2025/01/01 by Cynthia D. Coe · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies #Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
paper · pdf · doi:10.5840/jpd20262232
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/02/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In this paper, I offer a Levinasian critique of the moral reasoning within liberal eugenics—specifically, the principle of procreative beneficence. This principle asserts that prospective parents have a moral obligation to genetically test embryos and fetuses, and then to select the children who are most likely to have the “best life,” one that is comparatively free of suffering. A particular account of disability, suffering, and time shapes this framing of parental responsibility: that their obligations in the present are straightforwardly established by promoting future well-being or preventing future ill-being. By contrast, Levinas’s understanding of responsibility justifies an attitude of epistemic humility, which renders unanswerable the general question of how we, as prospective parents or as members of a wider community, should respond to the anticipated or presumed suffering of others. His approach to normativity thereby affirms recent critical disability theorists’ objections to liberal eugenics.