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GENTIC ENGINEERING

Statistics

  Counts

  Total Pages: 18.54
  Total Words: 4634
  Total Characters: 24670
  Number of Sentences: 186


  Averages

  Words per Sentences: 24.91
  Characters per Words: 5.32


  Readability

  Flesch Reading Ease: 46.91
  Fog Scale Level: 16.28
  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.91  

GENTIC ENGINEERING

Abstract
This paper sets out to defend human genetic engineering with a new bioethical approach, post-humanism, combined with a radical democratic political framework. Arguments for the restriction of human genetic engineering, and specifically germ-line enhancement, are reviewed. Arguments are divided into those which are fundamental matters of faith, or "bio-Luddite" arguments, and those which can be addressed through public policy, or "gene-angst" arguments.
The four bio-Luddite concerns addressed are: Medicine Makes People Sick; There are Sacred Limits of the Natural Order; Technologies Always Serve Ruling Interests; The Genome is Too Complicated to Engineer. I argue that these are matters of faith that one either accepts or rejects, and that I reject.
The non-fundamentalist or pragmatic concerns I discuss are: Fascist Applications; The Value of Genetic Diversity; The Geneticization of Life; Genetic Discrimination and Confidentiality; Systematically Bad Decisions by Parents; Discrimination Against the Disabled; Unequal Access; The Decline of Social Solidarity. I conclude that all these concerns can be adequately addressed through a proactive regulative framework administered by a liberal democratic state. Therefore, even germ-line genetic enhancement should eventually made available since the potential benefits greatly outweigh the potential risks.

1. Introduction
Nine years ago Jeremy Rifkin convinced me that genetic technology would determine the shape of the future while I rode a bus through the small, crooked, immaculate and beautiful streets of Kyoto. I was reading his Algeny [Rifkin, 1983], an alarmist attack on the coming of the gene age, alongside What Sort of People Should There Be? [Glover, 1984], a moderate defense of genetic engineering by the Oxford don Jonathan Glover. In a sense, in the nine years since, I have recoiled from the radical Rifkin to embrace the reformist Glover.
In earlier decades Rifkin had been an SD...

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