Chapter 8 Guidance on answering selected questions from the book

Question

Agar tells of a repository of the sperm and eggs of the most able and active individuals from around the world. These are then available for sale or research. Should there be more of these? Why should we not use only the gametes that contain the very best genetic material?

Guidance

An answer to this question involves a discussion of Julian Savulescu’s principles of procreative beneficence. In short this claims that parents ought to seek out the best for their children and this includes when making pre-implantation decisions. While he makes it clear he is not suggesting that parents should be required to use other (more expert) people’s gametes rather than their own, it could at least suggest when deciding between gamete donors a parent should choose the ones most likely to produce the best outcome for their children.

Savluescu’s argument is at its most appealing when we consider children of born parents. Surely if parents had a choice between two options one of which (say) made the child more intelligent and the other less, we would think parents ought to choose the one that made the child more intelligent. That seems undeniable and, if so, so the argument goes, we should say the same when decisions are being made about the creation of a child. Why choose a donor whose genetic inheritance will be poor when you could choose a donor whose inheritance will be good?

At the heart of the essay is whether you think the analogy works. You might attack the premise. Parents do not necessarily strive to produce the most intelligent child: they want their child to have fun as well as succeed in school, but that is not necessarily wrong. Alternatively you might attack the analogy: is there something different about creating a child with a particular purpose in mind and encouraging a child to develop in a particular way. There are plenty of ways in which these arguments can be developed. You might also want to think about the societal impact. If we had a society in which only “the best” gametes were used and so everyone was super intelligent, would that be a better society?

Reading

Persson, I. and Savulescu, J. (2012) Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement

(Oxford University Press).

Savulescu, J. (2006) ‘In defence of procreative beneficence’, Journal of Medical Ethics

33: 284.

Bennett, R. (2014) ‘When intuition is not enough: Why the principle of procreative

beneficence must work much harder to justify its eugenic vision’, Bioethics 28: 447