The DOI matches its Crossref record.
THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO CREATE CHILDREN WITH THE BEST CHANCE OF THE BEST LIFE
Abstract
According to what we call the Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PB), couples who decide to have a child have a significant moral reason to select the child who, given his or her genetic endowment, can be expected to enjoy the most well‐being. In the first part of this paper, we introduce PB, explain its content, grounds, and implications, and defend it against various objections. In the second part, we argue that PB is superior to competing principles of procreative selection such as that of procreative autonomy. In the third part of the paper, we consider the relation between PB and disability. We develop a revisionary account of disability, in which disability is a species of instrumental badness that is context‐ and person‐relative. Although PB instructs us to aim to reduce disability in future children whenever possible, it does not privilege the normal. What matters is not whether future children meet certain biological or statistical norms, but what level of well‐being they can be expected to have.
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Citations
Cited by
Human Germline Genome Editing: On the Nature of Our Reasons to Genome Edit
Sparrow, R. (2022) · The American Journal of Bioethics · doi:10.1080/15265161.2021.1907480 · Cited by 40
Gene Editing, Enhancing and Women’s Role
Simonstein, F. (2019) · Science and Engineering Ethics · doi:10.1007/s11948-017-9875-5 · Cited by 11
Metadata
- Authors
- SAVULESCU, J., & KAHANE, G.
- Venue
- Bioethics
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2009-05-26
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 274-290
- ISSN
- 0269-9702 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8519
- OpenAlex
- W1976409950
- Cited by
- 600
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 7.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
