Are ‘Designer Offspring’ Our Destiny?

The promise of gene editing and designer offspring may prove irresistible

Posted by Keith Tidman

It’s an axiom that parents aspire to the best for their children — from good health to the best of admired traits. Yet our primary recourse is to roll the dice in picking a spouse or partner, hoping that the resulting blend of chromosomes will lead to offspring who are healthy, smart, happy, attractive, fit, and a lot else. Gene editing, now concentrated on medical applications, will offer ways to significantly raise the probability of human offspring manifesting the traits parents seek: ‘designer offspring’. What, then, are the philosophical and sociological implications of using gene editing to influence the health-related wellbeing of offspring, as well as to intervene into the complex traits that define those offspring under the broader rubric of human enhancement and what we can and ought to do?

‘All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?’

— Immanuel Kant

The idea is to alter genes for particular outcomes, guided by previous mapping of every gene in the human body. To date, these selected outcomes have targeted averting or curing disorders, like cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, and sickle-cell disease, stemming from gene mutations. As such, one of the central bioethical issues is for parents to freely decide which disorders are ‘unacceptable’ and thus to prevent or fix through gene editing. The public, and the medical field, already make similar medical decisions all the time in the course of treatments: stem cells to grow transplantable organs, AI-controlled robotic surgery, and vaccinations, among innumerable others. The aim is to avoid or cure health disorders, or minimally to mitigate symptoms.

As a matter of societal norms, these decisions reflect people’s basic notions about the purpose of health science. Yet, if informed parents knowingly choose to give birth to, say, an infant with Down syndrome, believing philosophically and sociologically that such children can live happy, productive lives and are a ‘blessing’, then as a matter of ethics, humanitarianism, and sovereign agency they retain that right. A potential wrinkle in the reasoning is that such a child itself has no say in the decision. Which might deny the child her ‘natural right’ not to go through a lifetime with the quality-of-life conditions the disorder hands her. The child is denied freely choosing her own destiny: the absence of consent traditionally associated with medical intervention. As a corollary, the aim is not to deprive society of heterogeneity; sameness is not an ideal. That is not equivalent, however, to contending that a particular disorder must remain a forever variation of the human species.

‘We are going from being able to read our genetic code to the ability to write it. This gives us the … ability to do things never contemplated before’

— Craig Venter, writing in ‘Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature’.

Longer term, people won’t be satisfied limited to health-related measures. They will turn increasingly to more-complex traits: cognition (intelligence, memory, comprehension, talent, etc.), body type (eye and hair colour, height, weight, mesomorphism, etc.), athleticism (fast, strong, agile, endurance, etc.), attractiveness, gender, lifespan, and personality. The ‘designer offspring’, that is, mentioned above. Nontrivially, some changes may be inheritable, passed from one generation to the next. This will add to the burden of getting each intervention right, in a science that’s briskly evolving. Thus, gene editing will not only give parents offspring that conform to their ideals; also, it may alter the foundational features of our very species. These transhumanist choices will give rise to philosophical and sociological issues with which society will grapple. Claims that society is skating close to eugenics —a practice rightly discredited as immoral — as well as specious charges of ‘playing God’ and assertions of dominion may lead to select public backlash, but not incurably so to human-enhancing programs.

Debates will confront thorny issues: risk–reward balance in using gene editing to design offspring; comparative value among alternative human traits; potential inequality in access to procedures, exacerbating classism; tipping point between experimentation and informed implementation; which embryos to carry to term and childhood; cultural norms and values that emerge from designer offspring; individual versus societal rights; society’s intent in adopting what one might call genetic engineering, and the basis of family choice; acceleration and possible redirection of the otherwise-natural evolution of the human species; consequences of genetic changes for humanity’s future; the need for ongoing programmes to monitor children born as a result of gene editing; and possible irreversibility of some adverse effects. It won't be easy.

‘It is an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical … not deterministic’ 

— Richard Dawkins

The promise of gene editing and designer offspring (and by extension, human enhancement writ large) may prove irresistible and irreversible — our destiny. To light the way, nations and supranational institutions should arrange ongoing collaboration among philosophers, scientists, the humanities, medical professionals, theologians, policymakers, and the public. Self-regulation is not enough. Oversight is key, where malleable guidelines take account of improved knowledge and procedures. What society accepts (or rejects) today in human gene editing and human enhancements may well change dramatically from decade to decade. Importantly, introducing gene editing into selecting the complex traits of offspring must be informed and unrushed. Overarching moral imperatives must be clear. Yet, as parents have always felt a compelling urge and responsibility to advantage their children in any manner possible, eventually they may muse whether genetic enhancements are a ‘moral obligation’, not just a ‘moral right’.

What is a philosophical problem? The irrefutable metahypothesis

By Matthew Blakeway

If we ban speculation about metahypotheses, does philosophical debate simply evaporate? 



Karl Popper explained how scientific knowledge grows in his book Conjectures and Refutations. A conjecture is a guess as to an explanation of a phenomenon. And an experiment is an attempt to refute a conjecture. Experiments can never prove a conjecture correct, but if successive experiments fail to refute it, then gradually it becomes accepted by scientists that the conjecture is the best available explanation. It is then a scientific theory. Scientists don’t like the word “conjecture” because it implies that it is merely a guess. They prefer the word “hypothesis”. Popper’s rule is that, for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must be empirically falsifiable.

