The phrase “designer children” is almost always used pejoratively. But if the design is an improvement on the random combination of genes or if it is more reliable, could it be ethical not to be a designer? Even if we are right to disapprove of the motives of many parents who seek to influence how children will turn out, it is far from clear that we are entitled to formalize our disapproval in prohibitive legislation or regulation. We examined some of these problems in chapter 5. Here we will take a different focus and look in some detail at an element of design—gender—which is in no sense an enhancement. Looking in detail at the ethics of influencing the nature of future people when there is no question that the altered nature will constitute an improvement will tell us much about the ethics of determining what sorts of people there will be and indeed of intervening in evolution.
We need to consider both clear cases of interventions that are not enhancing at all and marginal cases where the question of whether or not the intervention improved things is not susceptible of a clear answer. One reason for doing so is that if such neutral or problematic interventions are both ethical and defensible then, a fortiori, those which bring palpable benefits will be too. We will start with marginal cases and move on to a clear case of desired interventions which do not confer anything by way of enhancement or evolutionary advantage.
There will always be cases that some people consider enhancements and others would not. In Victorian times the virtues of patriotism and piety were much in vogue.1 Today they seem less attractive to many. What if someone today wanted to endow their children with enhanced patriotism and piety? It is doubtful if we would consider (even if we believed in “the two P’s”) that people would be much harmed by having only the normal quota of these feelings so it is doubtful if anyone would regard such modifications as a matter of obligation along lines developed in previous chapters. However, should people be permitted to make such modifications if they proved possible?
Perhaps it is fortunate that modifications to such nebulous emotions (or are they dispositions?) as patriotism or piety are very unlikely to be possible, not least because such feelings are also likely to be correlated with other emotions which even those who value “the two P’s” may feel uncomfortable about. But suppose such modifications were possible. Or suppose that there was indeed a gene for homosexuality and some parents felt that protection from, or indeed guarantee of, a disposition to homosexuality would be a distinct enhancement. There are characteristics which are what I would call “morally neutral”; gender seems a clear case since it is not morally speaking “better” to be female rather than male or vice versa. However, gender is perhaps an identity-determining feature rather than a phenotypical difference which a particular person might or might not have (say, eye color or hair color). The issue of identity-determining features is important because if the feature in question determines identity, then it is not something inflicted on or denied to a particular person. Rather, we are talking about the ethics of creating one person rather than another. In this latter case it seems that so long as the feature is neutral (neither better not worse to be) then if it is not wrong to be such a person, not harmful, undignified, disadvantaged in any serious way, then it cannot be bad or wrong to create a person with those features. The issue is rather different if we are imposing a particular condition on an individual who would otherwise exist without that feature.
Let us now turn to a clearly neutral exercise of the power to determine how (and perhaps who) future people will be.
Is it morally wrong to wish and hope for a fine baby girl or boy? Is it wrong to wish and hope that one’s child will not be born disabled? I assume that my feeling that such hopes and wishes are not wrong is shared by every sane decent person. Now consider whether it would be wrong to wish and hope for the reverse? What would we think of someone who hoped and wished that their child would be born with disability, impairment, or even some disadvantage that fell short of whatever high standards are required before we classify a condition as a disability or impairment? What would we think of someone who wishes even a mild illness or injury for their child? Again I need not spell out the answer to these questions.
But now let’s bridge the gap between thought and action, between hopes and wishes and their fulfillment. What would we think of someone who, hoping and wishing for a fine healthy child, declined to take the steps necessary to secure this outcome when such steps were open to them? Again I assume that unless those steps could be shown to be morally unacceptable our conclusions would be the same.
We have examined these questions extensively so far and have found that the answer to them is an emphatic “yes,” we should make such improvements or enhancements if we can. However, many people think that elements of “design” which are not obviously health related or clearly beneficial are not only not morally required but morally bankrupt in a way that not only licenses disapprobation but licenses legal measures to ensure that we protect our children and our society from them.
