Or even if their isn’t, either we have free will, or we do not and are just deterministic biochemical meat puppets dancing to some unfathomable script… God playing with himself. If the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless.
Even if you do not believe in God, the same questions are relevant. I would argue that we do indeed have free will (for an excellent discussion by an atheist on that, see sections of David Deutsch‘s remarkable Fabric of Reality). And if we have free will, the very notion of submitting to the slings and arrows of life when an arrow-proof shield can be fashioned with our own hands is surely unreasonable… and to forcibly require that a person do nothing when the means to build that shield exist is not just unreasonable but monstrous.
In the print edition of New Scientist, Tom Shakespeare, the co-author of Genetic Politics: From eugenics to genome advocates outlawing parents from using ‘sperm selection technology’ which can allow the sex of a child to be chosen. He sees this as a precursor to parents eventually selecting desired traits for unborn children:
On balance, then, I believe that sperm sorting will in the long run do more harm than good. And this seems doubly true of sex selection via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Even if there is no “gene for” intelligence, sporting prowess or artistic talent, few scientists doubt that gene-chip technologies will one day provide considerable information about genetic variations. Letting parents choose embryos on the basis of sex now, for no good medical reason, will make it harder in the future to say no when they ask to choose embryos on the basis of other traits.
This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children. Not only can private individuals not be trusted to make such decisions (it should be left to ‘experts’), it is also unfair to others if those children are better educated. Similarly, if physically more capable disease resistant children can be ‘created’ by parents, this is somehow seen as ‘bad’ for everyone else. Now one might assume from Tom Shakespeare’s remarks above that he has nothing against medically based pre-implantation interventions. Yet he follows this with:
A line has to be drawn somewhere, and social sex selection is the right place. Children should be accepted for themselves, not to the extent that they fulfil our wishes and desires. We should be more tolerant of disability and all imperfections, let alone imbalances of sex within a family.
And here the real reason becomes clear. It seems that even if some parent can eradicate disability and imperfection (by which I assume he means physical imperfection) for their own unborn children, Professor Shakespeare thinks this is a bad idea. More importantly, he wants his view to be the force backed law of the land: he wants the issue to be political rather than social. I am indifferent to the idea of selecting the sex of a child, which I regard as a trivial matter, but it is clear that he sees this as the thin end of the wedge and in this I agree with him (though it is a wedge I wish to see well and truly hammered in).
A few months ago, I railed at a pair of deaf lesbian women who selectively bred a deaf child. I contend this was the commission of a monstrous and wilfull crime against that child, no different than if they had deafened it by stabbing sharpened pencils into its ears. Prof. Shakespeare disagrees (link requires RealPlayer or similar). It seems that he views intervening to cause disability is fine, but not to prevent it.
By comparison, what Tom Shakespeare is asking, or more accurately demanding given that he is talking about violence backed regulation, not social persuasion, is that parents of the very near future, ones who have the capacity to banish disability and imperfection, be permitted to do nothing of the kind. I see this as a crime of omission, rather than commission. If a family starves in Africa because there is not enough food for anyone, that is a tragedy. If a child starves in Britain because its parents elect to spend their money on booze and ciggies, that is wickedness. If a child is born disabled and yet the means to prevent this are within the grasp of the parents, that too would be wickedness. If other families cannot afford this, that is unfortunate but why actively penalize the more fortunate? If two children are drowning but only one can be saved, is it moral to let both drown in the interests of some warped notions of ‘fairness’?
We will not have to accept the random dice of genetic probability for much longer, anymore than we have to forgo antibiotics and surgical procedures to defeat illnesses and correct injury and defect. If God gave a child a birth defect, he also gave us the brain which produces the means to undo it. Yes, a person who has a disability must be treated with the respect any person is due by right, but forcibly refusing to allow the prevention of that disabling condition in the first place is not therefore moral.
