The genetic revolution is a discussion of how the transformation of genes from products of nature to human choices is redefining the rights of children to hold parents and society accountable for genetic defects.
The era of the genetic revolution is upon us. By revolution, I mean that genes are being massively moved from the realm of fate, where they are subject to random assignment by nature, to the realm of choice, where they are artificially assembled by humans. Once ignorant of the existence of genes, humans are now able to not only decode genetic information, but also manipulate it. Genes show “greater predictive power than any other regularity in human history” for a wide range of traits, including intelligence, personality, and longevity over a person’s lifetime. That’s why the technology to decipher and manipulate them is called a revolution. But revolutions have always been accompanied by anxiety about whether the changes they bring will not have unethical consequences that violate existing human rights. In the late 1990s, when Dolly was cloned, this anxiety was amplified by the growing possibility of human cloning using nuclear gene replacement technology, which led to the publication of The Genetic Revolution and Human Rights, a collection of lectures by leading experts in genetics, philosophy, law, and medicine, led by Amnesty International. In the book, Steiner argues that the genetic revolution has profoundly changed the human rights of children, and more specifically, the rights that children have against their parents and society over genetic defects.
He argues that after the genetic revolution, a child born with a defective gene can hold the person who provided it responsible for it and seek compensation. In light of the fact that it is usually the parents who provide the genes, this suggests, as commenter Wolf points out, that the child can hold the parents responsible for allowing their genetic defect to develop. There are two points to be made here. First, rights and responsibilities are complementary concepts. The subject of a right has the right to demand a certain behavior from the object of the right, and the object of the right has the responsibility to fulfill the right. Second, the right to hold someone accountable for a defective gene is a nearly identical conceptual right that arises from the right to have a normal gene. Taking these considerations into account, we can turn Steiner’s argument on its head and say – in the age of the genetic revolution, a child has the right to demand normal genes from his or her parents, and if this right is violated, the child has the right to hold the offender accountable and demand compensation for the damage. Steiner’s argument is that a child’s right to claim normal genes is not a new right. It’s just that the right that was asserted against society before the genetic revolution has shifted to the parents after the genetic revolution.
To support the idea that a child has the right to claim normal genes against society before the gene revolution, Steiner relies on the egalitarian premise of natural resource distribution. The egalitarian premise of natural resources is the theory that natural resources should not be owned exclusively by anyone, and that when such monopolies occur, they should be redistributed equally. Steiner divides all things, except humans, into natural and artificial objects, which are the products of human labor, and classifies genes, which predate the genetic revolution, as natural resources. This is because genetic information is a product of nature through a long evolutionary process. In contrast to the egalitarian ideal of natural resource distribution, in reality, genetic traits are not uniformly distributed among people due to randomization in nature, and there is a gap between those with superior genetic traits and those with inferior genetic traits. According to the egalitarian premise of natural resource distribution, this disparity is inherently unjust and must be eliminated through the redistribution of those natural resources, or, if that is not fundamentally possible, through the redistribution of other resources such as property. Since this redistribution must take place at the social level, in a world before the genetic revolution, a child with a genetic defect would have the right to claim normal genes from society and thus hold society responsible for the defective genes. This also implies that genes are natural products randomly produced by nature, and therefore the responsibility for genetic defects does not lie with specific individuals, such as parents.
However, in the post-gene revolution era, as genetic manipulation has become possible, Steiner argues that genes have been transformed from a natural resource created by natural chance to an artificial object processed by human labor. Therefore, he argues, as with all artificial objects, the entity that can manipulate them should be held responsible for the poor quality of the results. To put it another way, genetic defects are no longer the result of bad luck, but of parental negligence, and the failure of parents to actively test embryos for genetic defects and treat them is an unethical act of passive intentional harm to the child. Therefore, when a child is disadvantaged by poor genes, the conclusion is that the individual who caused this harm, the parents, can be held accountable, not society, which has a duty to realize justice by distributing natural resources equally.