Let us then re-pose our question: If it’s not wrong to wish for a bonny, bouncing, brown-eyed baby girl, why or how would it become wrong if we had the technology, the choice, to play fairy godmother to ourselves and grant our own wishes?2
We should remember that the traditional way of producing children, namely by selecting a marriage or, less formally, a procreational partner, is very often governed by prejudices or preferences, not only for a particular sort of partner, but for the particular sort of child that mating with that partner will produce.
If we examine a very basic element of design, namely gender, as our exemplar of an attempt to produce children to a particular “design,” we can become much clearer about the ethics of all such interventions. Gender selection has been one of the most controversial areas of possible parental choice. An investigation of the ethics of gender selection will, however, have consequences for other morally neutral traits like hair and eye color, physique, and so on. I say “morally neutral” because I assume no reasonable person thinks it could be morally better to have one color of hair rather than another, nor for that matter to be one gender rather than another. Although this is often taken to be a difficult question and indeed the idea of parents being able to choose such things very often causes outrage, it seems to me to come to this: either such traits as hair color, eye color, gender, and the like are important or they are not. If they are not important why not let people choose? And if they are important, can it be right to leave such important matters to chance?3
Of course the manner of choosing may be morally important. We might feel that abortion was not a reasonable way of determining such things; but if, for example, a liter of orange juice taken at a particular point in pregnancy could achieve the desired outcome, I doubt if any attempt to regulate its use would succeed or would even be contemplated.
Objections to the idea of gender selection and the like often turn on two forms of “slippery slope” argument. Either it is claimed that a pattern of gender preference will emerge which will constitute a sort of “slap in the face” to the gender discriminated against, an insult and humiliation, like a piece of racist graffiti perhaps, or it is suggested that the pattern of preference will be such as to create severe imbalance in the population of society with harmful social consequences. Plainly these are very different sorts of outcome.
We should note that a pattern of preference for one gender amongst those opting for gender selection would not necessarily be evidence of sexist discrimination. There might be all sorts of respectable, non-prejudicial reasons for preferring one gender to another including just having a preference for sons or daughters. A preference for producing a child of a particular gender no more necessarily implies discrimination against members of the alternate gender than does choosing to marry a co-religionist, a compatriot, or someone of the same race or even class implies discrimination against other religions, nations, races, or classes. Of course, if a pattern of preference in favor of one gender were to emerge, it might have either or both of the effects we have noted and would certainly be cause for concern. However, it seems to be verging on hysteria simply to assume either that it would inevitably have these effects or that the effects would be so damaging as to warrant legislation to prevent the remotest risk of their occurring.
Some might claim that such choices might be insulting in the way perhaps that graffiti of a swastika4 drawn by a Buddhist as a representation of a traditional Buddhist symbol might nevertheless be offensive to Holocaust victims, thus creating a defeasible reason not to do it. Of course we always have reasons not to offend others but both the graffiti example and gender selection illustrate clearly the power of good reasons for doing things that might offend others (in these cases freedom of speech and religion and reproductive autonomy) trump the sensibilities of those susceptible to offense.
It is not ethically speaking better to be a boy rather than to be a girl. To say that a human trait or feature is morally neutral is to say that there is no moral reason to prefer to have that trait nor to be without it, no moral reason to try to create that trait or feature, nor any reason to try to eliminate it, no moral reason to hope for it or fear it. In short, gender is not normally the occasion for rational regret. Of course some few individuals who believe that they have been born with the wrong physical manifestations of gender do regret having these and often request gender reassignment surgery. I note this phenomenon, but to investigate it further is beyond our present concerns.5
Absent moral reasons for preference, there is a presumption in favor of free choice. This is of course a rebuttable presumption, but the reasons for so doing must be powerful. I will return to this point in a moment.
The question then about determining sexual orientation or indeed degrees of patriotism or piety, in the unlikely event that determining such things should ever become possible, becomes one of the reasonableness of deliberately creating a person who will have, but might not have had, these characteristics. This may have to be judged on a case-by-case basis but perhaps the issue of gender selection just discussed is some guide.
