In defence of Procreative Beneficence

Procreative Beneficence, Obligation, and Eugenics

The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible....

Procreative beneficence: why we should select the best children.

Eugenic selection of embryos is now possible by employing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While PGD is currently being employed for the purposes of detecting chromosomal abnormalities or inherited genetic abnormalities, it could in principle be used to test any genetic trait such as hair colour or eye colour. Genetic research is rapidly progressing into...

The Value of Sex in Procreative Reasons

We can learn about people’s conceptions of the ideal life by looking at what they imagine heaven to be like. Although voluptuous and gendered (and even sexist) accounts of the afterlife are familiar, more reflective views grow ever more distant from our actual human form of life—many Christians believe that in heaven there will be no marriage, sexual intercourse, or procreation. For those of us...

Therapeutic beneficence and placebo controls.

Procreative liberty in the era of genomics.

Twentieth century biology began with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work on peas and ended with the sequencing of the human genome. In between came Thomas Morgan’s studies of fruit flies, the grand synthesis between genetics and evolutionary biology in the 1930s, and Watson and Crick’s publication in 1953 of the double helix structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid (“DNA”), the substance in th...