Reasons to Genome Edit and Metaphysical Essentialism about Human Identity.

The standard view in bioethics distinguishes between “person affecting” interventions that may harm or benefit particular individuals (e.g., by genome editing) and “identity affecting” interventions that determine which individual comes into existence (e.g., by genetic selection). Sparrow questions one of the central assumptions of the debates about reproductive technologies in the past several decades. He argues that direct genetic modification of human embryos should be classified not as “person affecting” but as “identity affecting” because any genome editing in the foreseeable future “will almost certainly” involve creating and editing multiple embryos, as well as selecting the “best possible” embryo by preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Sparrow also assumes that the distinction between “person affecting” and “identity affecting” interventions has crucial ethical significance: “the reasons we have to select embryos are weaker than the reasons we have to modify them” (Sparrow 2022). Thus, classifying genome editing as an “identity affecting” intervention, he concludes that there is no justification for laws requiring enhancement, even if one assumes that enhancement is morally obligatory. In this commentary paper, we are taking one step further in questioning the central assumptions in the bioethical debates about reproductive technologies. We argue that the very distinction between “person affecting” and “identity affecting” interventions is based on a questionable form of material-origin essentialism. Questioning of this form of essentialist approach to human identity allows treating genome editing and genetic selection as more similar than they are taken to be in the standard approaches. It would also challenge the idea that normative reasons we have in these two types of cases markedly differ in strength.