Morality of genetic enhancement (part 1)

"What's the right thing to do?" That's the question Professor Sandel used to open his Justice lectures at Harvard. He served on President Bush's bioethics committee back in 2002 and provided a liberal voice for the ethics of human genetic research and policy, liberal compared to the rest of the Bush-appointed panel. Recently, he gave a lecture for BBC about his moral objections to genetic enhancement of children. I'll summarize his points and inject some of my own thoughts, along with ideas gleamed from last Friday's Seattle H+ meeting.

Before I can start, I need to address two important distinctions. Genetic enhancement is not eugenics. Eugenics seeks to improve the human population by selective breeding, either through incentives or limitations on reproduction. Not only is it associated with racism and tainted by the Nazi ideas of racial purity, but it also infringes on the basic human right of reproduction:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children - World Health Organization

Sterilizing or restricting reproduction of a racial group is comparable to genocide. But, the non-coercive part of eugenics tends to slip under our moral radar: many religions encourage practitioners to marry inside the group, and to have more children. Countries like Singapore paid certain classes of citizens to have more children, and paid others to be sterilized. These practices fall into the vast gray area between right and wrong.

Genetic enhancement provides couples with the opportunity to choose and select specific traits for their unborn children, or modify the genes in a way that's impossible by nature. Unlike eugenics, it favors quality over quantity. It is not coercive, and it does not inherently discriminate against any group. At first sight, this does not violate any human rights. To justify any limitation, Sandel and other bio-conservatives must weigh any harms of genetic enhancement against what seems to be a reproductive right (though not mentioned yet by the WHO) for parents to decide what's best for their own children. The burden of proof falls on the conservatives.

Enhancement is not therapy. This is a contentious issue, because there exists a wide middle-ground where cases can be interpreted different ways in different contexts. Screening out Down syndrome and muscular dystrophy falls into preventative therapy, but engineering the perfect muscles for a future Olympic swimmer is clearly enhancement. More ambiguously, a treatment for Alzheimer's disease or for ADHD may also enhance memory and learning for regular people. The NSF's report on ethics defines enhancement as rising above the "species-normal" range - but even that can lead to fuzzy scenarios. At the end, the distinction relies on our intution.