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This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Vox. We here are Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust.

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For more information about bioethics bytes go to WW w practical ethics dot oecs docs ac dot UK or to i-Tunes you.

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The term designer baby is usually used in a pejorative sense to conjure up some dystopian brave new world.

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There are already ways to affect what kind of children you have, most obviously by choosing the partner you have them with.

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But there were others too.

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A pregnant mother can improve her baby's prospects by eating nutritious food in pregnancy, for instance, and avoiding smoking or drinking alcohol.

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With advances in genetics, however, there will soon be radical new methods to select or influence the characteristics of your progeny,

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not just physical characteristics like height or eye colour,

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but intellectual capacities and capacities linked to morality, such as how empathetic the child will be.

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The big question is how much freedom parents should have to make such selections.

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Julien Saville, Rescue of Oxford, Ohio Centre for Practical Ethics believes that if we can genetically alter the next generation,

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not only should we be free to do so. It may even turn out that in some circumstances we have an obligation to go ahead and do it.

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Julian Solecki, welcome to Bioethics Bytes. Good afternoon, Nigel.

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We're going to focus on the topic of designer babies. Now, could you just begin by saying a little bit about what is possible?

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So today we can use various technologies, either testing the foetus or of embryos to look at the genetic constitution.

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This is typically done to detect major genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome, cystic fibrosis or thalassaemia.

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But increasingly, it's being used for milder conditions or conditions that have a later onset,

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such as a disposition to breast or bowel cancer or, for example, Alzheimer's disease.

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But of course, in principle, you could test for any genes that the embryo or foetus has,

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genes that would code for the height, the personality, the cognitive abilities, the physical make up.

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So it opens the door to testing what kind of child you're likely to have.

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So it seems to be something quite different from screening out embryos which have a propensity

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to illness or disease from actively selecting particular attractive features of the child to be.

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So, for instance, to select a baby who will be a brilliant musician is very different from avoiding having a baby with cystic fibrosis.

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Well, I think that that's a mistake because many people have in mind the idea of selecting blonde haired, blue eyed children like the Nazis did.

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But when it comes to a lot of important aspects of ourselves, how our lives go is at least in significant part, determined by the genetic lottery.

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So, for example, one of the strongest features that determines how our lives go is the level of self-control or impulse control that we have.

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Walter Michel in the 1960s did a famous set of experiments where he placed a marshmallow in front of four year old children and told the children,

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not treat the marshmallow. And he left the room. And if they resisted the temptation, he gave them two marshmallows.

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Now, when he followed these children up ten years later,

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those who were able to devise strategies to delay gratification withstand the temptation of the marshmallow.

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Those children had more friends, more motivation to succeed, and much higher SAT scores.

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So whether you've got poor impulse control is going to affect how your life goes.

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So whereas many people think of diseases like a cleft lip or palate as being very significant, they can have an effect on bonding.

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But something like poor impulse control is going to have a much more profound

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effect on how your life goes than many diseases that we take very seriously.

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So I think we've got exactly the same reason.

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That is, care for how our children's lives go to select for those advantageous genes and to select against the disadvantageous ones.

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Or we could in principle do that by looking at the kind of partners we breed with.

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The logical extension of what you're saying is that we ought to be much more careful about

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selecting our partners because we've got a responsibility to have the right kind of babies.

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Well, of course, we've been practising genetic selection at a subconscious level all through human history.

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When we track partners that are more likely to be fertile and beauty is correlated with signals of fertility.

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And you're correct. I mean, if our main goal was to select a child with the best genes, we would select our partners very carefully.

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But that's still not going to guarantee that you're going to have the best child that you could have.

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Even with that partner, even with the best partners in the world, we still will have some embryos in foetuses with much shorter straws than others.

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So maybe we can select out a characteristic that is unattractive.

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But when we're talking about designing a baby, we're talking about a cluster of different features which operate together.

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You talk about impulse control, but it may be that we can.

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Pest control is highly correlated with some of the highly attractive qualities that maybe only people with weak impulse control will be creative,

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for instance. Well, to really get a program of designing babies off the ground ethically,

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you need to have a robust conception of what well-being is, what a good life for somebody is.

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And you need very good empirical evidence. So we need to know whether poor impulse control is associated with other advantageous tries.

