Abstract
It is likely that gene editing technologies will become viable in the current century. As scientists uncover the genetic contribution to personality traits and cognitive styles, parents will face hard choices. Some of these choices will involve trade‐offs from the standpoint of the individual's welfare, while others will involve trade‐offs between what is best for each and what is good for all. Although we think we should generally defer to the informed choices of parents about what kinds of children to create, we argue that decisions to manipulate polygenic psychological traits will be much more ethically complicated than choosing Mendelian traits like blood type. We end by defending the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when legislation is necessary to prevent serious harms, we should aim for simple rules that apply to all, rather than micro‐managing parental choices that shape the traits of their children. While we focus on embryo selection and gene editing, our arguments apply to all powerful technologies which influence the development of children.
Highlights
A commonly expressed fear in dystopian novels and popular debates about genetic engineering is that we will produce future people who are exactly alike
We think we should generally defer to the informed choices of parents about what kinds of children to create, we argue that decisions to manipulate polygenic psychological traits will be much more ethically complicated than choosing Mendelian traits like blood type
We end by de‐ fending the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when legislation is necessary to prevent serious harms, we should aim for simple rules that apply to all, rather than micro‐managing parental choices that shape the traits of their children
Summary
A commonly expressed fear in dystopian novels and popular debates about genetic engineering is that we will produce future people who are exactly alike. Thinking about what kinds of people will exist and how we will create them is arguably our most important moral obligation.[53 ] Some authors have argued that when the freedom to choose our children's characteristics creates a collective action problem, there is a prima facie case for government intervention.[54 ] In a sense this is right: we cannot expect undirected private choice magically to produce an optimal distribution of goods. The conditions for social norms to solve collective action problems will not always apply in these cases, unless people return to living in small and sta‐ ble communities where norms can more powerfully sculpt behavior, including reproductive preferences This makes it hard to know what to do about far‐reaching col‐ lective action problems—for example, those that arise because many parents may prefer extraverts to introverts, or because all would prefer a population with more empathy, but each would pre‐ fer a child with less empathy than average. When legal regulations are appropriate to prevent serious harms we think they should be broad in scope and few in number
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