Enhancing Evolution Quotes

“But more importantly, as we have seen, I do have a powerful interest in living in a society and indeed in a world in which scientific research is vigorously pursued and is given a high priority.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

“Those who think that ensoulment takes place at conception have an interesting problem to account for the splitting of one soul into four, and for the destruction of three souls when the four embryos are recombined into one, and to account for (and resolve the ethics of) the destruction of three individuals, without a single human cell being removed or killed. These possibilities should perhaps give us pause in attributing a beginning of morally important life to a point like conception.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

“If you have a preimplantation embryo in the early stages of development and split it, let us say into four clumps of cells, each one of these four clumps constitutes a new embryo which is viable and could be implanted with the reasonable expectation of successful development into adulthood (given the dramatic wastage rate of embryos in all human reproduction, see below). Each clump is the clone or identical “twin” of any of the others and comes into being not through conception but because of the division of the early cell mass. Moreover, these four clumps can be recombined into one embryo again. This creates a situation where, without the destruction of a single human cell, one human life, if that is what it is, can be split into four and can be recombined again into one. Did “life” in such a case begin as an individual, become four individuals and then turn into a singleton again? We should note that whatever our answer to this question, all this occurs without the creation of extra matter and without the destruction of a single cell.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

“In Kass’s suggestion (he disarmingly admits revulsion “is not an argument”), the giveaway is in his use of the term “rightfully.” How can we know that revulsion, however sincerely or vividly felt, is occasioned by the violation of things we rightfully hold dear unless we have a theory, or at least an argument, about which of the things we happen to hold dear we rightfully hold dear? The term “rightfully” implies a judgment which confirms the respectability of the feelings. If it is simply one feeling confirming another, then we really are in the situation Wittgenstein lampooned as buying a second copy of the same newspaper to confirm the truth of what we read in the first.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

“My own suggestion is that the moral status of the embryo, the fetus, and indeed any individual is determined by its possession of those features which make you or me morally more important than cats or canaries. At no stage of its development does the human embryo or fetus possess features that relevantly distinguish it from cats and canaries, save two. They are species membership and potential. Species membership, however, is devoid of moral significance; species preference is, like race or gender preference, simply a prejudice. Potential is no more helpful: whatever potential is possessed by the human embryo is also possessed by the unfertilized egg and the sperm and so the argument that we have an obligation to realize human potential becomes the exhausting and unattractive ethic of maximal procreation.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

“Upholding liberty, safeguarding a free society, is not cost free. One of the costs is that citizens must be prepared to accept that others must be free to do things that they themselves would not do, would not wish to do, and even things that make them uncomfortable or which they find repugnant. The liberty to do only those things of which the majority approve is no liberty at all.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

“Vaccination is of course an enhancement technology and one that has been long accepted (since the smallpox vaccine was first used at the end of the eighteenth century). Interestingly, there has been very little resistance to this form of enhancement.”
― John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People