When scientists consider a phenomenon that is truly mystifying, it seems reasonable to ask “what might a hypothesis for this look like?” At this point, scientists are hypothesising about hypotheses. Metahypothetical thinking is the first step in any scientific journey. When this produces no results, frustration gets the upper hand and they pursue the following line of reasoning: “the phenomenon is an effect, and must have a cause. But since we don’t know what that cause is, let’s give it a name ‘X’ and then speculate about its properties.” A metahypothesis is now presumed to be 'A Thing', rather than merely an idea about an idea.

The problem is the irrefutability of its existence.

Poetry to Refute Dawkinsism

A special poem by Chengde Chen to launch the new blog

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How to Refute Dawkins’ Atheism

 

Dear Professor Dawkins, 

Yes, your bestseller, The God Delusion, is bought by millions;
more so your TV debates taking on archbishops, hotly YouTubed.
“No belief without evidence”, your atheist crusade is convincing,
like sounding the new death-knell of religion, with web power.

When the believers defend faith with Scripture,
you dare them to “walk on water” or “turn water into wine”.
When they count the moral good religion brings,
you attribute enough wars and scandals to the Church.
When they’re lost for words, or deeds, and God is laughed at,
you harvest applause, like the invincible spokesman of reason.

However, let me ask you a hypothetical question: 
 
“If you knew it was the case that, without the fear of God,
human society would collapse, would you still reject religion?”
 
If you say “yes”, surely you would see how irrational you were –
worse than cutting off a man’s head to treat his headache.
A rational person, as you firmly claim to be, has to say “no” –
doesn’t this mean faith could be justified without evidence?

Reason has two functions: seeking truth and weighing expediency;
if we can’t tell if it’ll rain, we’ll carry an umbrella as a precaution.
Since “God’s existence” can neither be proved, nor disproved,
it’s reasonable for man to discipline himself with the imagination,
which wasn’t a “delusion” that happened to occur in all cultures,
but a spiritual organ driven by the evolutionary need to coexist.

Without the simple idea of the-Almighty-for-good-and-against-evil, 
what could have turned a race of jungle animal into a moral being?
True or not, the great invention of man’s “second heart”
deserves Nobel returning to history to award his best prize! 

 Yours sincerely, 

     An agnostic-who-explains-religion-with-evolution
 

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Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Aries: A Philosophical Ramble

Posted by Mark Shulgasser

 

IS IT NOT SURPRISING that the birthday of each of the following Four occurs under a single zodiacal sign: Aries, the sign of Mars, God of War?

Richard Dawkins - March 26, 1941
Daniel Dennett - March 28, 1942
Christopher Hitchens - April 13, 1949
Sam Harris - April 9, 1967 

In the ravings of St. John the Divine the quadriga-drawn chariot of Mars Victorious is transformed. Classical gods are overthrown and the four horses are individualized: white, red, black and pale. Each receives its own rider, but the entire figure turns from glory to destruction. The riders bring not victory but horror: sword, bow, famine, pestilence, savagery, chaos and death. This ghastly archetype, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, has been revived in the media-friendly crew known as the Four Horsemen of some sort of Atheism . . . new, militant, apocalyptic, even.

The chances of any four random individuals being born under the same sign of the zodiac are about seventeen hundred to one against. Skeptics are quick to point out that seemingly improbable things happen all the time. But the traditional association of Aries with bellicosity is too apt ignore. A crumb of possible meaning suggests the coincidence is not entirely without cause. Moreover, the traditional astrological association of Aries with things martial can be upheld.

No need to dwell again on Christopher Hitchens’ drunken belligerence. Richard Dawkins, for the Observer, is ”above all, an intellectual pugilist,” while in the Spectator,

“to be Dawkinsed . . . is to be squelched, pulverized, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste.” 

Tales of the less flamboyant Daniel Dennett’s contentiousness have been scrubbed from the Internet; his newest book is an image changer about how to argue nicely. Still, Dennett’s name remains a sock puppet for anonymous atheists too spittingly angry to use real names.

Sam Harris, chin out the farthest, is a martial artist, who left this impression on an interviewer last year in an article titled “The Atheist who Strangled Me”: “Harris thinks about violence more than almost anyone else I have ever met.” (It’s worth mentioning that the interviewer, Graeme Wood, has been covering the mid-east on the ground for a decade, and presumably has met some violent people.)

As distinguished from peaceable freethinking, the militant or crusading faction of ‘new’ atheism construes God as the personification, and religion the institutionalization, of simple, demonstrable lies: evil antagonists who must be defied and exposed. The association of the Horsemen with the Ram and Mars spotlights their aggression; but more pertinently, their Islamophobia, which was recently challenged by Glenn Greenwald: “That is the hallmark of this New Atheist movement: exploiting rational atheism to support and glorify US state power and aggression; they have become a prime source for pseudo-intellectual justification of US government conduct.”

With respect to Harris and his supporters Greenwald wrote: “I can say that I haven't encountered such religious-type fervor and jingoistic and tribalistic self-love (My Side is superior to Theirs!!) in quite a long time.”

Salon’s recent “Confessions of a Secret Muslim” by Sarah Harvard was chilling reading. Ten-year-olds are being taught the preposterous and medieval notion that one quarter of the world’s population worships evil, and many educated adults agree, well-supplied with arguments by the Horsemen. Casual bigotry is sufficiently widespread now that American Muslims who can ‘pass’ do so, out of fear. The potent polemic against Islam coming from militant atheism serves this situation well. That four Aries natives galloped to the leadership is an alarm bell, because Aries natives have played a leading role in the history of modern violence.

As rainbows only occur under special circumstances on special occasions, so the role of Aries natives in generating a discourse of violence is now, thanks to the Four Horsemen, a special vantage point from which even those who are resistant to the idea may catch a glimpse of astrological meaning.