I would like to suggest to my friends this essay in Prospect Magazine (it is from 1999 but still quite actual) by the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin on the issue of genetics, insurance companies and Politics. Good read for your weekend.
” How can we discriminate between proper and improper use of genetic information? Suppose that insurance companies are forbidden from either requiring genetic tests as a condition of insurance, or from asking whether candidates have had such tests. Then the companies will be destroyed by “adverse selection”: people who had been genetically tested would insure heavily if most at risk, not at all if less at risk—and insurance company bankruptcies would follow. But suppose that insurance companies are entitled to ask for information from candidates seeking insurance who have had their own tests. Then people would be discouraged from having such tests, and their own and the public health will suffer. This might be called the “insurance dilemma.” “
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Genetic science has made us aware of the possibility of a similar, though far greater, pending moral dislocation. We dread the prospect of people designing other people because that possibility in itself shifts the chance/choice boundary which underpins our values. Our physical being—the brain and body which give each of us our material substrate—has long been the absolute paradigm of what is both devastatingly important to us and beyond our power to alter, either individually or collectively. The popularity of the phrase “genetic lottery” itself shows the centrality of our conviction that what we most basically are is a matter of chance, not choice.
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If we were to take seriously the possibility we are now exploring—that scientists really have gained the capacity to create a human being with any phenotype that they or prospective parents choose—then we could chart the destruction of settled moral attitudes, starting at almost any point. We use the chance/choice distinction not simply in our assignments of responsibility for situations or events, but in our assessments of pride, including pride in what nature has given us. It is a striking phenomenon that people take pride in physical attributes or skills they did not choose or create, such as physical appearance or strength, but not when these can be seen to be the results of the efforts of others in which they played no part. A woman who puts herself in the hands of a cosmetic surgeon may rejoice in the result, but can take no pride in it; certainly not the pride she would have taken if she had been born into the same beauty. What would happen to pride in our physical attributes, or even what we make of them, if these were the inexorable results not of a nature in whose pride we are allowed, as it were, to share, but of the decision made by our parents and their hired geneticists?
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Further, we accept the condition in which we were born as a parameter of our responsibility, but not as itself a potential arena of blame (except in those cases, of relatively recent discovery, in which someone’s behaviour altered our embryonic development-through smoking, for example, or drugs). Otherwise, although we may curse fate for how we are, as Richard Crookback did, we may blame no one else. The same distinction holds for social responsibility, too. We feel a greater responsibility to compensate victims of industrial accidents, and of racial prejudice, than we feel a responsibility to compensate those born with genetic defects or those injured by lightning, or in those other ways which lawyers and insurance companies call, in an illuminating phrase, “acts of God.” How would this change if we are as we are through the conscious decisions of others? The terror many of us feel at the thought of genetic engineering is not a fear of what is wrong; it is a fear of losing our grip on what is wrong. We worry that our settled convictions will be undermined, that we will be in a kind of moral free fall, that we will have to think again against a new background, and with uncertain results. Playing God is playing with fire.
Suppose that this hypothesis is correct, and that it accounts for the powerful surge in people’s emotional reaction to genetic engineering. Have we then discovered not only an explanation but a justification for the revulsion? No. We would have discovered a challenge we must take up, rather than a reason for turning back. Our hypothesis reveals only reasons why our contemporary values may be wrong or ill-considered. If we are to be morally responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done ever since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discovery. We play with fire and accept the consequences, because the alternative is an irresponsible cowardice in the face of the unknown.
A good read indeed!
New Political Review 