Professor Shakespeare has achondroplasia, which is a genetic disorder that causes dwarfish traits. He quite rightly thinks this does not make him any less of a valid human being but where he and I depart is that I do not think disability is ‘okay’. Disabled people are okay, but let us not kid ourselves that physical (or mental) disability is not restricting and limiting. I do not doubt that Tom Shakespeare’s range of experience is as valuable, rich and interesting as my own: for sure, even ‘normal’ humans exhibit a wide range of capabilities. I am not disabled but I am not capable of the feats of a professional athlete. Yet clearly there comes a point when personal capabilities become so reduced that independent existence itself becomes difficult or impossible. If this can be delayed until the distant onset of old age, surely that is better than the enforced experiences of a life of disability.
But Tom Shakespeare does not want people like me to have a choice because he wants to use law to compel us to do things as he wishes. But if he and his statist ilk prohibit such use of technologies within the EU, then I see a nice little business opportunity opening up. Croatia is outside the EU and the Dalmatian coastline is a superb place for a nice holiday. I am sure a nice genetic screening clinic in Dubrovnik or Rijeka offering the best children science can offer along with a nice beach, glorious scenery and good food would make a fortune.
I agree, Perry. I have often had good-natured discussions about genetic engineering with my socialist friend Ed, and he has laughingly said “Of course you’re the radical, Mark, and I’m the conservative”. Naturally, he disapproves of genetic enhancement.
Of course some genetic engineering carries an extra, epidemiological risk – where perhaps it is unfair on everyone else for individuals to experiment unhindered, but how can it be automatically wrong for people improve themselves or their children? I think these critics are a mix of puritan killjoys, and Continental state-worshippers.
um… “This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children.”
which socialists actually object to private education on those grounds, exactly? None. I think you’re thinking of State Paternalists, aren’t you?
Socialists like Dea Birkett. How many socialists think compliance with socialist objectives should be elective? Which socialists are arguing that if I elect not to use the NHS, I can also elect to stop paying for it? Or if I home school, I can elect to stop paying for the state’s educational conscription centres? Which socialists actually think that education is none of the state’s business?
Yes there are indeed many conservatives who are also paternalist statists and I regularly heap scorn on them too. But Prof. Shakespeare is not one of those.
Always look on the dark side of things, these lefties.
I’d love to genetically engineer my offspring so they didn’t have to go through the pain my family all have with dental problems- we suffer from poor teeth. What is so radically earth shattering about that? I thought modern medicine was about prevention, rather then cure?
One of your best articles, Perry. I bit longish, but chock-full of lean meat for the soul.
‘Children should be accepted for themselves, not to the extent that they fulfil our wishes and desires. We should be more tolerant of disability and all imperfections, let alone imbalances of sex within a family.’
Well, I do not really care what sex my children are. But having gone to all the trouble of choosing my wife, largely to the extent that she fufils my wishes and desires, and not uninfluenced by the knowledge that my children would be like her, I cannot see any reason why I should not have some chance to (further) choose my children in a similar fashion.
I would heavily indebt myself if I could guarantee our child a healthier life. After all, my choice of what foods my wife eats (inasmuch as I have one), where we live, etc, is influenced almost not at all by cost but very much by what I, rightly or wrongly, believe will be best for our child.
As for imperfections, I will be, as my parents before me, much much less tolerant of many ‘imperfections’ than the majority of parents I observe today.
Finally, this is very much socialist – intervening to prevent a free choice on the grounds of a possible suffering, forgetting that we suffer so as to learn, and thus derailing once again our natural and very efficient capacity to adopt the most advantageous behaviour for our situation – see eg welfare and unemployment, welfare and single motherhood, etc!
I don’t see why you have to bring the state into this, except as the protector of basic individual rights. I think it is hard to deny that choosing someone else’s most basic charactistics for them violates those rights, and the notion no one should have such sovereignty over another. Yes, at the time it happens, the person has not yet been conceived, but once that does occur, the power others have had over their lives is overwhelming. I expanded on this argument on my own site on 8 September.
By the way, if parents can choose to cure children from various problems, and give them certain characteristics, sex changes etc. why shouldn’t they be able to deform them? Would you advocate the state determine what constitutes “improvement” of a baby, or would you say parents should be able to ensure their children are born with no limbs? I don’t think either of these options is very desirable, and would say the best cut-off point to have parental modifications of children banned, whether the state labels them an “improvement” or not.