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And in fact, we do have science to tell us something about that.

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It doesn't seem to be correlated with anything advantageous, except perhaps a slightly lower propensity to depression.

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But that evidence is very weak. But that's exactly the kind of research we need to do.

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But when we have that evidence in place and we do have good reasons to believe that some

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biological feature or genetic feature is correlated with a a more advantageous life,

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with more opportunity, with a better prospect of a better life. I think we've got a moral obligation to do that.

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The important fact is that all biology is distributed unequally.

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It's just a curve. The IQ curve is the most well known bell curve.

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We arbitrarily define disease as two standard deviations below the mean.

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If you've got an IQ less than 70. In fact, there was a woman recently executed in Virginia because her IQ was 72,

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and her counsel tried to argue that this made no functional difference to her capacities.

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And they were exactly right. There's no difference in the abilities of somebody with an IQ of 69 and somebody with an IQ of 72.

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Yet in one case, you're eligible for the death penalty. In the other case, you're not.

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Now, that's just an arbitrary decision that we've made. What matters is not how many statistical deviations.

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We are away from the mean. What matters is how likely a particular biological feature is going to be to how well life goes,

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or in this case, to how competent you are to make decisions about criminal behaviour.

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So you're saying that not only can we make these genetic modifications to the child that we might have, but that we ought to do that.

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There's a responsibility with the parent to be to analyse the kind of child that they're going to produce.

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Of course, terrorism. And I think that what's most important is how well our lives get our well-being.

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And insofar as we have an obligation to have healthier children, we have the same obligation to have children with better lives.

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Now, that's not an overriding or an ultimate obligation.

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It's not something that quashes every other reason. Of course, there can be other reasons for not doing this, but prima facie,

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in the first instance, we have a reason, a moral reason that has to be outweighed.

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If I decide not to give my child a medical treatment, I have to have a good reason not to do it.

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But likewise, if I decide not to give my child a vitamin,

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that will increase that child's IQ or make that child more empathetic or achieve some other goal.

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We uncontroversial, we think, is good fit. You have to have a reason for it.

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And the same goes for genetic selections. Of course, if they're dangerous or expensive, these would be reasons against them.

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But in many cases, in the future we'll be accessing the whole genome.

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Why wouldn't we get information that's there and use it if it's going to make for children who have better lives?

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Well, one reason might be that there are many different conceptions of what makes a life go well.

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There isn't complete consensus about what a good or better life is.

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Of course, is huge dispute. This has been going on for thousands of years, but there will be some clear cut cases where there's reasonable consensus.

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I gave the example of self-control, impulse control. This is a try.

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That's good for you. No matter what kind of life you want to leave, you want to lead a religious life.

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You want to be a fighter. You want to be a doctor. It's good to be able to marshal your impulses in order to train or to work towards

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those goals so we can at least focus on those so-called all purpose goods.

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But I think that we will and we do have a convergence on some ideas about the good life.

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After all, how else would we design educational institutions?

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How else would we bring up children? We think it's good that children are tolerant, empathetic, have a sense of justice.

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If there are biological dispositions that give us variable levels of empathy, then I think it's quite open for debate to say,

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well, whether we should be using our knowledge of biology and genetics to try to influence those.

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Now that to me sounds like a kind of social engineering at a general level that we're deciding what kind of people we want in our society.

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But at a particular level,

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I might love soccer and try and breed a super child who can play at the top level with the Premier League and score lots of goals.

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So some of those selections may be antithetical to the sorts of values that you saying we might want in society perhaps.

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Being a brilliant sportsman is not compatible with being generous,

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spirited and a range of other traits because it requires a certain level of competitive spirit that overrides that.

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There may well be conflict between social goals and personal goals or goals for the child's life.

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The child has the best life possible and those would be difficult things to balance.

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In general, I think the principle should be child focussed.

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We should choose those traits that make that child's life go as well as possible, unless that child will represent a direct threat to other.

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People. So if somebody wanted to engineer or select for extreme ferociousness and viciousness or psychopathy,

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I think society would have a legitimate reason to say at that point,

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because of the risk, the direct threat to other people, we have a reason to veto that kind of choice.

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But the sporting example is an interesting one because there is a gene that's been identified, the act and three gene,

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which if you've got two copies of one version, you're more likely to be good at Sprint events and two copies of the other version.

