This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.
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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The term designer baby is usually used in a pejorative sense to conjure up some dystopian brave new world.
There are already ways to affect what kind of children you have, most obviously by choosing the partner you have them with.
But there were others too.
A pregnant mother can improve her baby's prospects by eating nutritious food in pregnancy, for instance, and avoiding smoking or drinking alcohol.
With advances in genetics, however, there will soon be radical new methods to select or influence the characteristics of your progeny,
not just physical characteristics like height or eye colour,
but intellectual capacities and capacities linked to morality, such as how empathetic the child will be.
The big question is how much freedom parents should have to make such selections.
Julien Saville, Rescue of Oxford, Ohio Centre for Practical Ethics believes that if we can genetically alter the next generation,
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.
Julian Solecki, welcome to Bioethics Bytes. Good afternoon, Nigel.
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?
So today we can use various technologies, either testing the foetus or of embryos to look at the genetic constitution.
This is typically done to detect major genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome, cystic fibrosis or thalassaemia.
But increasingly, it's being used for milder conditions or conditions that have a later onset,
such as a disposition to breast or bowel cancer or, for example, Alzheimer's disease.
But of course, in principle, you could test for any genes that the embryo or foetus has,
genes that would code for the height, the personality, the cognitive abilities, the physical make up.
So it opens the door to testing what kind of child you're likely to have.
So it seems to be something quite different from screening out embryos which have a propensity
to illness or disease from actively selecting particular attractive features of the child to be.
So, for instance, to select a baby who will be a brilliant musician is very different from avoiding having a baby with cystic fibrosis.
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.
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.
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.
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,
not treat the marshmallow. And he left the room. And if they resisted the temptation, he gave them two marshmallows.
Now, when he followed these children up ten years later,
those who were able to devise strategies to delay gratification withstand the temptation of the marshmallow.
Those children had more friends, more motivation to succeed, and much higher SAT scores.
So whether you've got poor impulse control is going to affect how your life goes.
So whereas many people think of diseases like a cleft lip or palate as being very significant, they can have an effect on bonding.
But something like poor impulse control is going to have a much more profound
effect on how your life goes than many diseases that we take very seriously.
So I think we've got exactly the same reason.
That is, care for how our children's lives go to select for those advantageous genes and to select against the disadvantageous ones.
Or we could in principle do that by looking at the kind of partners we breed with.
The logical extension of what you're saying is that we ought to be much more careful about
selecting our partners because we've got a responsibility to have the right kind of babies.
Well, of course, we've been practising genetic selection at a subconscious level all through human history.
When we track partners that are more likely to be fertile and beauty is correlated with signals of fertility.
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.
But that's still not going to guarantee that you're going to have the best child that you could have.
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.
So maybe we can select out a characteristic that is unattractive.
But when we're talking about designing a baby, we're talking about a cluster of different features which operate together.
You talk about impulse control, but it may be that we can.
Pest control is highly correlated with some of the highly attractive qualities that maybe only people with weak impulse control will be creative,
for instance. Well, to really get a program of designing babies off the ground ethically,
you need to have a robust conception of what well-being is, what a good life for somebody is.
And you need very good empirical evidence. So we need to know whether poor impulse control is associated with other advantageous tries.
And in fact, we do have science to tell us something about that.
It doesn't seem to be correlated with anything advantageous, except perhaps a slightly lower propensity to depression.
But that evidence is very weak. But that's exactly the kind of research we need to do.
But when we have that evidence in place and we do have good reasons to believe that some
biological feature or genetic feature is correlated with a a more advantageous life,
with more opportunity, with a better prospect of a better life. I think we've got a moral obligation to do that.
The important fact is that all biology is distributed unequally.
It's just a curve. The IQ curve is the most well known bell curve.
We arbitrarily define disease as two standard deviations below the mean.
If you've got an IQ less than 70. In fact, there was a woman recently executed in Virginia because her IQ was 72,
and her counsel tried to argue that this made no functional difference to her capacities.
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.
Yet in one case, you're eligible for the death penalty. In the other case, you're not.
Now, that's just an arbitrary decision that we've made. What matters is not how many statistical deviations.
We are away from the mean. What matters is how likely a particular biological feature is going to be to how well life goes,
or in this case, to how competent you are to make decisions about criminal behaviour.
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.
There's a responsibility with the parent to be to analyse the kind of child that they're going to produce.
Of course, terrorism. And I think that what's most important is how well our lives get our well-being.
And insofar as we have an obligation to have healthier children, we have the same obligation to have children with better lives.
Now, that's not an overriding or an ultimate obligation.
