Theoretical vs Practical Reasons: Derek Parfit and Bioethics.

Abstract

In his paper, “Human Germline Genome Editing: On the Nature of Our Reasons to Genome Edit,” Rob Sparrow argues that “genome editing is highly unlikely to be person affecting for the foreseeable future and, as a result, will, on the Parfitian account, neither benefit nor harm edited individuals” (Sparrow 2022, 4). What is striking about this claim is that, if true, it means that we will need to find some other way (other than beneficence and person-affecting reasoning) to explain why genome editing is wrong when it is wrong. One of the common explanations for its moral wrongness (or rightness) will be taken off the table, so to speak. While at first glance, this view may seem extremely revisionary to genome editing debates (since apparently, claims of benefit/harm to particular embryos and the individuals they become is a common mode of argument in genome editing ethics), there are at least two reasons why the view is not so revisionary First, there are other reasons that we can appeal to in explaining why genome editing is wrong when it is. Indeed, Sparrow tips his hat to one of them—new genome editing techniques (e.g., nuclear transfer) would involve cloning living or deceased human beings. As another example, Parfit himself was prepared to say that despite the sticky “non-identity problem,” there are ways to explain why certain reproductive decisions are wrong when they are wrong. Consider his famous example of “a young girl’s child.” Here, a 14-year-old girl “decides” to have a child, and because she is so young, gives the child a bad start at life. On the one hand, we are inclined to say that the decision was “wrong” and that it “wronged” the child that she had at such a young age. However, the Nonidentity Problem gives us pause and does not allow us to say this, for had she had a child at a later date, the child would have been a different child. Thus, how can we say that she wronged the child that she did have when the alternative would have been the child not existing at all (surely worse for the child). Parfit’s take is that there actually is a way for us to say that the girl made a morally wrong choice. He writes, “It would have been better if this man’s mother had waited. But this is not because of what she did to her actual child. It is because of what she could have done for any child that she could have had when she was mature. The objection must be that, if she had waited, she could have given to some other child a better start in life” (Reasons and Persons, 364–365). Thus, even when we take personaffecting arguments off the table, there are still other ways to explain why certain reproductive choices (such as those involved in certain instances of genome editing) are wrong. There is a second reason why Sparrow’s view is not so revisionary or shattering to genome editing debates. This reason is found buried deep in Parfit’s concluding remarks in Reasons and Persons and it is very interesting. Parfit writes,