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You're likely to be better at endurance events. Now, how should we think about that in terms of selecting the best child?

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It doesn't seem to me there's any clear answer.

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It's not a case that we can say it's better to be better at sprint events or better to be better at endurance events.

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That's the sort of thing we should just give people freedom to make their own choices about what sort of child they want to have.

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Some people are going to say, listening to this,

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you've got a kind of godlike view of what you're doing with the child, that you are creating a child as you see fit.

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And that's going against the whole history of humanity,

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where there's a lottery about what kind of child that you have and the child takes what it gets and makes the most of it.

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It seems to me that that's going to introduce all kinds of strange dynamics between children and parents.

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The parents can, to some degree, be held blameworthy if things don't go the right way.

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I think you're correct that most people have this gift view where given the child and we should just provide the best for that particular child.

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And I think you're correct that this could go wrong in lots of different ways,

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but it's important to recognise the biological starting point is extreme genetic inequality.

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So if we can overcome that, we do achieve something positive. That is, we give them a better start in life.

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And then the second challenge is to ensure that those children are raised in a way that gives them autonomy,

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that respects them, and that we don't hold parents responsible for the fate of their children in any way.

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That's different to today. The point is not that we must legally be compelled to have designer babies.

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It's just that we have a reason to have them.

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We should be free to engage in natural reproduction without any genetic selection, and we should also be respected in those decisions.

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I think that brings out what seems to me your underlying position, which is a liberal one, that you're saying that unless there are very good reasons,

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the state shouldn't be allowed to intervene in individual matters of choice so

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that parents should be free to make the choices that they see fit to make,

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even if they're making mistakes,

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even if they've got slightly bizarre views about the kind of offspring that they might have that should still be tolerated.

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Absolutely. As I said, there are only very, very rare circumstances where a choice will impose direct harm on other people.

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The states are entitled to intervene, but in most cases,

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the role here is to provide people with good scientific evidence, a discussion and a robust conception of wellbeing,

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and to try to persuade people to make selection decisions that will have children with the best prospects of the best life.

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But people should have freedom of reproduction,

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freedom not only to decide how many children to have a when to have children, but what kind of children to have.

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And freedom sometimes has a price.

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Sometimes people make decisions that we disagree with or indeed that are wrong, but we should respect those unless they directly harm a child.

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Important thing in reproduction is when you're selecting between different embryos.

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The parents are not harming an embryo by selecting a different embryo.

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So they're different two cases after birth where if somebody refuses to have the treatment of disease or to treat deafness,

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they're actually harming that child. When you select between a deaf embryo and a hearing embryo or between an embryo

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with an advantageous genetic constitution and a disadvantageous constitution,

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the child that will result, provided they have a life worth living, has no complaint.

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This is a different category of decision that we can grant much more freedom to than we would typically give to parents when we bring their children.

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One side effects of what you're saying might be that people who have some kind of genetic difference from the norm,

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that a large number of people selecting out will feel that society is prejudiced against them, that if people are screening out shorter people,

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for instance, people who happen to been born,

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the genetic predisposition to be short may then feel doubly discriminated because not only are they short,

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but the people around them telling them that it's bad to be short.

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Absolutely. That could be a consequence.

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And in fact, we see that again with Down's syndrome, because of fewer children being born with Down's syndrome,

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because nine out of ten people who find today that they're carrying a Down's syndrome

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baby decide to abort because there's fewer children being born with Down's syndrome.

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The argument is that those children are doubly discriminated against, and it's possible that that's true.

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The response to that, though, is not to ban Down's syndrome screening.

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It's to change people's attitudes, to get rid of those discriminatory attitudes, to educate people better and to respect freedom.

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Does the freedom that you're talking about extend to choosing the sex of your baby?

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Absolutely. I mean, unless you can point to a. Clear harm, then people should be free to make those choices.

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Now, when it comes to sex selection in countries like the UK or America or Australia.

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People, studies have shown,

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typically want sex selection for their second or third child and they want the opposite sex to the sex that they've already got.

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And just over 50% of them choose to have a girl.

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Now, those sorts of choices don't express any discriminatory attitude, and nor will that affect the sex ratio of the country.

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If you were concerned about the sex ratio,

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you could easily make six selection only available for family balancing only for the opposite sex two children that you've already had.

