Designing people: A post-human future?

Abstract

The advent of genetic technologies has sparked a variety of questions about their legal, ethical, and social consequences. Issues of discrimination, better medicine, moral status, access, familial obligations, ethnic affiliations, and parental duties are discussed in relation to genetic testing, gene transfer, and genetic enhancement. In the midst of new discoveries and new debates, bioethicists strive to achieve a balance between a responsibility to contemplate theoretical possibilities that might result from current technological advances and a responsibility to convey whether such theoretical possibilities could come to be. (Parens, 2004) The purpose of this chapter is to argue that bioethicists dealing with genetic enhancement technologies are failing to achieve this balance. This failure stems, in part, from an inadequate understanding of human biology. Not only do proponents and critics of genetic enhancement have erroneous presuppositions about the role of genes in human biology, they also espouse incorrect beliefs about knowledge production in the biological sciences. I will conclude by showing some of the problematic consequences that might follow from failing to achieve this balance between a concern for theoretical possibilities related to genetic enhancement and a responsibility to evaluate the feasibility of those promises. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.