If we ask what level of risk a society like the United Kingdom, for example, should be prepared to run in order to avoid the unnecessary imposition of legal restraint on choice and to see whether a pattern of preference emerges and if so whether or not it is a pattern of discriminatory preferences, the answer is not clear.
My own proposal would be that a society like the United Kingdom, say, of about fifty-eight million people, could afford to license, say, one million procedures for gender selection over a ten-year period with options to revise the policy if severe imbalance seemed likely and was likely to prove significantly damaging to individuals or society. The United States could of course afford to license maybe six times as many procedures. With a licensing scheme we could then see what patterns of selection and motivation emerged. Even if all choices went one way, the imbalance created would be relatively small before detection, and a halt could be called if this seemed justifiable. I doubt that the places allocated on such a program would not be taken up (it would of course be self-financing and would not be part of the public health care system). It must be remembered that those who opted for gender selection would (with current technology) have to be very circumspect about their procreation and use sperm selection or preimplantation testing as the method. This would not, I guess, be wildly attractive or indeed particularly reliable. For the foreseeable future the take-up will also by limited by the availability of clinics offering the service. In any event, the way forward for a tolerant society respectful of autonomy would surely be not to rush to prohibitive legislation, but rather to license the activity with regular monitoring and see whether anything so terrible that it required prohibitive legislation emerged.
Suppose that an unprecedented perturbation of the spheres, or other natural event, had caused a one-off increase in births of one gender, say by 1%? Would the prospect of more boys or girls (even a million or so) than would otherwise have been expected throw U.K. society into a spin? Would six million more Americans of a particular gender cause panic? Would anyone lose any sleep over it? Suppose we had to wake up to the fact that there already was a gender imbalance in our different societies in favor of girls? Suppose (perish the thought) that in the United Kingdom there were already about 1,250,000 more women than men! In such a terrible eventuality perhaps we should hope that gender selection would predominantly favor males, and that some inroads into this adverse balance might thereby be made. Of course this is in fact the situation we currently face in the United Kingdom with just that (favorable?) gender balance in favor of females.7
A report by the United Kingdom Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)8 recommended outlawing gender selection9 and it is instructive as well as interesting to examine their reasoning, which is typical of much international opposition to gender selection.
The HFEA had conducted a consultation exercise prior to publishing its report, canvassing opinion about the legitimacy of gender selection, and the results of this wide public consultation were clearly influential.
A famous essay on Jane Austen by D. W. Harding10 argues that “gentle Jane’s” novels of English country life are far from gentle and are best understood as subtly expressing Austen’s hatred for the small-minded and petty bourgeois world, full of the prejudices and conceits she describes: a hatred regulated by her ironic and deft prose. The HFEA report embodies a sort of mirror image of Harding’s insight. In the report, the opinions which emerge from the consultation exercise, which, unsupported by evidence or valid arguments, are impossible to distinguish from prejudices, are given formal approval and proposed regulation by a government-appointed body set up with the responsibility to provide expert leadership. The leadership in fact exemplified in this report owes much to the legendary Duke of Plaza Toro, so faithfully and tellingly recounted by W. S. Gilbert.11
In her introduction to the HFEA’s report, Suzi Leather, then Chair of the HFEA, remarked:
I consider that our conclusions and the advice contained in this report represent an informed, balanced and proportionate response to the very complex issues raised by sex selection and I hope it will stand as a principal point of reference for all those—Government, professionals and the interested public—who will be involved in taking the debate forward.