Steiner’s argument that genes are classified as natural products in the context of the pre-gene revolution is valid. He argues that from an evolutionary point of view, nature is the creator of genetic information, so it is the same as other natural products such as the atmosphere, ozone layer, etc. However, if we take a closer look at the mechanism of evolution, it is undeniable that the creation of human genes involved a significant amount of human labor as well as natural forces. This is because in the process of evolution, changes in the combination of genes in a species are the result of a constant interaction between the organism and its environment. The fact that anthropogenic efforts of individuals can influence the composition of the genetic mix of the next generation can be supported by the existence of at least four forms of such efforts First, an individual’s efforts to survive and reproduce, i.e., to overcome competition and the environment in order to pass on its genes; second, an individual’s efforts to alter the environment, such as through clearing or migration, that affects the formation of gene combinations; third, an individual’s active selection of mates during sexual reproduction; and fourth, as epigenetics has shown, an individual’s lifelong lifestyle or selective exposures can modify its gene combinations. Genes are products of nature, unlike the atmosphere and ozone layer, which Steiner cites as classic examples of natural products, with the addition of significant human labor. Steiner’s simplistic and dichotomous definition of natural objects as products of nature and artificial objects as products of human labor is not sufficient to classify genetic products as natural or artificial, as both nature and human labor are at work.
To compensate for this limitation, it seems necessary to improve the criteria for distinguishing between natural and artificial objects. Rather than asking whether nature or humans influence the outcome, it would be more appropriate to ask whose influence is more dominant. If nature’s influence is more dominant, the result is classified as a natural object, and if human influence is more dominant, the result is classified as an artificial object. There is a simple metric for determining whether nature or humans have a greater influence on an outcome: whether humans can foresee the outcome of a particular endeavor. Unlike nature, which acts by chance, humans act with purpose and have an intended outcome. Through countless experiences, humans are able to predict the future outcome of a particular endeavor based on whether or not it consistently produces their intended results. The more predictive we are, the more control we have over the outcome, and the more influence we have over nature. By this standard, genes are classified as natural products. In order to have a specific effect on a gene or the genes of future generations, humans make efforts such as the aforementioned mate selection and environmental modification. However, these efforts do not necessarily guarantee the actual outcome of changing genes. Human efforts cannot overwhelm natural processes that are due to chance, such as the randomization of genes or the occurrence of genetic defects due to natural catastrophic radiation. Therefore, as Steiner concludes, it is reasonable to classify genes as natural products in the pre-gene revolution era.
According to this criterion, it is also reasonable to classify genes as anthropogenic objects in the post-Gene Revolution era. However, this is not just because, as Steiner argues, they can be subject to human effort. Rather, it is because the highly controllable artifact of genetic manipulation allows for highly predictive manipulation of human genetic outcomes. If genes are categorized as artificial objects, then the genetic consequences of genetic defects should also be held accountable to the parents who have the control to allow them to persist, even if the cause of the defect is natural chance. This is illustrated by the example of a child who is injured in a natural disaster after birth, even if it is not necessarily genetic. It’s a natural coincidence that the natural disaster happened, but it’s generally considered unethical for a parent with the financial resources or connections to treat the injured child to leave the child alone. But it’s not just because the parents had control over the situation; by that definition, the child is liable for his or her genetic defect to everyone who can afford to treat him or her, namely society. This would be no different from the situation before the genetic revolution, as Steiner argues. The relationship between a child and his or her parents is unique because the parents are the child’s representatives. In the definition of a minor, a parent is typically the child’s agent, the one who makes decisions on behalf of the child. The fundamental reason why parents have this authority is because they are responsible for the child’s upbringing. The concepts of agency and duty of care are complementary: parents have the right to make decisions on behalf of their child, but they also have a duty to care for the child in the child’s best interests. Parents are obliged to pursue the interests of the child and, when they have the control to minimize the disadvantages of the child, they are obliged to use it.
So far, we have examined the validity of Steiner’s argument that children have the right to hold society or their parents responsible for genetic defects and seek compensation, both before and after the genetic revolution. His argument is based on the classification of genes as natural objects before the genetic revolution and as artificial objects after the genetic revolution. In this discussion, we argue that Steiner’s categorization is an oversimplification, and we broaden the criteria for categorization from whether nature or humans acted on the genetic product to the relative certainty of the effect of the action. This strengthens Steiner’s argument that society is responsible for compensating for the defects of natural products, genes, before the gene revolution based on the egalitarian premise of natural resource distribution, and that parents are responsible for the defects of artificial objects, genes, after the gene age, based on the passive intentionality of parents. He also emphasized that in the post-gene era, the control that parents have over genes as artificial objects, as well as the parental responsibility that parents have as fundamental agents of the child, gives the child a fundamental right to hold parents accountable for genetic defects.
