Timothy F. Murphy

Bioconservative commentators argue that parents should not take steps to modify the genetics of their children even in the name of enhancement because of the damage they predict for values, identities and relationships. Some commentators have even said that adults should not modify themselves through genetic interventions. One commentator worries that genetic modifications chosen by adults for themselves will undermine moral agency, lead to less valuable experiences and fracture people's sense of self. These worries are not justified, however, since the effects of modification will not undo moral agency as such. Adults can still have valuable experiences, even if some prior choices no longer seem meaningful. Changes at the genetic level will not always, either, alienate people from their own sense of self. On the contrary, genetic modifications can help amplify choice, enrich lives and consolidate identities. Ultimately, there is no moral requirement that people value their contingent genetic endowment to the exclusion of changes important to them in their future genetic identities. Through weighing risks and benefits, adults also have the power to consent to—and assume the risks of—genetic modifications for themselves in a way not possible in prenatal genetic interventions.

It is unclear that United States schools are doing sufficient work to identify and protect the interests of their LGB students this analysis, we rely on certain public-health research in social epidemiology to show that discrimination against LGB adolescents imposes morally significant harms to both adolescents and community. We apply "trust” and “social capital” to educational standards and practices as foundations for educational practices that work toward full equality of LGB students in regard to opportunity and other primary social goods.

There are no technologies at the present time that would allow parents to select the sexual orientation of their children. But what if there were? Some commentators believe that parents should be able to use those techniques so long as they are effective and safe. Others believe that these techniques are unethical because of the dangers they pose to homosexual men and women in general. Both sides point to motives and consequences when trying to analyse the ethics of this question. These arguments are reviewed, and it is concluded that opponents of these technologies have not shown good reason why the law or policy should override parental choice in this matter. In general, therefore, if technologies become available to choose the sexual orientation of children, parents should be allowed to use them, provided they are safe and disrupt no interest of the child. This use will, at the very least, protect homosexual children from parents who do not want them, but it will also allow parents who want homosexual children to make that choice as well

The value of extending the human lifespan remains a key philosophical debate in bioethics. In building a case against the extension of the species-typical human life, Nicolas Agar considers the prospect of transforming human beings near the end of their lives into Galapagos tortoises, which would then live on decades longer. A central question at stake in this transformation is the persistence of human consciousness as a condition of the value of the transformation. Agar entertains the idea that consciousness could persist in some measure, but he thinks little is to be gained from the transformation because the experiences available to tortoises pale in comparison to those available to human beings. Moreover, he thinks persisting human consciousness and values would degrade over time, being remade by tortoise needs and environment. The value available in the transformation would not, then, make the additional years of life desirable. Agar’s account does not, however, dispose of the tortoise transformation as a defensible preference. Some people might still want this kind of transformation for symbolic reasons, but it would probably be better that no human consciousness persist, since that consciousness would be inexpressible as such. Even so, it is not irrational to prefer various kinds of lifespan extension even if they involve significant modifications to human consciousness and values

Some commentators argue that conception constitutes the onset of human personhood in a metaphysical sense. This threshold is usually invoked as the basis both for protecting zygotes and embryos from exposure to risks of death in clinical research and fertility medicine and for objecting to abortion, but it also has consequences for certain religious perspectives, including Catholicism whose doctrines directly engage questions of personhood and its meanings. Since more human zygotes and embryos are lost than survive to birth, conferral of personhood on them would mean – for those believing in personal immortality – that these persons constitute the majority of people living immortally despite having had only the shortest of earthly lives. For those believing in resurrection, zygotes and embryos would also be restored to physical lives. These outcomes do not mean that conception cannot function as a metaphysical threshold of personhood, but this interpretation carries costs that others do not. For example, treating conception as a moral threshold of respect for human life in general, rather than as a metaphysical threshold of personhood, would obviate the prospect of the afterlife being populated in the main by persons who have never lived more than a few hours or days.