By the way, if parents can choose to cure children from various problems, and give them certain characteristics, sex changes etc. why shouldn’t they be able to deform them?
That is bizarre Peter. By that logic, I assume you regard the decision to feed a child or to starve a child as just two morally neutral options? To make a child resistent to disease or free of spina bifida is not ‘just an option’ with equally valid choices being making the child blind and deaf.
Choosing to alter a child via technology is not by itself the big moral issue, how they are altered is where morality really comes in. ‘Depriving’ them of the ability to get cancer is objectively good (if it was possible, which one day it might be), ‘depriving’ them of the ability to see or hear is objectively bad.
I cannot understand how this is so hard for people to understand.
if the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless.
Your points concerning Mr. Shakespeare were good, but why did you have to open with this silly non sequitur? These things remain de facto meaningful no matter what: If humans evolved, or if they didn’t; If there is no god or is; no soul or soul; no free will or complete freedom; if humans are made out of meat or metal or whatever. How does anything we discover about the universe undermine the dignity of a human life? Answer: it can’t.
Not at all. If the multiverse is perfectly deterministic (everything that can happen, happens) but the particular universe in which we life NOW is not deterministic (what does or does not happen here, does or does not happen here), then leaving things to “God’s Will” seems pointless. We are free agents and so should act as such. “God’s Will” is that we choose.
If that is not the case, then the only objective truth is that we are just predestined clockwork bits in some giant celestial wind-up joke: if free will is an illusion then moral choice is an illusion and so how is one course of action any better than any other? It is all predestined so who cares?
‘Depriving’ them of the ability to get cancer is objectively good (if it was possible, which one day it might be), ‘depriving’ them of the ability to see or hear is objectively bad.
Sure, but what about depriving people of excessive aggression? You know the sort of parents “Oooh we want a nice, caring lad who will not get into fights”. But “excessive” aggression directed against injustice, or against a violent military enemy, can be very valuable. Who decides whether this change should be allowed? The state? If the state can determine what is acceptable engineering, it gains more power than if it banned all engineering of people’s characteristics in the first place. Or perhaps you would happily allow massive emotional and physical engineering of children, with no laws stopping a parent with the cash and the doctor willing to go through with it?
Basically, you have three options:
1) Assert that children who are to be born have basic individual rights not to have their personality and characteristics (like their sex) tampered with
2) Allow the state to determine what is a good and what is a bad modification to a person, or
3) Allow parents to warp and engineer their kids before birth without limit.
I opt unequivocally for 1. Which do you advocate?
And why don’t you believe that changing and selecting another person’s characteristics violates basic individual rights?
It seems that there will always be unintended consequences. You can fiddle with genes and come up with your idea of a perfect being, and when it starts to exhibit some unintended behavior- what, throw it back, like a fish from the river, and try again?
Conception and birth- well, heck, life itself- hold many surprises. You’ll never be able to eliminate or control them all, d’ya think? Is it moral to manipulate the sex of a child, whether it is done in a lab or by exposing the wrong-sexed newborn on a mountainside? And when the population is lopsided with one sex over the other, just another problem to be solved, and the unintended consequences of that resolution just another problem to be solved, and so on, through infinity.
There might be wonderful solutions available in gene manipulation. A person is always going to have to come to grips with the fact that some people will like them the way they are, and others will not. Is it right for parents to create children in the image of what they want for them, rather than to help children to be the people that they are? Many parents invest a lot of time in trying to figure out what their children want, and helping them to get it. A painfree or problem free life is not an option, as yet, and I don’t know that gene manipulation will be able to fill that bill (though it might be able to prevent some hideous problems… but at what cost?). Parents can help their children solve problems in life, but if they are preoccupied with some idea of perfection and trying to make their children fit that mould, it will make no difference if it includes gene manipulation or not. It ain’t respecting autonomy and freedom.
