Eugenics and the Ethics of Selective Reproduction

Biomedical science is capable of giving people more choice than ever before about what their future children will be like.  IVF combined with embryo testing and selection, for example, makes it possible for people to choose the sex of their child, to avoid the birth of a child with a disability, or even to choose to deliberately create a disabled child.  Such possibilities raise important ethical issues – questions about which, if any, of these choices are morally wrong – along with closely related questions about law and regulation.  Our report, Eugenics and the Ethics of Selective Reproduction, tackles some such questions.  In particular –

  1. What is Eugenics? Which, if any, of our current practices actually are eugenic?  Is ‘eugenics’ a helpful term to use when discussing human reproduction?
  2. What moral objections are there to using embryo selection techniques to avoid disease and disability in our children? Are any of these objections sound? 
  3. Should people who positively want to have a child with a disability (some members of the Deaf community, for example) be allowed to use embryo selection to achieve this?
  4. Is choosing the sex of your future child wrong? Are there any circumstances in which people should be allowed to do this?

Our approach to these questions is philosophical: we use the methods distinctive to philosophy to address the issues.  First, we seek to uncover the form or structure of people’s ethical arguments or reasoning.  Second, we analyse these arguments to see which are valid and which are confused or mistaken.  Third, we seek to explain what some of the key terms in the debate mean and how they’re used.  Lastly, we seek to elucidate the moral principles which are appealed to in these debates (such as the idea that we have an obligation to create the ‘best possible’ children, or that children should be treated as ‘gifts’), and aim to evaluate them by spelling out their implications and looking at the extent to which they cohere with other important beliefs, policies, and values.

As philosophers, we’re generally more interested in the structure and workings of people’s moral arguments than in defending particular policy positions.  So while we do often conclude by saying that certain actions or policies are, or are not, defensible, such conclusions are not the most important thing.  Rather, it’s the illumination of arguments, concepts, and principles that is our more fundamental aim.  Some of the conclusions that we arrive at, such as that there are circumstances in which prospective parents should be allowed to select their child’s sex, or allowed deliberately to create a child with a disability, are controversial and not all of our readers will agree with them.  Nonetheless, even when our conclusions aren’t ultimately accepted, we still hope to have improved the quality of the debate, and of the way we think about these issues, by investigating whether even some rather unpopular ethical positions may not be as indefensible or abhorrent as they at first appear, and conversely whether some commonly used arguments and assumptions are flawed.

We all stand to learn a great deal from respectful open-minded ethical debate and we very much hope that our papers help to promote this end.  If you have any comments, feedback, or questions on our work, please feel free to email us via the Research Institute for the Social Sciences at research.humsstempadmin@keele.ac.uk

Stephen Wilkinson & Eve Garrard

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Eugenics and the Ethics of Selective Reproduction by Stephen Wilkinson and Eve Garrard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License