Researchers are working to derive sperm from banked testicular tissue taken from pre-pubertal boys who face therapies or injuries that destroy sperm production. Success in deriving sperm from this tissue will help to preserve the option for these boys to have genetically related children later in life. For the twin moral reasons of preserving access and equity in regard to having such children, clinicians and researchers are justified in offering the option to the parents of all affected boys. However, some parents may wish to decline the option to bank tissue from their boys because the technique may seem too unfamiliar or unusual, but over time people may become more comfortable with the technique as they have done with other novel assisted reproductive treatments. Other parents may wish to decline the option because of moral or religious reasons. A prominent natural law theory holds, for example, that the ARTs that would be involved in using sperm derived from banked tissue to produce a child are morally objectionable. Some parents might not want to bank tissue in order to shield their son from using ARTs they see as objectionable. Clinicians and researchers should respect parents who wish to decline banking tissue, but parents should ordinarily embrace choices that protect the possible interests their sons may have as adult men, including the wish to have genetically related children.

Some parents have taken steps to ensure that they have deaf children, a choice that contrasts with the interest that other parents have in enhancing the traits of their children. Julian Savulescu has argued that, morally speaking, parents have a duty to use assisted reproductive technologies to give their children the best opportunity of the best life. This view extends beyond that which is actually required of parents, which is only that they give children reasonable opportunities to form and act on a conception of a life that is good for them. Does the selection of deaf children violate that responsibility? Morally speaking, parents should refrain from using assisted reproductive treatments or prenatal interventions in order to have a child with a disability. Deafness and other disabilities represent intrinsic disadvantages that cannot be offset by other advantages that families and society can offer to people. By the same token, neither should parents seek enhancements of intelligence or physical traits that would undercut intrinsic goods of human life in similar ways. These moral arguments do not, however, sustain the judgment that the law should necessarily interfere with parents' decisions in these matters, even if those choices are morally unwise.

Spontaneous abortion is rarely addressed in moral evaluations of abortion. Indeed, 'abortion' is virtually always taken to mean only induced abortion. After a brief review of medical aspects of spontaneous abortion, I attempt to articulate the moral implications of spontaneous abortion for the two poles of the abortion debate, the strong pro-abortion and the strong anti-abortion positions. I claim that spontaneous abortion has no moral relevance for strict pro-abortion positions but that the high incidence of spontaneous abortion is not (as some claim) eo ipso any sort of justification for voluntarily induced abortion. Secondly, I show that if the strict anti-abortionist position is to be taken seriously in its insistence that prenatal life has a right to be protected by virtue of its being conceived, then it seems necessary to take measures to prevent spontaneous abortion and its presumptive causes, and this as a matter of moral obligation

Abstract: This essay explores recent trends and major issues related to gay and lesbian philosophy in ethics (including issues concerning the morality of homosexuality, the natural function of sex, and outing and coming out); religion (covering past and present debates about the status of homosexuality and how biblical and qur'anic passages have been interpreted by both sides of the debate); the law (especially a discussion of the debates surrounding sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and its impact on transsexuals, and whether the law should be used to enforce morality); scientific research into the origins of homosexuality (including discussion of arguments against such research); and metaphysics (especially the question of whether homosexuality is socially constructed during particular times and in particular cultures, or whether sexual orientation is an essential trait cutting across times and cultures).

Some critics of same-sex marriage allege that this kind of union not only betrays the nature of marriage but that it also opens children to various kinds of harm. Same-sex marriage is objectionable, on this view, in its nature and in its effects. A view of marriage as requiring an unassisted capacity to conceive children may be respect as one idea of marriage, but this view need not be understood as marriage itself. It is not clear, in any case, why government should prefer this one idealized view of marriage over other others, so long as recognition of other kinds of marriage do not stand in the way of government carrying out its core interests, such as the protection of children. The idea that children are necessarily harmed when conceived by and for same-sex couples cannot be sustained as a matter of psychological evidence or moral argument. No research shows that such children are routinely harmed or rarely-but-catastrophically. Comparative accounts of the welfare of children of same-sex couples cannot show either that children must be brought into existence only under ideal circumstances.

