Abstract

A moderate communitarian theory entitled "filial morality" is developed in an attempt to address the questions of who owes genetic obligations to future generations, what is owed, who are the beneficiaries of such duties, and why duties to future generations should be fulfilled. Some problems faced by obligation theorists and communitarians who discuss human genetic engineering are reviewed. Specific problems are: a conflation of environmental with genetic obligations, a blending of the perspectives of medical and population genetics, a temporality problem , a beneficiary problem , and the derivation of moral obligations from nonvoluntary membership in associations. While environmental obligations to future populations are analogous to parental obligations, genetic duties to posterity are directly obligations of parents to their own offspring. An obligation to nurture may justify a parent's consent to gene therapy for a child with a fatal condition, but it prohibits the genetic designing or enhancement of a child. Future generations assign meaning to the present generation in the continuation of a family narrative, a narrative which could not be continued if the parent engaged in the genetic designing of his or her child. The problem of nonvoluntary membership as a source of obligation in communitarian theories is addressed with the suggestion that a decision to nurture another is preceded by the fundamental decision to nurture one's own life. The normative force of obligations to posterity is traced to the basic choice to nurture