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9 - Genes, identity and the ‘expressivist critique’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2009

By
Rob Sparrow
Edited by
Loane Skene  and
Janna Thompson
Loane Skene
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Janna Thompson
Affiliation:
La Trobe University, Victoria
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Summary

Introduction

Technologies such as prenatal testing, combined with the option of abortion, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis now give prospective parents unprecedented power to choose the genetics of their children. In effect, they allow parents to sort embryos according to whether they have desirable or undesirable genes. A society in which such technologies become widespread – as they have in many industrialized nations already – might be thought of as a ‘sorting society’. This description, however, immediately draws attention to another, more disturbing, potential in these technologies. Critics of the sorting society worry that it involves choosing between different ‘sorts’ of people, deciding who will be born on the basis of a belief that some sorts of people are better than others.

The shameful historical legacy of racial eugenics has meant that there is little open enthusiasm for using modern technologies of genetic selection to select for (supposed) racial traits. While technologies enabling sex selection have been widely adopted to that purpose, their use in this fashion has, I think, at least as many critics as admirers amongst those writing about the ethics of this practice. Instead, these sorting technologies have been taken up and defended most enthusiastically in the service of the goal of preventing the birth of children who might suffer from various disabilities. As a result, it has been critics from within the disability community who have thought hardest about – and have raised some of the most forceful objections to – the development of the sorting society.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Sorting Society
The Ethics of Genetic Screening and Therapy
 , pp. 111 - 132
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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