Anja Karnein has suggested that because of the importance of respect for persons, law and policy should require some human embryos created in vitro to be available for adoption for a period of time. If no one comes forward to adopt the embryos during that time, they may be destroyed (in the case of embryos left over from fertility medicine) or used in research (in the case of embryos created for that purpose or left over from fertility medicine). This adoption option would increase the number of embryos available for couples looking for help in having children, but that effect is less important—Karnein argues—than the observance of respect for human persons. As possible persons, she holds that embryos ought to be treated, as if they will become children, if only for a while. If enacted as a matter of law and policy, an ‘adoption option’ would wrongly interfere with the dispositional rights women and men ought to have over embryos they create in the course of trying to have children. Karnein's proposal would also deprive researchers of certainty that the embryos they create for research would actually be available that way, leading to increased burdens of time and money and maybe even to more embryos than would otherwise be produced. Karnein's analysis does not show, moreover, that any duty of rescue applies to embryos. No woman is required to adopt any embryo, which significantly undercuts the justification for an obligatory adoption period.

ABSTRACT In this essay the argument set forth by Michael Levin regarding the abnormality of homosexual behaviour is reviewed and criticized. Against his argument which holds that homosexual behaviour is abnormal because it constitutes an evolutionary aberration, I argue that Levin's and all similarly constructed arguments fail to show that evolutionary origins of sexual behaviour have any significant normative force. I contend that his notion of homosexuality is confused and that he fails to consider alternative methods of how homosexuality might have indeed served evolutionary adaptive purposes or been the result of surplus adaptations. I argue, too, that Levin's linking of unhappiness with homosexual behaviour is spurious and ill‐supported. Consequently, I reject Levin's claims that public policy ought to do what it can to minimize the incidence of such behaviour. I argue by contrast that if happiness is the end of public policy decisions, then society ought to take what measures it can to protect persons in respect of their homosexual behaviour and identities.

There are religious and philosophical versions of the thesis that AIDS is a punishment for homosexual behaviour. It is argued here that the religious version is seriously incomplete. Because of this incompleteness and because of the indeterminacies that ordinarily attend religious argumentation, it is concluded that the claim may be set aside as unconvincing. Homosexual behaviour is then judged for its morality against utilitarian, deontological, and natural law theories of ethics. It is argued that such behaviour involves no impediment to important moral goals and is not therefore immoral. Where natural law might be used to condemn homosexual behaviour, it is argued that the theory itself is not well established. Consequently there is a prima facie reason for rejecting the philosophical version of the punishment thesis. This conclusion is further supported by noting the lack of proportion between the purported immorality of homosexuality and a punishment as devastating as AIDS

Reports about possible genetic bases of homoerotic sexual orientation in adults have received a kind of schizophrenic social reception. On the one hand, these reports have been welcomed by some gay men and lesbians as biological confirmation of the commonly held view that sexual orientation is an involuntary trait, that sexual orientation is not in any meaningful sense chosen. Simon LeVay has received mail from thankful correspondents who welcomed his 1991 report about the possible neuroanatomical basis for male homoerotic sexual orientation, and some legal analysts see important implications of biological studies for the ways in which civil rights are recognized, especially those that depend on an immutable characteristic like race or gender

Some commentators object to the use of embryonic and fetal diagnostic technologies by parents who wish to avoid disabilities in their children. In particular, they say this use is hurtful in the meaning it expresses, namely that the lives of people with disabilities are not valuable or are less valuable than the lives of others. Other commentators have tried to show that this meaning does not necessarily belong to parents' choices and is not therefore credible as a general moral objection. However, this analysis overlooks the way in which the use of these technologies can be legitimately interpreted as hurtful. Once we admit to these hurtful effects felt by people with disabilities and those who hold them dear, it becomes important to ask whether that hurt can justify limits on parents' choices. Because the use of these technologies does not hurt people with disabilities directly and because there is no requirement that people having children work to ensure the continued existence of people with disabilities, no justification for limiting parents' choices is to be found in the hurt some people experience in steps taken to avoid disabilities in children.