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So there are very practical strategies that you can adopt to prevent any disturbance of the sex ratio.

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Countries like the UK. There's also the worry that the people who will actually be able to make the

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meaningful decisions about what kind of children to have will be the rich people.

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It'll actually encourage a wider division between rich and poor because only people who can afford the treatments will be able to say,

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I would like a child who is six feet to first class mind, superb athletes, genial disposition, compassionate.

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The poor people will just have to take what they get.

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Well, of course, that's what happens today in terms of education, access to computer technology or other technology, access to health care.

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So inequality does exist. And we seem to think that it's reasonable to tolerate that kind of inequality.

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But say we didn't say it was going to lead to this kind of two tiered genetic division in society.

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What's the solution to that? Well, there are two solutions.

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One is to ban the use of the technology, and the other one is to make it freely available as we make basic medicine, basic health care available.

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And I think if you're talking about genes that have significant effect on a child's later prospects

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of having a good life change that would affect mood or personality or cognitive abilities,

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then I think those things should be treated as we treat basic health care on a free basis.

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So how you use this technology, what kind of society it creates, is up to us to decide according to our policies.

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It seems to me the most irrational policy is one that just we won't use it at all.

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Now you'd be making this sound reasonable,

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but there are lots of people listening to this who will think it's the most terrifying development in the history of humanity.

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We've got the evidence of Nazi eugenic programs. We've got religious worries about playing God.

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They think you're a crazy scientist wanting to use your evil discoveries to create a master race.

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You're right, this has a tainted history. But it's also true that we've made these sorts of decisions all the time throughout history.

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Remember, we selected our mate when we selected the circumstances of the time at which we

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bring up children in order to maximise the resources that we have for them.

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We've been making these kinds of decisions and that's what it is to be human.

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To be human is to try to improve your condition and to improve the condition of your children, to improve the sorts of children that you have.

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Now, the challenge is to avoid the kind of Nazi eugenics which was involuntary, according to a social Darwinist racist view of how society should be,

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which had no concern for the well-being of the children, produced a no concern for the well-being of the parents.

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Indeed, in some cases they were killed to realise those sorts of goals.

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That's quite a different view to saying that we should use our knowledge of science to improve the human condition.

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Now, if you reject this, what you're saying is that natural God gives us something which is good enough or optimal.

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And I think when you look at the scientific evidence for that, it's just not true.

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At one point in history, people thought that disease was God's punishment for sin,

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that pain in childbirth was Eve's curse, and that you shouldn't vaccinate or provide pain relief in labour.

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Well, I think the kind of opposition to blanket opposition to the use of this technology is

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exactly the same as that kind of opposition to vaccination and pain relief in labour.

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If you were going to have another child now, what character traits and physical traits would you select?

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So I wouldn't use any of this technology now because the technology at the moment for those sorts of things is too immature and it does involve risks.

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I'm a believer that at this point nature surpasses the sorts of choices we can make in ten or 20

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years when whole genome analysis is much cheaper and we have a better idea of what genes do do.

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Then I would use it, and I would want my children to be empathic and capable of interacting and belonging

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to a social group and responding appropriately to other people's emotions,

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being able to read other people's intentions and identify their emotions.

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I'd want them to have high level cognitive abilities because IQ and other general cognitive

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abilities simply allow you to understand and use information about the world more effectively,

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quickly and progressing through more logical steps.

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Those kinds of abilities to live a social existence, have imagination, to have a good humour, subjective well-being.

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Just how happy we tend to feel has a very significant biological component.

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Some people are just flat and depressed. That's not due to their circumstances in these cases, it's due to their biology.

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I wouldn't want my children to have a personality disorder.

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I wouldn't want them to have a disposition to borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.

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The important thing to recognise here is we won't be able to design a child.

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We won't be able to say this child will be Mozart or we will be able to do his change the chances of various outcomes,

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raising the probability or reducing the probability. And I think that's quite a reasonable thing to do.

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Of course, the outcome is going to be influenced by their environment, their upbringing,

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their experiences and how they turn out will be largely undetermined.

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But on that bit that we can influence the time of that procreation, we should influence it.

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We've got a reasonable conception of well-being and good evidence about the relationship of biology to that.

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Julian Sevilla. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks, Nigel.

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