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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Designer Babies: Choosing Our Children's Genes, Bonnie Steinbock
Designer Babies: Choosing Our Children's Genes, Bonnie Steinbock
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
The phrase “designer babies” refers to genetic interventions into pre-implantation embryos in the attempt to influence the traits the resulting children will have. At present, this is not possible, but many people are horrified by the mere thought that parents might want to choose their children’s genes, especially for non-disease traits. I want to argue that the objections are usually not well articulated, and that even when they are, it’s far from obvious that such interventions would be wrong.
The Morality Of Killing Human Embryos, Bonnie Steinbock
The Morality Of Killing Human Embryos, Bonnie Steinbock
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Embryonic stem cell research is morally and politically controversial because the process of deriving the embryonic stem (ES) cells kills embryos. If embryos are, as some would claim, human beings like you and me, then ES cell research is clearly impermissible. If, on the other hand, the blastocysts from which embryonic stem cells are derived are not yet human beings, but rather microscopic balls of undifferentiated cells, as others maintain, then ES cell research is probably morally permissible. Whether the research can be justified depends on such issues as its cost, chance of success, and numbers likely to benefit. But …