While undoubtedly informed, it is informed largely by the results of a public consultation, the “hostility” of which to gender selection is manifest and even explicitly acknowledged in those terms by the HFEA, and this apparent hostility is accepted at face value. But more importantly the HFEA’s report is inconsistent and, in the rare cases in which arguments appear, the arguments do not adequately support the conclusions drawn. The form of the document is also revealing. The bulk of it, i.e., chapters 1–4 (of six chapters), concerns background, and gives an overview of the reportage of commissioned research and public attitudes. Virtually the whole of the burden of establishing the report’s conclusions is permitted to, and clearly does, emerge from the public consultation. Whether or not the public consultation was informative of the debate, it was in effect determinative of the conclusions that the HFEA reached. After these first four chapters, the report moves swiftly to its conclusions without any demonstration of balancing or considering the relevant arguments. These are manifest defects but they are not untypical of many national and international documents on gender selection and other elements of design. The reason (or excuse) for considering this report and its defects in some (albeit brief) detail is their representative nature.
The HFEA came out strongly against all but strictly therapeutic uses of gender selection; and by “therapeutic” is meant uses which prevent the passing on of sex-linked disorders. Let us start with the inconsistency involved in this exception. A first thing to note is that the HFEA were cautious. They ruled out one method of gender selection, namely flow cytometry, because “[i]t is not possible to discount a theoretical risk to health with the use of this technique.” Of course one can never discount risks if this absurdly high standard of caution is employed. Such a standard would rule out the benefits of almost all medical procedures, because there is always a theoretical risk, if not an actual risk, however slight. It may be that this method of gender selection should not be used on safety grounds, but not because there is “a theoretical risk to health,” but surely because there is a real and significant risk. The same of course goes for many objections to new technologies, including the enhancement technologies considered in this book.
The HFEA then go on to consider so-called “gradient methods” of sex selection and note that “there is no reason to suspect that gradient methods pose a significant risk to the health of offspring.” We should note in passing, of course, that even this certificate of risk-free health given by the HFEA would fail their previously employed rigorous test, namely that “it is not possible to discount a theoretical risk to health.” Since it is never possible to discount such a risk, if this is an objection it applies to gradient methods as powerfully as it does to flow cytometry However, let that pass. What is clear is that the HFEA regard even minimal risks to the health of resulting children which may flow from risks inherent in the methods of sex selection (rather than any social or psychological outcomes) as decisive in rejecting gender selection except where it would be used to rule out the inheritance of sex-linked disorders. The same would, presumably, be true of any risks connected with enhancement.
Now this is a startling conclusion, since in paragraph 129 the HFEA state that “[t]he risk of passing on a serious sex-linked genetic condition is a good and, other things being equal, sufficient reason for prospective parents to be offered the options of sex selection.” Note that the risks inherent in the procedures of sex selection will still be present where the purpose is to eliminate sex-linked disorders, and so the HFEA’s argument seems to be that it is reasonable for parents to expose their future children to risks to their health because the alternative for these parents is to expose different children12 to greater risks. The HFEA avoid consideration of a third alternative in this context, which is that parents do not need to expose children to significant risks at all. They can use embryo selection or abstain from reproduction. However, since the avoidance of greater risks to different children is not something that can benefit the particular children that will be born as a result of the gender selection, it surely cannot justify exposing these children to risk if the risks are unacceptably high. To talk of greater risks to different children is slightly problematic. If no gender selection is used, either boys or girls may result. Gender selection to eliminate sex-linked disorders usually tries to eliminate males, since they are more likely to be affected. The interesting question is: who benefits? The class of children saved from “risk” by sex selection are at risk of being born with a serious disease. But in some cases such an existence may still be preferable to nonexistence. So they may be saved from the risk of disease at a greater (almost 100%) risk of nonexistence. In such a case it might be argued that only the parents and society benefit from this risk-avoidance strategy and that the welfare of the child to be born has no place in the calculation.
