Hastings Center Report
Will an Enhanced Child Have Less Freedom? A U.S. Nationally Representative Survey Experiment
Abstract: One of the many arguments against the genetic enhancement of children is that the children enhanced in this way would have restricted freedom by being controlled by the design of their parents. These normative arguments are based on empirical assumptions about the experience of such children, but these assumptions have never been tested. In this paper, I first discuss the mechanisms by which such a loss of freedom would occur. I then produce a test of these assumptions using a survey experiment from a U.S. nationally representative survey with 3,401 adult respondents. The results suggest that the empirical assumptions in the literature are correct and that an enhanced child will experience less freedom than would an unenhanced child.