Peter, when a man and a woman concieve a child a randomly determined sperm penetrates a randomly determind egg and now we have a something that will become a child. If scientists choose a diferent pair of sperm and egg then a differnet child will be born. We are not altering the child, we are determining which out of the many(thousands? millions?) posibilities occurs.
Great discussion of these issues in Robert Heinlein’s 1948 book “Beyond this Horizon.” Describes a future history where much of the human race was GE’d to remove aggression. The inevitable war between the majority sheep and the few remaining wolves had the obvious outcome.
Whilst these radical technologies are emerging, there is a battle between those who favour ‘nature’ and those who promote ‘enhancement’: the majority vs. transhumanism, if you will.
If parents have the freedom to enhance, they have the freedom to hobble or provide disabilities for their children, as well, ie deafness. Would you allow one to be free but not the other?
This is a question, not a line of support.
Philip,
This last question is easy: do you allow parents to maim or wound a child (after birth)? No. Do you allow them to cure it of some wound ? Of course.
Can you distinguish between maiming and curing ? Usually you can.
Same for not yet concieved children.
There is a problem with unintended consequences, but that’s different from the problem you pose.
Jacob: Perry cited a case where parents had ensured their child would suffer a reduction in the natural sensorium since this agreed with their view of how the child should be. In this case, the disability was deafness.
Now, as I oppose the role of coercion or state interference in these matters, I am unsure as to how you would resolve this tension between the unborn and the parents. You assume a flat ‘No’ which appears to indicate that you would allow the state to police this in order to protect the unborn from their parents if they wished to reduce its abilities in some way. Yet, we have an example of deaf individuals who do not regard their reduced sensorium as a disability and do not view the same state in their child as immoral.
Do we just accept this situation?
Philip,
Say one whishes to amputate his own leg. Is it ok?
It is ok with me and the state should not interfere (though a case can be made that he should be locked up in a psychiatric ward). But if he asks a surgeon do do this service for him – the state should interfere and forbid the surgeon to perform such an amputation.
My common sense dictates that we should avoid extremes where parents are permitted to produce intentionally deformed children. After all – it is not only what you do to yourself – it’s what you do to another person (the child).
However – that does not mean that the state must forbid *any* genetical engineering or enhancement.
Yes, there is a ploblem: where is the boundary between what is permitted and what is forbidden?
Who said life isn’t messy ?
But this doesn’t justify a total ban on genetical improvement.
If that is not the case, then the only objective truth is that we are just predestined clockwork bits in some giant celestial wind-up joke: if free will is an illusion then moral choice is an illusion and so how is one course of action any better than any other? It is all predestined so who cares?
Free-will, in the Cartesian sense, is ill-defined. No cause causes itself, the contradiction is axiomatic. We live in a universe of cause and effect. The only alternative left is randomness. If the humanbrain is a slot machine, how is that any more free than if it is under the mechanics of causation? This is all irrelevant to my original point:
You cheapen human dignity when you presume it is conditional based on our understanding of the universe. Human dignity is unconditional. If all the world’s scientists made a cogent argument tomorrow that humans are made of pop-tarts, my desire for life, liberty, and happiness would feel no less real to me, and my will to maintain it would reamain in full (even if that will was completely shaped by genes and environment). I imagine, despite what you say, that yours would too.
I agree with -j about free will. Of course it exists, but it doesn’t mean what most people think it does. But then, as a Calvinist I’m somewhat biased.
I don’t see why allowing some alterations, but not all, means letting the government make its own arbitrary distinctions, any more than allowing some forms of economic action, like voluntary exchange, but not others, like theft, necessarily means letting the government make its own arbitrary choices. Of course, a lot of time the government will, but that doesn’t make it unavoidable. As for the gray area he brought up, it would seem like drugging the person, by reducing or ending the biological potential for aggression, and not like simply trying to train it out of him.
What I think the left is worried about is the creation of genetically superior children who will, by existing, destroy egalitarianism. I don’t think they need to worry about it; it would be an implicit admission your own genes aren’t good enough.
You can’t solve an equation with bad data, Samizboy.