This essay evaluates the moral logic of ‘liberal eugenics’: the ideal of genetic control which leaves decisions about what sort of people to produce in the hands of individual parents, absent government intervention. I argue that liberal eugenics cannot be justified on the basis of the underlying liberal theory which inspires it. I introduce an alternative to Rawls's social primary goods that might be called natural primary goods: hereditable mental and physical capacities and dispositions that are valued across a range (...) of projects and pursuits. I suggest that reproductive genetic biotechnologies like embryo selection, cellular surgery, and genetic engineering, which aim to enhance ‘general purpose’ traits in offspring are less like childrearing practices a liberal government leaves to the discretion of parents than like practices the state makes compulsory. I argue that if the liberal commitment to autonomy is important enough for the state to mandate childrearing practices such as health care and basic education, that very same interest is important enough for the state to mandate safe, effective, and functionally integrated genetic practices that act on analogous all‐purpose traits such as resistance to disease and general cognitive functioning. I conclude that the liberal case for compulsory eugenics is a reductio against liberal theory. (shrink)

Should doctors ever be allowed to offer care that their state or employer forbids? What if their deeply held personal values or beliefs demand they treat patients in need? We’re used to hearing abo...

Courts have resolved a range of controversies by casual appeal to the state's interest in “potential life” that Roe held capable of overriding even fundamental rights. My analysis of this potential-life interest reveals its use to mean not one but four species of concern. I call these prenatal welfare, postnatal welfare, social values, and social effects and demonstrate how they operate under different conditions and with varying levels of strength.

This Article considers the moral and legal status of practices that aim to modify traits in human offspring. As advancements in reproductive biotechnology give parents greater power to shape the genetic constitution of their children, an emerging school of legal scholars has ushered in a privatized paradigm of genetic control. Commentators defend a constitutionally protected right to prenatal engineering by appeal to the significance of procreative liberty and the promise of producing future generations who are more likely to have their (...) lives go well. This 'new eugenics,' however, confronts us with ethical challenges that neither liberal arguments about autonomy, fairness, and consent, nor utilitarian arguments about preferences, happiness, and equality, are able to capture. I begin by analyzing the Supreme Court's modern substantive due process jurisprudence, as it bears on recent advancements and controversies in genetic science. After developing a doctrinal framework that could support an asserted right to genetic engineering, I draw on empirical research in behavioral psychology to examine the influence of eugenic norms on egalitarian attitudes and institutions. I predict that if parents become accustomed to choosing the genes of their children, it would be radically more difficult to give an influential account for why the successful should adopt a charitable posture toward those who are less fortunate. I argue that by shifting control over offspring DNA from chance to choice, enhancement will inflate a sense of individual entitlement for social and economic outcomes. I conclude that increasing willingness to prevent the birth of abnormal children distracts attention from institutions that fail to accommodate the limitations of imperfect people. Some may reply that producing people who better fit the roles society chooses to reward need not deter us from providing for people whose abilities fail to meet the demands of modern society. However, this reply misses the way that changes in reproductive practices can bring about changes in the way that we understand our identities and relationships. Eugenic solutions to social problems such as poverty, crime, and unemployment reshape the challenge of genetic disadvantage so that it is no longer one we address through collective measures such as public education, social services, and income redistribution, and instead becomes one for individual parents to prevent through donor screening, embryo discard, or selective abortion. (shrink)

Liberal theory seeks to achieve the moral and practical goods of toleration, civil peace, and mutual respect within modern pluralistic societies by excluding from public debate those arguments that arise from within formative conceptions about what gives value to human life. I ask whether it is reasonable to bracket, for purposes of public deliberation, our deepest moral views about genetic engineering. The answer to this question depends, at least in part, on how we come down on those moral issues that (...) such biotechnological practices presupposes. I argue that the moral language of liberal justice - of rights and duties, interests and opportunities, freedom and consent, equality and fairness - cannot speak to the moral concerns at the heart of such practices. My goal is not to indict liberalism as a valuable framework in many areas of theory and practice. I mean, instead, to challenge the suitability of liberalism to furnish a plausible and coherent account of the moral status for a range of biotechnological practices. (shrink)

