Class Eight/notes
From Cyberlaw
Notes 3.3.06
Sorry for the delay. As always, edit away...
Class discussion before Sandel gets here:
- • Ethicists must stand on a turtle – what turtle is he standing on? What is wrong with seeking perfection?
- • Thinks it would get rid of our sense of “giftedness”
- • Root in revulsion to eugenics? Self-interested fear of moral condemnation of the present?
- • Has he set up a false dichotomy?
- • How is problem of constraining profit companies analogous to constraining human experimentation?
- o We think Bonds is cheating, it’s unfair
- o How much is determined by his natural skill/by drugs – does biotech really take chance out of everything?
- o Arg that the effect will be at the margins, rather than w/ ppl like Bonds
- o Difference between types of enhancement
Sandel is here!
Regulation of FDA of HGH:
- • Approved for genetic hormonal deficiencies
- • Then used for short kids that were short just bc parents were short – is this wrong? Will it lead to use by avg height kids to become tall?
- o Distinction between cosmetic and medical reasons – diff burdens?
- o Possible wealth effects – does this mean that we don’t allow unequal distribution based on expense?
- o Interest in diversity
- o Informed consent
- o If height is a positional good, then it’s a self-defeating hormonal arms race
- o Slippery slope argument --> eugenics?
Slippery Slope:
- • This is free market/privatized eugenics
- • What is the bogeyman at the bottom of the slippery slope? Gattaca clip
- • What is wrong w/ making choices? This has been happening forever – is this “eugenic mating”?
- • India and China exhibit sex selection
- • Sperm donors – picked based on characteristics
- • Is it morally condemnable to pick mates based on offspring characteristics?
- • Reproduction treated as special – based in Western religious tradition?
- o Is ability to cure things genetically actually affirming faith?
- o Is there a difference between cosmetic and medical solutions?
- o Difference between disease and sex selection
If Nesson’s a legislator, does he pass a law to make it illegal to sex select?
- • Self-interest to stay in office
- • Using law is waste of legal capital, creates more wrong-doings
- • When do you legislate using morals?
- o When morals are widely shared?
- • What ab aborting based on gay genes?
- • What ab drug that would change invitro from gay to straight? An infant born?
Sandel: difference between selecting based on debilitating disease and sex selection is being female is not a disease
- • Diff between discrimination and disease
- • Point made that ppl have v different lines in the gray area
- • Story ab deaf lesbian couple choosing deaf sperm donor
- o Is it morally troubling to conceive to satisfy parents’ prefs? Is this instrumentalizing this child?
- o His main objection wasn’t ab whether deafness was a disability, but with the design – and this applies to all other cases of parents treating children as objects of creation/will, no matter what their criteria, i.e. it is a eugenic practice
- • Would draw the line between medical and non-medical reasons
o How does govt regulate this? Do you say that the “superior” is eugenics?
Other points:
- • Genes aren’t determinative
- • Would force parents who don’t want to modify to do so or end up w/ disadvantaged children
- • Would create more uniformity, based on what we think right now are the best traits
- • Would solidify what’s “best”
- • Sandel is on the bioethics panel – ethical reasons can be used as fuel for religiously motivated politics…but can also use these args on the other side
We are getting close to power to control our own code – are we able to?
Belee 02:37, 5 April 2006 (EDT)
