Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Human Persons: Numerical Identity and Essence
- 3 Human Persons: Narrative Identity and Self-Creation
- 4 Identity, What We Are, and the Definition of Death
- 5 Advance Directives, Dementia, and the Someone Else Problem
- 6 Enhancement Technologies and Self-Creation
- 7 Prenatal Identity: Genetic Interventions, Reproductive Choices
- Index
7 - Prenatal Identity: Genetic Interventions, Reproductive Choices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Human Persons: Numerical Identity and Essence
- 3 Human Persons: Narrative Identity and Self-Creation
- 4 Identity, What We Are, and the Definition of Death
- 5 Advance Directives, Dementia, and the Someone Else Problem
- 6 Enhancement Technologies and Self-Creation
- 7 Prenatal Identity: Genetic Interventions, Reproductive Choices
- Index
Summary
According to the framework developed in this book, we human persons are essentially human animals and characteristically self-narrators who care about continuing as such. Through the lens of this framework, in conjunction with defensible moral assumptions, we have examined the definition of human death, the authority of advance directives in cases involving severe dementia, and the use of enhancement technologies. Our discussion of enhancement technologies focused on postnatal enhancements, while our treatment of advance directives considered an institution in which adults make self-regarding decisions. Naturally, different issues arise when adults make decisions for dependent others – with greater complexity emerging if those others are unborn. Our examination of the definition of death studied the end of our existence, leaving open the question of when we come into existence.
In this final chapter, we will confront several controversial issues that were not addressed in earlier chapters. We will consider the prenatal human animal, or organism, and several types of decisions that adults make on behalf of this being. More specifically, we will address these topics: (1) our origins, or when we come into existence; (2) prenatal genetic interventions in relation to human identity; (3) the ethics of prenatal genetic interventions; (4) reproductive choices that may affect who comes into being (the nonidentity problem); and (5) implications of this chapter's findings and the Time-Relative Interest Account (TRIA) (introduced in Chapter 5) for the morality of abortion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Human Identity and Bioethics , pp. 244 - 294Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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