Essay On Genetic Engineering Ethics

Be that as it may, the decisions that parents make during genetic engineering can limit the autonomy of the child whom was “designed” a specific way. Even more, the pressure that can be applied onto a child can be exceedingly overwhelming. Obviously, a child is not able to control whether or not their parents alter their genes, but without genetic engineering there would be more of a potential range of genes a person could be born with. For example, children do not get to decide if they end up growing to be six foot and five-inch-tall with five foot and five-inch-tall parents or a natural inclination for music reading or intelligence. As a result, these children lost their right to choose and had their lives planned out for them before they even were able to make decisions or think for themselves. There is no guarantee that evaluating the autonomy of the …show more content…
When considering ethics, we must evaluate the difference between what we can do and what we should do. There is no clear cut, definite solution when considering whether or not parents should be able to alter the genome of their children and in which ways altering is considered ethical. With the utilitarian concept, there is no right answer, there is only the idea of the “best answer,” which includes the many complex contradictions between each side of the controversy. For example, on one hand, through genetic engineering there is a large percentage of a population of children who are born without any predisposition towards a genetic disease, but on the other hand, there is the other percentage of the population affected by this disease that no research is being conducted on. The majority of the population was not affected, therefore there was little to no awareness about the disease and people did not want to financial support the research for only minimal