Last year, Julian Savulescu of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics here at Oxford debated Robert Sparrow of Monash University on the issue of using techniques like embryo selection to ensure one’s children have the best life possible. Savulescu has notably defended not only the permissibility but the obligation to select for the best children, while Sparrow has been more critical of enhancement via embryo selection. The transcript of their debate is now available, and their exchange helps clarify a key source of disagreement between proponents and critics of embryo selection – whether parents should be maximizing their children’s well-being, or simply giving them a good enough life. At its core, the debate is less about the intricacies of new technologies like preimplantation genetic diagnostics (PGD) and more about the ethics of parenting. I’ll summarize some of the key points of the debate below, but I encourage readers to have a look at the transcript to get a sense for how the dialectic plays out as well as how each interlocutor deals with a wide array of objections.

In a nutshell, Savulescu believes the (pro tanto) obligation to enhance one’s children using biomedical means such as embryo selection is a natural extension of general parental obligations to give one’s kids the best life that one can. There is strong evidence to suggest that genes can influence a variety of traits such as intelligence, self-control and altruism; those in turn can have profound impact on a person’s opportunities and happiness. And just as parents should improve those traits by making sure their kids get the best (affordable) education possible, parents should make sure their kids have the best genes possible. The duty is pro tanto, which means other factors (including financial cost) can outweigh the duty, but it at least suggests those parents with the means should be using embryo selection that has proven effects on well-being.

Sparrow, however, believes this maximizing impulse is wrong-headed and, instead, parents should focus on satisficing – giving their children a good enough life, something close to species-typical normalcy. It’s fine to use PGD to prevent various health problems, insofar as those problems interfere with a species-typical life. However, Sparrow argues that a parenting strategy of constantly maximizing a child’s potential has disturbing implications. For example, it implies that parents really have the obligation to use another couple’s (superior) embryos and that parents who don’t enhance are in a certain sense abusing their children (like parents who don’t let their kids go to school) and should therefore be compelled to enhance. And even if they aren’t compelled by law, intense competition will inevitably compel parents to enhance, just as there is significant pressure nowadays to ensure your child goes to the best private school possible to give them the best shot at life. These issues can be avoided, according to Sparrow, if parents instead focus on getting their children up to an adequate threshold of opportunity and well-being.

One interesting wrinkle brought up in Q&A is the non-identity problem: by selecting a different embryo, one changes the identity of one’s child. It is then not technically correct to say one has an obligation to a particular child to use PGD. Savulescu avoids this issue by casting the obligation not as to specific identifiable children, but a more impersonal obligation towards whatever children one has – akin to obligations to unspecified ‘future generations’ whose identities might be altered by one’s choices. However, this complicates the parental analogy; using PGD is no longer similar to educating a particular (identifiable) child, but rather more similar to saving money for private school before one has children. As Sparrow points out, this makes the obligation considerably weaker than it might have appeared.

Other audience members put pressure on Sparrow’s emphasis of species-typical normalcy. Does this mean the health interventions that pushed life expectancies beyond the species-normal levels of the time were problematic? And would an enhancement raising child’s expected IQ from 80 to 100 (the approximate human average) then be acceptable? Sparrow was reluctant to embrace either of these implications, but it is unclear how he can do so while also maintaining the satisficing model of improvement via embryo selection. Furthermore, Savulescu noted that species-typical levels appear relatively arbitrary. Why is ‘good enough’ tied to the current state of humanity? Sparrow seems to think that some arbitrariness must be accepted in this realm because of the vagueness of the question of what’s good enough, but there still needs to be some reason behind picking species-typicality as the threshold. The question remains why this particular threshold should be preferred over some other, equally arbitrary threshold (say, the minimal needed to survive).

The debate covers a number of issues besides these, including the technical feasibility of using PGD for enhancement and how to determine what interventions, in particular, would actually improve well-being. The Savulescu-Sparrow debate is a nice example of the two sides of the enhancement debate engaging directly with each other; if the issues are not completely resolved by the end, one at least comes away with a better understanding of what’s at play.