Compare using one child as a bone marrow (or even kidney) donor for a sibling. This would equally be a case in which a child would be required to run risks rather than expose a different child to greater dangers, but I doubt that would be thought obviously consistent with arguments requiring the welfare of the child concerned to be taken into account.13 I assume that the welfare of “the child who may be born” refers to the welfare of the particular child calculated to be the product of the combination of choices and technology used. The only possible alternative understanding of the meaning of the phrase “welfare of the child to be born” sees it as requiring a eugenic program for reproduction aimed at producing the best of all possible children in the circumstances. This would be an altogether different project, and one, I would suggest, that is even further from the project of the framers of the HFE Act 1990 (the act of the U.K. parliament which set up the HFEA) or those who voted for it.
The only way to sustain the idea that seems to be in the heads of the HFEA is to argue that, although the child is exposed to greater risk, such risks are in the interests of the child exposed to them because it is that child’s only chance of existence.
It is as if the future children had been offered a bargain: “Here’s the deal, you have a chance of coming into existence but only if you accept greater than normal risks—take it or leave it!” A rational embryo or would-be embryo would take the deal, because the alternative is nonexistence. This is the only appeal which makes sense in terms of the interests of “the children who will be born,” but I doubt if the HFEA would wish to endorse it because then they would have to do so in the simple gender-selection case.14
We should note that this way of thinking of things does not involve the attribution of interests to nonexistent beings (although I see nothing in principle wrong with such an attribution). We may translate the hypothetical deal I have described as if it were put post facto to existing children. We say to them: “OK you exist, but at greater risk than would have been required for other kids to exist. Was it worth it? Was it a good deal?” I imagine they would answer “yes” unless life for them was not worth living.
Now of course there is a sense in which the HFEA are quite right. They want to say that for parents at risk of producing a child with a sex-linked disorder there is an important therapeutic advantage in sex selection. Given that they are going to procreate, it enables parents to have a child with less risk of malformation or disease than available alternatives. For this choice to be ethical we have to judge the risk involved in the gender selection procedure so small as to justify it in terms of dangers to the resulting child, unless we appeal to the argument that asks what a rational embryo would choose—the so-called “nonidentity” argument. This argument, invented by Derek Parfit, shows that reproductive choices which select the child to be born cannot harm that child or do other than promote its welfare unless they create a child with a life not worth living.15 Remember, in the case of a genetic link with sex-linked disorder the parents get a child without having to risk having a child with a sex-linked disorder, which by hypothesis they do not want. But that is the same in the simple gender-preference case. In that case too, gender selection gives the parents a chance to have a child which is free of a condition (being male or female) that the parents do not want. Of course the parents in one case have a more pressing or serious justification according to some. But this too is a matter of judgment of a considerably problematic nature, for in neither case do the parents have to procreate; they can abstain. The alleged case of “necessity” is predicated upon the procreative imperative. But more argument is needed to show that that imperative involves mere procreation as opposed to chosen procreation. Which brings us to the HFEA’s other arguments concerning choice and to reproductive liberty and the democratic presumption.
In his response to my critique of the HFEA’s report, Tom Baldwin, Deputy Chair of the HFEA, argues that there is another deeper dimension to “welfare of the child” considerations.16 Baldwin draws on the work of Jürgen Habermas.17 Baldwin tells us that
Habermas argues that an essential ingredient of our conception of ourselves is that we should be able to regard our embodied character (Leibsein) as a natural phenomenon, and not something which has been, in some respect, deliberately imposed upon us by others, even by our parents. Of course, we must also recognize that in many ways we have been predisposed by the genes we have inherited from our parents; these predispositions are, however, our bodily inheritance and there is no way in which a human being can be created without some such genetic inheritance. But where a fundamental characteristic such as one’s sex has been deliberately selected for, things are different.… There is an inescapable alien intrusion into its subjective sense of itself.
