Talk: Jonathan Anomaly Book Launch - Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement

Friday, February 21, 2020 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm

Title: Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement

Abstract: Creating Future People offers readers a primer on how new genetic technologies will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their personality, moral capacities, physical appearance, and immune system. It explains the science of gene editing and embryo selection, and explores the moral questions and political implications these technologies raise. Dr. Anomaly takes seriously the diversity of preferences parents have, and the limits of public policy in regulating what could soon be a global market for reproductive technology. He argues that once embryo selection for complex traits happens it will change the moral landscape by altering the incentives parents face. All of us will take an interest in the traits everyone else selects, and this will present coordination problems that previous writers on genetic enhancement have failed to consider.