It's not something that quashes every other reason. Of course, there can be other reasons for not doing this, but prima facie,
in the first instance, we have a reason, a moral reason that has to be outweighed.
If I decide not to give my child a medical treatment, I have to have a good reason not to do it.
But likewise, if I decide not to give my child a vitamin,
that will increase that child's IQ or make that child more empathetic or achieve some other goal.
We uncontroversial, we think, is good fit. You have to have a reason for it.
And the same goes for genetic selections. Of course, if they're dangerous or expensive, these would be reasons against them.
But in many cases, in the future we'll be accessing the whole genome.
Why wouldn't we get information that's there and use it if it's going to make for children who have better lives?
Well, one reason might be that there are many different conceptions of what makes a life go well.
There isn't complete consensus about what a good or better life is.
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.
I gave the example of self-control, impulse control. This is a try.
That's good for you. No matter what kind of life you want to leave, you want to lead a religious life.
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
those goals so we can at least focus on those so-called all purpose goods.
But I think that we will and we do have a convergence on some ideas about the good life.
After all, how else would we design educational institutions?
How else would we bring up children? We think it's good that children are tolerant, empathetic, have a sense of justice.
If there are biological dispositions that give us variable levels of empathy, then I think it's quite open for debate to say,
well, whether we should be using our knowledge of biology and genetics to try to influence those.
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.
But at a particular level,
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.
So some of those selections may be antithetical to the sorts of values that you saying we might want in society perhaps.
Being a brilliant sportsman is not compatible with being generous,
spirited and a range of other traits because it requires a certain level of competitive spirit that overrides that.
There may well be conflict between social goals and personal goals or goals for the child's life.
The child has the best life possible and those would be difficult things to balance.
In general, I think the principle should be child focussed.
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.
People. So if somebody wanted to engineer or select for extreme ferociousness and viciousness or psychopathy,
I think society would have a legitimate reason to say at that point,
because of the risk, the direct threat to other people, we have a reason to veto that kind of choice.
But the sporting example is an interesting one because there is a gene that's been identified, the act and three gene,
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.
You're likely to be better at endurance events. Now, how should we think about that in terms of selecting the best child?
It doesn't seem to me there's any clear answer.
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.
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.
Some people are going to say, listening to this,
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.
And that's going against the whole history of humanity,
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.
It seems to me that that's going to introduce all kinds of strange dynamics between children and parents.
The parents can, to some degree, be held blameworthy if things don't go the right way.
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.
And I think you're correct that this could go wrong in lots of different ways,
but it's important to recognise the biological starting point is extreme genetic inequality.
So if we can overcome that, we do achieve something positive. That is, we give them a better start in life.
And then the second challenge is to ensure that those children are raised in a way that gives them autonomy,
that respects them, and that we don't hold parents responsible for the fate of their children in any way.
That's different to today. The point is not that we must legally be compelled to have designer babies.
It's just that we have a reason to have them.
We should be free to engage in natural reproduction without any genetic selection, and we should also be respected in those decisions.
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,
the state shouldn't be allowed to intervene in individual matters of choice so
that parents should be free to make the choices that they see fit to make,
even if they're making mistakes,
even if they've got slightly bizarre views about the kind of offspring that they might have that should still be tolerated.
Absolutely. As I said, there are only very, very rare circumstances where a choice will impose direct harm on other people.
The states are entitled to intervene, but in most cases,
the role here is to provide people with good scientific evidence, a discussion and a robust conception of wellbeing,
and to try to persuade people to make selection decisions that will have children with the best prospects of the best life.
But people should have freedom of reproduction,
freedom not only to decide how many children to have a when to have children, but what kind of children to have.
And freedom sometimes has a price.
Sometimes people make decisions that we disagree with or indeed that are wrong, but we should respect those unless they directly harm a child.
Important thing in reproduction is when you're selecting between different embryos.
The parents are not harming an embryo by selecting a different embryo.
So they're different two cases after birth where if somebody refuses to have the treatment of disease or to treat deafness,
they're actually harming that child. When you select between a deaf embryo and a hearing embryo or between an embryo
with an advantageous genetic constitution and a disadvantageous constitution,
the child that will result, provided they have a life worth living, has no complaint.
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.
One side effects of what you're saying might be that people who have some kind of genetic difference from the norm,
that a large number of people selecting out will feel that society is prejudiced against them, that if people are screening out shorter people,
for instance, people who happen to been born,
the genetic predisposition to be short may then feel doubly discriminated because not only are they short,
but the people around them telling them that it's bad to be short.
Absolutely. That could be a consequence.