Baldwin offers no reason other than the authority of Habermas as to why “an essential ingredient of our conception of ourselves is that we should be able to regard our embodied character (Leibsein) as a natural phenomenon.” But again we should be cautious about accepting any of this at face value. Before Darwin, it might, not implausibly, have been asserted that an essential ingredient of our conception of ourselves was that we were created as human beings. Now we know we have evolved, like chimpanzees, in a seamless transition from our common ape ancestor, but most of us seem to have adapted well to this dramatic change in Leibsein. The evidence is that human beings are fairly robust and well able to adapt to new conceptions of themselves and their place in the universe. The observations of Galileo and Copernicus were equally, perhaps more, momentous for our conceptions of ourselves and our place in the universe and in the scale of things, but again we seem to have come through. The absorption of Galileo and Copernicus no less than Darwin into our conceptions of ourselves and our place in the world throws doubt upon any conception of a given set of essential ingredients of our conceptions of ourselves.
Although Baldwin accepts the nonidentity of the children that result from different choices, he nonetheless insists in employing it in a way in which it is difficult to make sense of. For example, it “was her parents’ choice that their child should be a daughter and in that sense her femininity is indeed imposed on her” seems to imply that their child might not have had her femininity imposed on her, that she might have been, and might have preferred to be, a boy. How might she have escaped this fate and avoided this imposition of femininity?
In paragraph 132 of the report, the HFEA set out, and commit themselves to, what we have called the democratic or the liberal democratic presumption, a device which, as readers of this book will be well aware, is one of which I heartily approve. They express the presumption thus:
The main argument against prohibiting sex selection for non-medical reasons is that it concerns that most intimate aspect of family life, the decision to have children. This is an area of private life in which people are generally best left to make their own choices and in which the State should intervene only to prevent the occurrence of serious harms, and only where this intervention is non-intrusive and likely to be effective.
This is a firm and consistent statement of one of the presumptions of liberal democracies, that the freedom of citizens should not be interfered with unless good and sufficient justifications can be produced for so doing. The presumption is that citizens should be free to make their own choices in the light of their own values, whether or not these choices and values are acceptable to the majority. In this report, however, the HFEA simply surrender to the hostility to gender selection of a majority (not of citizens, but of respondents to a consultation which, although it describes itself as “wide,” necessarily samples a tiny fraction of the population) and give, in the end, no weight to this important liberal principle and presumption underlying all democratic societies.
In the paragraphs following paragraph 132, the HFEA rehearse many of the considerations that were adduced in the public consultation and it is not clear always whether they are endorsing these or merely repeating them. The HFEA rightly dismiss considerations that gender selection may produce a gender imbalance and rely in effect on the following few, and I believe totally inadequate, considerations.
The first is set out in paragraph 139, where they say, “In our view the most persuasive arguments for restricting access to sex selection technologies, beside the potential health risks involved, are related to the welfare of the children and families concerned.” The HFEA then gloss this concern for children by noting that, “Children selected for their sex alone may be in some way psychologically damaged by the knowledge that they had been selected in this way as embryos.” This is a very tendentious and unwarranted way of putting the point. They produce no evidence, nor indeed could they produce any evidence, that children would be selected for their sex alone. This is the point which derives from Kantian ethics, that individuals must be treated as ends in themselves and not as mere means. However, it is very difficult to find evidence or even persuasive anecdotes that if people are treated as means they are treated as mere means or exclusively as means. It is very unlikely that children selected for gender would be selected solely for their gender. Indeed it is difficult to understand what that might mean. Also the idea that even if this were the case, they would be so unloved and treated so unacceptably badly that it would cause psychological damage is a piece of reckless speculation for which no evidence is produced and indeed no evidence could be produced. Moreover, the HFEA give no proof or even any reason to suspect that psychological damage would occur. Note, for example, that the process need not be offensive to the child in treating her even as a mere means. Parents will always also care for the child and will want her to feel good about herself; that is (presumably) why they have taken such care over selecting the right gender.
