Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Many instances of parental enhancement are objectionable on egalitarian grounds because they unnecessarily amplify one kind of asymmetry of power between parents and children. Because children have full moral status, we ought to seek egalitarian relationships with them. Such relationships are compatible with asymmetries of power only to the extent to which the asymmetry is necessary for (1) advancing the child's level of advantage up to what justice requires or (2) instilling in the child morally required features. This is a ground to oppose parental enhancements whose purpose is either to merely satisfy parents' preferences or to confer on the child advantages above and beyond what the child is owed by justice.
- Ethics
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Other content recommended for you
- Fetuses, newborns, & parental responsibility
- Genetic enhancement, post-persons and moral status: a reply to Buchanan
- Are those who subscribe to the view that early embryos are persons irrational and inconsistent? A reply to Brock
- Parental responsibilities and moral status
- Deciding against disability: does the use of reproductive genetic technologies express disvalue for people with disabilities?
- Infanticide and moral consistency
- Shaping children through genetic and environmental means
- Reproductive cloning, genetic engineering and the autonomy of the child: the moral agent and the open future
- Defending the distinction between pregnancy and parenthood
- Moral uncertainty and the farming of human-pig chimeras