And in fact, we see that again with Down's syndrome, because of fewer children being born with Down's syndrome,
because nine out of ten people who find today that they're carrying a Down's syndrome
baby decide to abort because there's fewer children being born with Down's syndrome.
The argument is that those children are doubly discriminated against, and it's possible that that's true.
The response to that, though, is not to ban Down's syndrome screening.
It's to change people's attitudes, to get rid of those discriminatory attitudes, to educate people better and to respect freedom.
Does the freedom that you're talking about extend to choosing the sex of your baby?
Absolutely. I mean, unless you can point to a. Clear harm, then people should be free to make those choices.
Now, when it comes to sex selection in countries like the UK or America or Australia.
People, studies have shown,
typically want sex selection for their second or third child and they want the opposite sex to the sex that they've already got.
And just over 50% of them choose to have a girl.
Now, those sorts of choices don't express any discriminatory attitude, and nor will that affect the sex ratio of the country.
If you were concerned about the sex ratio,
you could easily make six selection only available for family balancing only for the opposite sex two children that you've already had.
So there are very practical strategies that you can adopt to prevent any disturbance of the sex ratio.
Countries like the UK. There's also the worry that the people who will actually be able to make the
meaningful decisions about what kind of children to have will be the rich people.
It'll actually encourage a wider division between rich and poor because only people who can afford the treatments will be able to say,
I would like a child who is six feet to first class mind, superb athletes, genial disposition, compassionate.
The poor people will just have to take what they get.
Well, of course, that's what happens today in terms of education, access to computer technology or other technology, access to health care.
So inequality does exist. And we seem to think that it's reasonable to tolerate that kind of inequality.
But say we didn't say it was going to lead to this kind of two tiered genetic division in society.
What's the solution to that? Well, there are two solutions.
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.
And I think if you're talking about genes that have significant effect on a child's later prospects
of having a good life change that would affect mood or personality or cognitive abilities,
then I think those things should be treated as we treat basic health care on a free basis.
So how you use this technology, what kind of society it creates, is up to us to decide according to our policies.
It seems to me the most irrational policy is one that just we won't use it at all.
Now you'd be making this sound reasonable,
but there are lots of people listening to this who will think it's the most terrifying development in the history of humanity.
We've got the evidence of Nazi eugenic programs. We've got religious worries about playing God.
They think you're a crazy scientist wanting to use your evil discoveries to create a master race.
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.
Remember, we selected our mate when we selected the circumstances of the time at which we
bring up children in order to maximise the resources that we have for them.
We've been making these kinds of decisions and that's what it is to be human.
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.
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,
which had no concern for the well-being of the children, produced a no concern for the well-being of the parents.
Indeed, in some cases they were killed to realise those sorts of goals.
That's quite a different view to saying that we should use our knowledge of science to improve the human condition.
Now, if you reject this, what you're saying is that natural God gives us something which is good enough or optimal.
And I think when you look at the scientific evidence for that, it's just not true.
At one point in history, people thought that disease was God's punishment for sin,
that pain in childbirth was Eve's curse, and that you shouldn't vaccinate or provide pain relief in labour.
Well, I think the kind of opposition to blanket opposition to the use of this technology is
exactly the same as that kind of opposition to vaccination and pain relief in labour.
If you were going to have another child now, what character traits and physical traits would you select?
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.
I'm a believer that at this point nature surpasses the sorts of choices we can make in ten or 20
years when whole genome analysis is much cheaper and we have a better idea of what genes do do.
Then I would use it, and I would want my children to be empathic and capable of interacting and belonging
to a social group and responding appropriately to other people's emotions,
being able to read other people's intentions and identify their emotions.
I'd want them to have high level cognitive abilities because IQ and other general cognitive
abilities simply allow you to understand and use information about the world more effectively,
quickly and progressing through more logical steps.
Those kinds of abilities to live a social existence, have imagination, to have a good humour, subjective well-being.
Just how happy we tend to feel has a very significant biological component.
Some people are just flat and depressed. That's not due to their circumstances in these cases, it's due to their biology.
I wouldn't want my children to have a personality disorder.
I wouldn't want them to have a disposition to borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.
The important thing to recognise here is we won't be able to design a child.
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,
raising the probability or reducing the probability. And I think that's quite a reasonable thing to do.
Of course, the outcome is going to be influenced by their environment, their upbringing,
their experiences and how they turn out will be largely undetermined.
But on that bit that we can influence the time of that procreation, we should influence it.
We've got a reasonable conception of well-being and good evidence about the relationship of biology to that.
Julian Sevilla. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks, Nigel.
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