D. Micah Hester thinks the residency match system helps sustain the divide between the haves and the have-nots in healthcare. He believes that the match system channels talent away from the have-nots in a more or less systematic way, damaging moral values in physicians as it goes. As a way of making inroads against these effects, he has asked whether assigning medical school graduates to residencies at random would distribute talent and educational opportunity more broadly and promote desirable moral values. I pointed out what I think are serious limitations of this proposal, and Hester has extended me the courtesy of a reply. Yet with that reply, I find that he has made it even more difficult to defend a lottery approach to residency assignment

Some commentators argue that conception signals the onset of human personhood and that moral responsibilities toward zygotic or embryonic persons begin at this point, not the least of which is to protect them from exposure to death. Critics of the conception threshold of personhood ask how it can be morally consistent to object to the embryo loss that occurs in fertility medicine and research but not object to the significant embryo loss that occurs through conception in vivo. Using that apparent inconsistency as a starting point, they argue that if that embryo loss is tolerable as a way of conceiving children, it should be tolerable in fertility medicine and human embryonic research. Double-effect reasoning shows, by contrast, that conception in vivo is justified even if it involves the death of persons because the motives for wanting children are not inherently objectionable, because the embryo loss that occurs in unassisted conception is not the means by which successful conception occurs, and because the effect of having children is proportionate to the loss involved. A similar outcome holds true for in vitro fertilisation in fertility medicine but not for in vitro fertilisation for research involving human embryos

Developments in uterus transplant put assisted gestation within meaningful range of clinical success for women with uterine infertility who want to gestate children. Should this kind of transplantation prove routine and effective for those women, would there be any morally significant reason why men or transgender women should not be eligible for the same opportunity for gestation? Getting to the point of safe and effective uterus transplantation for those parties would require a focused line of research, over and above the study of uterus transplantation for non-transgender women. Some commentators object to the idea that the state has any duty to sponsor research of this kind. They would limit all publicly-funded fertility research to sex-typical ways of having children, which they construe as the basis of reproductive rights. This objection has no force against privately-funded research, of course, and in any case not all social expenditures are responses to ‘rights’ properly speaking. Another possible objection raised against gestation by transgender women is that it could alter the social meaning of sexed bodies. This line of argument fails, however, to substantiate a meaningful objection to gestation by transgender women because social meanings of sexed bodies do not remain constant and because the change in this case would not elicit social effects significant enough to justify closing off gestation to transgender women as a class

The motives and consequences of harvesting sperm from brain dead males for the purpose of effecting post mortem fatherhood are examined. I argue that sperm harvesting and post mortem fatherhood raise no harms of a magnitude that would justify forbidding the practice outright. Dead men are not obviously harmed by the practice; children need not be harmed by this kind of birth; and the practice enlarges rather than diminishes the reproductive choices of surviving partners. Certain ethical and legal issues nevertheless require attention. As a matter of consistency with other harvesting protocols, there ought to be a mechanism for respecting the wishes of men who when alive do not wish to become fathers post mortem. Mechanisms governing entitlement to harvest and use sperm will also be required. I note that the law is unlikely to recognize the paternity of children born from harvested sperm, though there may be reasons to recognize that paternity in some instances

In some areas of clinical medicine, discussions about fertility preservation are routine, such as in the treatment of children and adolescents facing cancer treatments that will destroy their ability to produce gametes of their own. Certain professional organizations now offer guidelines for people who wish to modify their bodies and appearance in regard to sex traits, and these guidelines extend to recommendations about fertility preservation. Since the removal of testicles or ovaries will destroy the ability to have genetically related children later on, it is imperative to counsel transgender people seeking body modifications about fertility preservation options. Fertility preservation with transgender people will, however, lead to unconventional outcomes. If transgender men and women use their ova and sperm, respectively, to have children, they will function as a mother or father in a gametic sense but will function in socially reversed parental identities. There is nothing, however, about fertility preservation with transgender men and women that is objectionable in its motives, practices, or outcomes that would justify closing off these options. In any case, novel reproductive technologies may extend this kind of role reversal in principle to all people, if sperm and ova can be derived from all human beings regardless of sex, as has happened with certain laboratory animals.