This essay considers the moral status of certain practices that aim to enhance offspring traits. I develop an objection to offspring enhancement that draws on an account of the role morality of parents. I work out an account of parental ethics by reference to premises about child development and to observations about parenting culture in the United States. I argue that excellence in parenthood consists in a dual responsibility both to guide children toward the good life and to accept them (...) as they are. I conclude that prenatal manipulation of healthy and normal characteristics in human offspring fails to balance the dispositional extremes of control and restraint to which many parents today are susceptible. I apply this account of good parenting to the challenging case of height enhancement for short but otherwise healthy children. Finally, I reply to objections, first, about the phenomenology of bearing normative obligations to people who do not yet exist and, second, about the moral logic of criticizing embryo selection in the context of assisted reproduction when we accept child selection in the context of adoption. (shrink)

This essay considers principles of distributive justice for access to reproductive biotechnologies which make it is possible to enhance the traits of human offspring. I provide prima facie reason to think that redistributive principles apply to genetic goods and proceed to evaluate the way in which four distributive patterns - egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism - would implement a just distribution of genetic goods. I argue that the currency of genetic redistribution consists in natural primary goods like health, vision, (...) and rationality as these goods contribute to the biological component of basic capabilities, like being healthy, seeing properly, and being able to reason. I develop a mixed sufficiency/priority approach to genetic enhancement, and defend this approach against objections. (shrink)

In a little noted passage in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argued that genetic intervention in the traits of offspring may be morally required as a matter of distributive justice. Given that the “greater natural assets” of each “enables him to pursue a preferred plan of life[,]” Rawls wrote, the parties to the original position “want to insure for their descendents the best genetic endowment.…Thus over time a society is to take steps at least to preserve the general level (...) of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects.…The pursuit of reasonable policies in this regard is something that earlier generations owe to later ones.” Whether biological enhancement actually is a moral obligation we owe to future generations is a question that I have taken up elsewhere, but which lies beyond my scope here. If we agree with Rawls that some measure of safe and effective genetic intervention may be required as a matter of justice, it stands to ask how the distribution of genetic goods – that is, the hereditary basis of human traits – should be carried out. (shrink)

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump won conservative support by promising that he would, if elected, nominate “pro‐life” justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether President Trump makes good on his campaign promise to restrict abortion rights may come down to competing impulses of the chief justice, John Roberts. These dueling dispositions—from the man whom many see as the new “swing justice”—hold the key to a blockbuster new case that legal historians call “the most unpredictable the Supreme Court has been (...) on abortion in decades.” The case, June Medical Services v. Russo, turns on arduous new requirements that Louisiana has imposed on facilities and clinicians that provide abortion. But the case is not just about abortion access. The Court will have to decide whether a clinic has a right to challenge the law in the first place. (shrink)

This Article examines the influence of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on affective attitudes toward children with disabilities and on the incidence of disability-selective abortion. Applying regression analysis to U.S. natality data, we find that the birthrate of children with Down syndrome declined significantly in the years following the ADA's passage. Controlling for technological, demographic, and cultural variables suggests that the ADA may have encouraged prospective parents to prevent the existence of the very class of people the Act was (...) designed to protect. We explain this paradox by showing how specific ADA provisions could have given rise to demeaning media depictions and social conditions that reinforced negative understandings and expectations among prospective parents about what it means to have a child with a disability. We discuss implications for reproduction law and antidiscrimination policy. (shrink)

A key public health measure has received far too little attention over the course of the Covid‐19 pandemic: paid sick leave policies that encourage people at risk of spreading disease to stay home rather than come to work. The United States is one of the only developed countries that fails to guarantee paid sick leave at the federal level, leaving a patchwork of state and private policies that undersupply time off when people are contagious and protect top wage earners at (...) wildly disproportionate rates compared with what workers with lower incomes experience. Other countries have shown that sick leave mandates are neither unjustified burdens on employers nor gratuitous giveaways to employees. In fact, sick leave saves on health care costs by making employees less likely to infect coworkers, to be absent for longer themselves, or to need treatment in expensive hospital emergency departments. Nationally guaranteed sick leave is urgently needed to promote public health. (shrink)