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Abstract
Despite the advent of CRISPR, safe and effective gene editing for human enhancement remains well beyond our current technological capabilities. For the discussion about enhancing human beings to be worth having, then, we must assume that gene-editing technology will improve rapidly. However, rapid progress in the development and application of any technology comes at a price: obsolescence. If the genetic enhancements we can provide children get better and better each year, then the enhancements granted to children born in any given year will rapidly go out of date. Sooner or later, every modified child will find him- or herself to be “yesterday’s child.” The impacts of such obsolescence on our individual, social, and philosophical self-understanding constitute an underexplored set of considerations relevant to the ethics of genome editing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An early version of this article was presented at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and I thank Professors Derrick Au and Hon-Lam Li for the opportunity to benefit from the discussions on that occasion. Johanna Seibt provided insightful feedback on the argument when it was presented at Aarhus University: I thank Morten Dige and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen for the invitation to attend and present at the Truly Human? seminar. Nick Agar, Erik Malmqvist, and Catherine Mills were each kind enough to read a draft of the article. I also thank Chris Gyngell, Julian Savulescu, Rob Ranisch, and Inmaculada de Melo-Martin for correspondence while I was writing it. Mark Howard and Courtney Hempton assisted me with preparing the article for publication. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.
Notes
1. I have discussed the implications of obsolescence for enhancement more generally in Sparrow (Citation2015a). See also Wolbring (Citation2010). In this article I focus on the case of genetic enhancement to the exclusion of other forms of enhancement and especially on the implications of genetic obsolescence for our understanding of what it means to be human.
2. Although note that there remains some controversy about the extent to which CRISPR/Cas9 generates “off-target effects” (Knoepfler Citation2017; Liang et al. Citation2015; Ma et al. Citation2017; Scott and Zhang Citation2017), as well as the significance of such effects for the ethics of the use of the technology (compare, for instance, Savulescu et al. [Citation2015] with Lanphier et al. [Citation2015]).
3. As I discuss further in the following, my willingness to engage with this literature should not be read to imply that I myself believe that enhancement is a realistic possibility, given the current state of our understanding of genetics.
4. Qua therapy, a particular therapy may well be rendered obsolete by new techniques to secure or restore health. Nevertheless, the result achieved by a successful therapy—health—is not threatened with obsolescence by the development of better therapies.
5. There are undoubtedly limits on the level of functioning that might be achieved by a biological organism in any given dimension and thus the extent to which particular traits may be “enhanced.” Nevertheless, it seems likely that no matter how enhanced an embryo was, further enhancements in some dimension or other would remain possible. In any case, if any ultimate limit on enhancement exists, we are unlikely to approach it for many decades.
6. Just how plausible this assumption is, is another question. On the one hand, for the most part, scientific and technological progress occurs gradually, which suggests that it will be many decades still until meaningful genetic human enhancement is possible, if it ever becomes possible. On the other hand, as devotees of “the law of accelerating returns” like to emphasize, because scientific and technological progress relies on the results of previous investigations it has a tendency to accelerate (Kurzweil Citation2005). Moreover, there are more scientists working today than ever before. I am personally inclined to be skeptical about claims about exponential growth in the rate of technological progress but will, for the sake of the argument that follows, allow the premise that rapid progress will occur in order to engage in “immanent critique” of the project of genetic human enhancement.
7. Again, it is necessary to emphasize that the fact that we might prefer gene “A” to gene “B” is not sufficient to establish that gene B is obsolete—this would only be the case if A is understood to be superior to B by virtue of being the product of technological progress. Importantly, this means that obsolescence is not the appropriate framework through which to understand natural genetic differences. In particular, genes associated with impairments are located in relation to an idea of health rather than an idea of progress; this will remain true even if, as the result of the development of effective gene therapies, individuals are no longer born with genes associated with particular impairments.
8. We might gain some insight by investigating the experiences of those persons whose skill sets have been rendered obsolete by technological progress. However, because, as I argued in the preceding, genetic obsolescence is likely to differ from obsolescence of skill sets in a number of ways, such investigations are only of limited relevance in this context.
9. A similar dynamic already operates in areas of the economy characterized by rapid progress, such as computer science or biotech. In these industries, employees are at risk of discovering that their skill sets are obsolete by the time they are in their mid 30s. However, rapid progress in genetic enhancement would greatly exacerbate this phenomenon. While people can work to maintain and update their skill sets, they will not be able to update their genes.
10. It might be objected—as it has been objected to Habermas’s writings on enhancement—that my discussion in this section trades on, and is complicit with, a false genetic determinism. People are more than their genes, and thus, even if, as I have suggested, particular genes will be made obsolete by enhancement, it would be a mistake to conclude that “people” would thereby be made obsolete. I certainly do not wish to endorse genetic determinism. However, what thinking about the relationship between enhancement and obsolescence reveals is the way in which rapid progress in enhancement technologies would render us, at the level of type rather than of token, akin to the other manufactured items we see around us. Even though individuals will continue to possess—and to determine—their own ends, they will also become the type of things that are subject to obsolescence. That this new self-conception is properly tendentious does not unsettle my claim that it is an inevitable consequence of surrendering the human genome to the dynamics of technological progress.