We have already noted the value of experiments in procreation and their connection with freedom of the individual. It is not inconceivable that it will turn out that it is in fact good for children to feel they have been specially selected. Here there is a good case of evidence-based regulation. Allowing freedom for parents and conducting careful follow-up research will show whether or not children are benefited or harmed by such knowledge and the degree of harm or benefit involved. If it turns out to be bad more often than good, parents will presumably stop doing it, and if they don’t, then is the time to consider legislation.19
The HFEA then repeat (or is it “endorse”?) two other considerations, namely “[t]hat such children would be treated prejudicially by their parents and that parents would try to mould them to fulfil their (the parents’) expectations. Others saw a potential for existing children in the family to be neglected by their parents at the expense of sex selected children.” Well, these so-called dangers may be theoretically possible, but they are hardly realistic. Suffice it to say that for these highly speculative and fanciful dangers (for which no evidence is produced and indeed for which so far as I am aware no evidence exists) to count against the powerful formulation of the democratic imperative would be effectively to deny that imperative any weight or role at all; and indeed this is precisely what the HFEA have done, because in paragraph 147, which is the final statement of the HFEA’s justifications for rejecting gender selection and indeed for proposing legislation against it, they say the following:
In reaching a decision we have been particularly influenced by the considerations set out above relating to the possible effects of sex selection for non-medical reasons on the welfare of children born as a result, and by the quantity of strength of views from the representative sample polled by MORI and the force of opinions expressed by response to our consultation these show that there is very wide-spread hostility to the use of sex selection for non-medical reasons. By itself this finding is not decisive; the fact that a proposed policy is widely held to be unacceptable does not show that it is wrong. But there would need to be substantial demonstrable benefits of such a policy if the State were to challenge the public consensus on this issue [my italics].
Thus, the powerful statement of the democratic presumption in paragraph 132 that “the State should intervene only to prevent the occurrence of serious harms” has been converted into the requirement that “there would need to be substantial demonstrable benefits.” Here not only has the democratic presumption been turned on its head, but the burden of proof has entirely shifted from the requirement that the State show that its interference is necessary to prevent the occurrence of serious harms to the rather feeble requirement that those who wish to exercise liberty must qualify for this freedom by showing that its exercise provides substantial demonstrable benefits. If this is to be the case, liberty is meaningless and the presumption of liberal democracies is overthrown.
Sex selection is, as I have suggested, a good example of the attempt to “design” children where the elements of design are what I have called “morally neutral.” Note a number of salient features.
• Gender is genetically determined (so gender selection involves genetic determination).
• Gender is harmless: being a boy or a girl is not bad for you. It is therefore a neutral or personal choice.
• Selection does not, as we have seen, involve shaping the individual in any way, nor can it conceivably make the individual worse off than either (a) she was or (b) she might have been.
• However, it is an example of “design” because it involves choosing between different possibilities or “plans.” (Just as when I choose a designer shirt or dress I am indulging my taste in some directions at least, so it is with gender choice.)
The first point needs no further explanation. Let me say something about the claim that gender is harmless. By this I mean simply that it is not harmful to the individual to be a man or a woman. Men and women have existed since humans have and although there have been severe power imbalances between the two genders for most of human history, the damage that this has caused is contingent, not a necessary part of maleness or femaleness. If gender is rightly called a “morally neutral trait,” then it cannot be morally wrong to be a man or a woman and so it cannot be morally wrong to create a man or a woman. The only remaining question is whether it can be morally wrong to create a man rather than a woman or vice versa.20
The third element is very important. There is no complaint the “victim” of gender selection can make because for her there was no alternative but never to have existed. “She” could not have been a boy. This is because the boy that might have been selected or created instead of her would not have been “her” only with a different gender. It would not have been a case of sex reallocation. It would simply have involved the creation of an entirely different person.
Although this is hardly ever noticed, the same is true for any significant genetic manipulation that might be made to an embryo or indeed to the gametes prior to conception, if this ever becomes possible. So complaints that parents who would use gender selection are attempting to shape or mold their child are simply incoherent. They may of course be choosing what sorts of children will come into existence, but none of those children have any legitimate or even coherent complaint, for they could not have had an alternative life free of such externally imposed choices.
If the creation or imposition of neutral traits like gender are permissible, then enhancements are surely much less problematic.