Some commentators speak freely about genetics being poised to change human nature. Contrary to such rhetoric, Norman Daniels believes no such thing is plausible since ‘nature’ describes characteristic traits of human beings as a whole. Genetic interventions that do their work one individual at a time are unlikely to change the traits of human beings as a class. Even so, one can speculate about ways in which human beings as a whole could be genetically altered, and there is nothing about that venture that could not be deliberated in the way other high-impact questions can be evaluated. There might well come a time when it would be defensible to use genetics to change human beings as a class, in order to protect people in the face of changed environmental circumstances or to enhance existing capacities. Moreover, if one understands human nature not in an empirically descriptive way but in a metaphysical way having implications about human behavior, it can make sense to talk about de-naturing individuals through genetic changes. Even under a metaphysical conception of human nature, however, one can still imagine that people in the future might want to alter their traits in pursuit of another normative idea of a good and valuable life, and genetic modifications might function as a pathway to that change

Carson Strong has argued that if human cloning were safe it should be available to some infertile couples as a matter of ethics and law. He holds that cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer should be available as a reproductive option for infertile couples who could not otherwise have a child genetically related to one member of the couple. In this analysis, Strong overlooks an important category of people to whom his argument might apply, couples he has not failed to consider elsewhere. In this discussion, however, Strong refers exclusively to opposite sex couples facing obstacles such as surgically removed ovaries and the inability to produce sperm. In fact, however, there are many adult couples who, while fertile in and of themselves, are not fertile as couples. This group includes not only opposite sex couples but coupled same sex partners as well. I believe the defenses Strong offers regarding the use of SCNT by opposite sex infertile couples would extend to same sex couples for two reasons. First, some same sex couples might face the inability to have a genetically related child, and second, Strong's arguments ultimately ground a general defense of SCNT independent of the question of a couple's fertility

Arthur Caplan has argued that the presumptive naturalness, universality, and inevitability of aging are no obstacles to conceptualizing aging as a disease since those traits are themselves merely contingent. Moreover, aging lends itself to discussion in terms of diagnostic symptomatology and etiology. Is aging therefore a disease? I argue that aging need not be shown to be unnatural or a disease in order to make it the subject of biomedical interest. I suggest that rather than ask "Is aging a disease?", the better point of philosophical departure would be to ask "Is aging objectionable such that its prevention and cure ought to be sought?". In this way, the moral issues at stake emerge more clearly. Chief among these issues are the potential results of curing aging and the implications for the prospect of meaningful human life without the de facto limitations that aging (and perhaps death) put upon it. A convincing argument that aging should be cured, therefore, would need to show that human significance warrants and possibly seeks such a cure and that the social costs of curing aging are morally acceptable. Keywords: aging, disease, cure, immortality CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

The nationally-famous advocate of physician-assisted suicide did not die by his own hand. Dr. Jack Kevorkian died the old-fashioned way in America: in a hospital, with multiple disorders undercutting his life. Kevorkian took up interest in assisted suicide early in his medical career, and he wanted prisoners on death row to volunteer for experiments just before their execution. Kevorkian saw individual consent as the wheel, axle, and grease for all decisions in these matters. He helped many people die, but it is unclear what moral principle guided his decisions to say yes and no to requests for help in dying. His spree in helping people die came to an end, when he himself injected a man with a lethal substance. Because of his single-minded focus on the value of assisted suicide and experimentation before execution, he had little impact on the broader ethical analysis of assisted-suicide and the rights of prisoners. He leaves little legacy in ethics for the analysis of assisted-suicide or in vivo experimentation.

Some commentators have criticized bioethics as failing to engage religion both as a matter of theory and practice. Bioethics should work toward understanding the influence of religion as it represents people's beliefs and practices, but bioethics should nevertheless observe limits in regard to religion as it does its normative work. Irreligious skepticism toward religious views about health, healthcare practices and institutions, and responses to biomedical innovations can yield important benefits to the field. Irreligious skepticism makes it possible to raise questions that otherwise go unasked and to protect against the overreach of religion. In this sense, bioethics needs a vigorous irreligious outlook every bit as much as it needs descriptive understandings of religion