Parental Responsibility and Gene Editing

Abstract to chapter co-authored with Emma A. Jane for the volume “Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing” edited by Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston.

Once genetic screening and intervention technologies become safe, effective, and inexpensive, should parents use them to safeguard their children’s happiness, and would parents who do not use them be reckless and irresponsible? This line of thinking is troubling for many reasons, but in particular because it overlooks that social pressure, not a sense of responsibility, is what will most likely lead parents to use such technologies. This matters because unless we pay more attention to how people’s choices are affected by group dynamics, then over time nobody may even notice when such technologies start being used in troubling ways. To address this concern, we argue that social institutions are needed that enable society as a whole to reflect on its own evolution over time. Until such institutions are created – to oversee, to evaluate, and to control social factors that influence people’s choices – it makes little sense to debate parental responsibilities.