are there any limits to this? A limit may be set by the capacities of the human brain. In.
University Press, 1978), 6. 16. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Political Education’, in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), 127. 17. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 313–14. 110 Afterword This book grew out of my Uehiro Lectures at Oxford in 2004. The lectures were a pleasure to give. Part of the pleasure came from the lively and questioning audience. Part of it had to do with the support given to practical ethics in Oxford by the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and.
Abnormality is unimportant. What matters is the contribution to whether or not the person flourishes. And, unsurprisingly, people with Asperger’s syndrome flourish more when not forced into attempts to conform, and deaf people flourish more when they choose for themselves whether to use sign. Impaired human flourishing: the case of blindness Aristotle was a biologist as well as a philosopher. When he made the idea of human flourishing the centre of his ethical theory, he may have been thinking of.