Defending designer babies

I'm just back from talking to another forum - a much smaller one this time, the Ethics Cafe, organised by Ralph Blunden at Readings Bookshop in Hawthorn. This was a round-the-table chat with about eight or ten people, on the topic of designer babies, which I interpreted as referring to the genetic engineering of human embryos.

I had three points to make:

1. The very idea of "designer babies" provokes fear and repugnance, even anger, in many people.

2. The actual arguments against it leave some residue of concern, even after they are examined stringently. But, whatever worries are not fully answered often turn out to be speculative and uncertain, and they must be weighed against the possible benefits. In all, the arguments against "designer babies" may have some force, but they are relatively weak. (I considered Kantian arguments, utilitarian arguments, and arguments relating to the autonomy of the child, all of which have significant problems. In each case, not much is left of the argument if we state it, then scrutinise it, carefully.)

3. Therefore, we have a disconnect between people's strong emotional responses and the rather weak arguments that are meant to provide their rational justification.

This raises the question as to why we find such a disconnect, or lack of proportion, between the arguments and the emotional responses. Is there a psychological explanation? I explored the possibility that it is not just an unaccountable yuck factor but (also?) a sense of background conditions being challenged. The theory of background conditions postulates that any society, including our own, assumes some constants "in the background" that are not themselves open to human choice, and against which choices are made. If these are seen as under under threat, some people may have a sense of "nature" being violated. Perhaps there is also a sense of vertigo, as if the stable ground is being taken away from under us.

I asked a further question. If, as individuals, we identify the surplus repugnance that we feel as being caused by a sense of threat to background conditions, is this really a reason for continuing to oppose an innovation? Or should this recognition tend to undermine our opposition, once we recognise it? After all, the sorts of innovations that are (arguably) opposed for these sorts of reasons are often socially accepted by opponents at a later stage and prove not to be as problematic as was feared, even if they do have a downside as well as an upside. Examples include the contraceptive pill and IVF.

We had a good discussion of what aspects of genetic engineering it might be rational to fear, and where the fear might come from other than just a sense of violation of nature or a threat to background conditions. The group rose to the occasion to find some rational bases for concern, which is fair enough - there do seem to be some things that we might worry about, though still speculative and uncertain. One might be extra responsibility expected of parents who are already under too much pressure.

It's also true that the more scary uses of such a technology are the ones that will be more difficult to develop in the foreseeable future. E.g., it will be easier to snip out the potential for certain disease traits that have a strong genetic link, or to select pre-implantation embryos without the genetic potential for these traits, than to enhance such things as intelligence. I must quickly add that the latter, if it proves to be possible, may be also be defensible; after all, if parents used environmental means, such as reading and education, to improve their children's cognitive abilities, we'd praise them for it.

Though it was a small group, I found the discussion stimulating and informative. I hope the other partipants felt the same way and that Ralph and his people will invite me back another time.