David Wasserman

What would be objectionable about sports doping if it were safe and legal? Some ethicists have justified their qualms about doping by invoking elusive distinctions between the natural and the artificial. But the harm in doping and other biotechnological enhancements is best understood in terms of the values of athletic competition—specifically, the spectators' identification with the performers, and the continuity and comparability of athletic achievement over time. Instead of endorsing categorical bans on specific enhancements, David Wasserman recommends caution informed by a clear perception of the values at stake

While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is sufficiently great to make procreation wrong. In addition to these "philanthropic" arguments, he advances the "misanthropic" one that because humans are so defective and cause vast amounts of harm, it is wrong to create more of them.David Wasserman defends procreation against the anti-natalist challenge. He outlines a variety of moderate pro-natalist positions, which all see procreation as often permissible but never required. After criticizing the main anti-natalist arguments, he reviews those pronatalist positions. He argues that constraints on procreation are best understood in terms of the role morality of prospective parents, considers different views of that role morality, and argues for one that imposes only limited constraints based on the well-being of the future child. He then argues that the expected good of a future child and of the parent-child relationship can provide a strong justification for procreation in the face of expected adversities without giving individuals any moral reason to procreate.

As imaging technologies help us understand the structure and function of the brain, providing insight into human capabilities as basic as vision and as complex as memory, and human conditions as impairing as depression and as fraught as psychopathy, some have asked whether they can also help us understand human agency. Specifically, could neuroimaging lead us to reassess the socially significant practice of assigning and taking responsibility?While responsibility itself is not a psychological process open to investigation through neuroimaging, decision‐making is. Over the past decade, different researchers and scholars have sought to use neuroimaging (or the results of neuroimaging studies) to investigate what is going on in the brain when we make decisions. The results of this research raise the question whether neuroscience—especially now that it includes neuroimaging—can and should alter our understandings of responsibility and our related practice of holding people responsible. It is this question that we investigate here.

In this article I want to ask what we should do, either collectively or individually, if we could identify by genetic and family profding the 12% of the male population likely to commit almost half the violent crime in our society. What if we could identify some individuals in that 12% not only at birth, but in utero, or before implantation? I will explain the source of these figures later; for now, I will use them only to provide a concrete example of the kind of predictive claims we can expect to be made with some frequency, and some scientific credibility, over the next generation. I will adopt an outlook that one commentator has called “pragmatic optimism,” but which could also be called technological optimism - the belief that a science or technology will achieve many or most of its advertised goals. My optimism will be directed towards human behavioral genetics, the source of predictions like the one I just offered; I will assume that this controversial discipline will achieve a substantial pan of its scientific ambition to identlfy genetic differences among individuals that help predict and possibly explain future behavior, psychological health, and cognitive skill. This optimism is very limited -it concerns the scientific success of behavioral genetics, not the social value of that success.

This chapter deals with parental virtue or familial virtue and reproductive decision-making, particularly when the potential child has some impairment. There is a moral asymmetry between actions that raise or those that lower the chances of having a child with impairment. The former is regarded as wrong while the latter is considered morally correct. This chapter argues that such asymmetry is against the ideal of unconditional parental acceptance of their child, whatever his condition is. It proposes an alternative. Parents are justified to choose the kind of existence their child will have only if such an impairment is necessary for the child's existence. According to J. Scully, T. Shakespeare, and S. Banks, certain kinds of legitimate choices may be inappropriate for parents if these are against the nature of a parent-child relationship.

In this paper, we critically appraise institutions for people with disabilities, from residential facilities to outpatient clinics to social organizations. While recognizing that a just and inclusive society would reject virtually all segregated institutional arrangements, we argue that in contemporary American society, some people with disabilities may have needs that at this time can best be met by institutional arrangements. We propose ways of reforming institutions to make them less isolating, coercive, and stigmatizing, and to provide forms of social support the larger society denies many people with disabilities. Although these reforms far fall far short of abolition, they draw heavily on the work of disability scholars and advocates who call for the complete replacement of institutional arrangements with systems of supported living. The consideration of non-ideal-solutions is useful not only in reforming existing institutional arrangements, but in bringing disability scholarship and advocacy to bear on bioethics, which has paid little attention to institutions for people with disabilities. We intend this paper to redress the neglect within mainstream bioethics of the complex ethical problems posed by institutions.

In this 2001 volume a group of leading philosophers address some of the basic conceptual, methodological and ethical issues raised by genetic research into criminal behavior. The essays explore the complexities of tracing any genetic influence on criminal, violent or antisocial behavior; the varieties of interpretations to which evidence of such influences is subject; and the relevance of such influences to the moral and legal appraisal of criminal conduct. The distinctive features of this collection are: first, that it advances public discussion while clarifying the debate about genetic research and criminal behavior; second, that it explains scientific controversies about behavioral genetics in lucid, non-technical terms; third, that it demonstrates how the possible findings on genetics and crime bear on fundamental issues of moral and criminal responsibility. The volume will be of particular value to philosophers concerned with applied ethics , behavioral geneticists, psychologists, legal theorists, and criminologists

This study brings together two important literatures together in the one volume. One concerns the role of quality assessments in social policy, especially health policy. The second concerns ethical and social issues raised by prenatal testing for disability. Hitherto, these two literatures have had little contact with each other: few scholars have written about both, or have compared the two domains in a systematic way, while people with disabilities and disability scholars are underrepresented in recent discussion on health policy and quality of assessment. This book turns the perspectives of disability scholars on issues that have largely been the province of health methodology, policy and philosophy, while angling philosophical policy analysis on problems that have largely been the province of disability scholarship. This volume will be sought after by bioethicists, philosophers, and specialists in disability studies and healthcare economics.

Noninvasive, prenatal whole genome sequencing may be a technological reality in the near future, making available a vast array of genetic information early in pregnancy at no risk to the fetus or mother. Many worry that the timing, safety, and ease of the test will lead to informational overload and reproductive consumerism. The prevailing response among commentators has been to restrict conditions eligible for testing based on medical severity, which imposes disputed value judgments and devalues those living with eligible conditions. To avoid these difficulties, we propose an unrestricted testing policy, under which prospective parents could obtain information on any variant of known significance after a careful informed consent process that uses an interactive decision aid to deliver a mandatory presentation on the purposes, techniques, and limitations of genomic testing, as well as optional resources for reflection and consultation. This process would encourage thoughtful, informed deliberation...

Adrienne Asch inspired, challenged, and provoked a generation of bioethicists and philosophers who were discovering the subject of disability. For Adrienne, disability was a complex phenomenon that raised universal issues of embodiment, justice, well‐being, and identity. She insisted that bioethicists and philosophers who invoked disability in discussions about these issues first learn something about it, for which her own work provided critical insights. She argued eloquently that those who relied on unsupported assumptions about disability, even in the most arcane debates, reinforced harmful stereotypes and impoverished their own thinking. At the same time, she urged that the claims of disability scholars concerning discrimination, fairness, and kindred issues be made with philosophical clarity. She was fearless with the smug and insular in both fields, but generous with those, like me, who were merely naive.