Jonathan Anomaly's book describes itself as a "fast- paced primer on how new genetic technologies will enable parents to influence the traits of their children" and this book ably delivers on that description. In fewer than 90 pages Anomaly addresses chapters on cognitive enhancement, moral enhancement, aesthetic enhancement, immuno-enhancement, and synthetic people.
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Anomaly's goal in each chapter is to "give a sense of the reasons for and against a particular kind of enhancement, to explain the kinds of collective action problems that access to enhancement technology might generate, and to think through what we should do in response" x. A distinctive characteristic of Anomaly's approach is that he hopes to raise moral questions "that are informed by science and constrained by feasibility considerations of the kind economists appeal to" x.
Anomaly has an admirable command of the technological advances being made with enhancing technologies and he addresses the ethical complexity of these developments with competence and insight. Advancing normative discussion and debates, let alone some practical prescriptions, about technological interventions that are still speculative and may or may not come to fruition is a daunting Thhe challenging endeavour. Intellectual humility and an adaptive and provisional moral lens are, I believe, the foundational ingredients to a sage analysis of potential enhancing technologies. Anomaly's goal of advancing arguments and analyses informed by the science is a welcome contribution to these debates in bioethics, though the science surrounding each of these enhancement issues is still very contested and embryonic as opposed to settled and thus each individual chapter of this short book could be the focus of a book in itself.
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Regarding cognitive enhancement, the focus of Chapter 1, the issue of what constitutes "intelligence" is a topic of much debate among scientists, as is the issue of the role of heritability for intelligence. The nature of the fast-paced analysis Anomaly deploys in this book means that the definition and heritability of intelligence are addressed in just go here pages. The risk is that a reader might form an overly simplistic understanding of the science, for example, interpreting the claim that "genetics explains about 80 percent of the variation in intelligence between adults in a population" 5 to imply that society ought to prioritize equalizing the genetics for intelligence rather than focusing so much on education and supportive family environments.
Mogals from childhood through to young adulthood environment plays a more significant role in differences in intelligence. And there are additional complexities, like the fact that the environments people are exposed to in the actual world do not always mirror the "normal range of environmental influence" to which genome-wide association studies refer. So the role neglect and abuse play in differentials in intelligence is a further complication which illustrates the limits of relying solely on genome-wide polygenic scores that aggregate the effects of thousands of genetic variants.
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My point is a simple one: I think this area of scientific inquiry is click the following article too early and ongoing to make formulating any specific normative prescriptions plausible and defensible. Anomaly covers a number of interesting topics related to cognitive enhancement, including personality traits the big 5 OCEAN : Openness, Conscientiousness, Empathy, Agreeableness, and Neuroticismpositional goods, social benefits, and moral standing and moral status. His examination of cognitive enhancement is insightful and provocative, and effectively demonstrates why this is an issue that should be given serious consideration rather than blindly ignored or cavalierly embraced.
Chapter 2 addresses the issue of moral enhancement, a topic that has been receiving growing attention in bioethics over the past decade. Anomaly begins the chapter by considering the pros and cons of oxytocin, a hormone that plays an important role in social bonding. If particular modifiable genes could be identified that could influence how generous and fair our offspring would be, should parents have the liberty to pursue such modifications?
Would there be a moral obligation on parents to alter their children so that they make better moral decisions? These are provocative and interesting questions, and students taking an undergraduate bioethics class will find Anomaly's fast-paced The Morals and Ethics of Genetic Engineering of these issues an engaging introduction to these ethical debates.]
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