Editing the Best of All Possible Worlds

Abstract

It has been argued that we have a moral obligation to explore human germline modification in order to create the best possible children. In contrast, this chapter argues that in order to flourish as human beings we need to recognize that there are many different ways of being good and that the pursuit of happiness is most likely to succeed not in the extraordinary, the larger than life and better than human and beyond average, but in the ordinary life, which has enough scope and depth to provide us with all the happiness that a human life can possibly have.