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Deregulating the Genetic Supermarket: Preimplantation Screening, Future People, and the Harm Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2000

COLIN GAVAGHAN
COLIN GAVAGHAN
Affiliation:
Colin Gavaghan has recently been appointed lecturer in Medical Law at Glasgow University's Institute of Law & Ethics in Medicine. He is currently completing a Ph.D. examining the legal and ethical implications of preimplantation screening
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Abstract

Robert Nozick, in what is surely one of the most intriguing and provocative footnotes in modern philosophical writing, referred in Anarchy, State and Utopia to the notion of a “genetic supermarket.” In keeping with the central arguments of that text, his suggestion was that choices about the genetic composition of future generations should, as far as possible, be left in the hands of private individuals, and should not be determined or restricted by the state. This free market in genetic screening would meet “the individual specifications (within certain moral limits) of prospective parents,” and would possess “the great virtue that it involves no centralized decision fixing the future human type(s).” In short, prospective parents would be allowed, to whatever extent was rendered possible by current technology, to choose the genetic traits of their future children.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 2000 , pp. 242 - 260
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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