The Washington Post has an article about sex-selection technologies for couples who are planning to have a baby, and includes the following quote:
“It runs the risk of turning procreation and parenting into an extension of the consumer society,” said Michael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard University. “Sex selection is one step down the road to designer children, in which parents would choose not only the sex of their child but also conceivably the height, hair color, eye color, and ultimately, perhaps, IQ, athletic prowess and musical ability. It’s troubling.”
Now I agree that there’s likely to be a slippery slope phenomenon here, likely either an attitude-altering slippery slope or a small change tolerance slippery slope (see here). But what’s at the bottom hardly seems so bad. Some of the floats in that particular parade of horrible are actually quite nice — I’d love to choose a higher IQ for my kids, and society would generally be better if we could do that, too. (One mustn’t overrate intelligence as a cure to the world’s problems, but one mustn’t underrate it, either.)
Now some of the selection conditions — hair color and eye color, for instance — seem pretty shallow. But so what? Parents do shallow things, and are entitled to do them, too, if they don’t hurt their kids; and selecting hair color or eye color won’t hurt their kids. Likewise, I suspect, for selecting height, athletic prowess, or musical ability.
Now I can see some possible arguments about why this might be bad. Parents who select certain traits for their kids might end up demanding that their kids live up to those traits. “You will practice the piano, and you will like it! I spent $30,000 to get you the piano gene.” Maybe. But parents do that these days, too, with traits that they think their kids ought to have — or traits that they’ve tried to instill through education, rather than genetics. Do we object to parents trying to create “designer teenagers” because they spend money training their kids athletically, musically, or intellectually? Do we try to suppress those educational technologies? Or do we conclude that on balance more ways for parents to try to improve their kids’ futures are better, even if some parents might use those ways unwisely?
I can certainly see some objections to particular design techniques or options. If certain techniques risk kids being born with serious genetic defects, then I’d be “troubl[ed].” But I suspect most parents wouldn’t want those techniques, either, and in any case that’s an objection to a particular technique, not to the notion of molding one’s children’s genetics. Likewise if some genetic traits help kids at the expense of others (imagine a gene that makes people resistant to some contagious disease but increases the chance that they’d be asymptomatic carriers) — troubling, but properly solved by dealing with that particular trait, not by objecting more generally to parents improving their children’s lives, or even selecting relatively neutral cosmetic features (such as eye color or hair color).
Thanks to reader Greg Weber for the pointer.
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