How Does Genetic Engineering Reflect Our Humanity?

If you could choose your child's intelligence, athleticism, personality, and lifespan before they were born — would you?

And more importantly: should you?

That question — which once belonged exclusively to science fiction — is rapidly becoming a practical one. Genetic engineering and bioenhancement technologies are poised to make virtually every human capacity modifiable: physical dexterity, mental acuity, memory, focus, and more. And the parents of the near future will face choices that no generation in human history has ever had to make.

In this award-winning episode of Good Is In The Details — recognized with a Silver Davey Award in the General: Educational category — Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo sit down with Professor Michael Bess, Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, recipient of major fellowships from the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Fulbright program, and author of Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future (Beacon Press) described by Kirkus Reviews as "an extraordinarily thoughtful... insightful philosophical analysis" and named one of the most important books on biotechnology ethics of the past decade.

Professor Bess has spent decades thinking carefully about what these technologies will do to human identity, human equality, and the meaning of a human life. This conversation is the clearest, most accessible, and most philosophically rigorous introduction to those questions that we have produced.

What we explore in this episode:

• What genetic engineering actually is, and what the near-future technology of designer babies, epigenetic modification, and germline editing will genuinely make possible for parents in the coming decades
• Rejuvenation therapies potentially extending human lifespans to 160 years or more; cognitive enhancement that could double or triple IQ scores; bioelectronic devices for modulating brain processes — and what it means that these possibilities are crossing the threshold from science fiction to reality
• The philosophical heart of the episode: what does it mean to be human, and does genetic engineering threaten, enhance, or simply change that meaning?
• The ethics of parental choice: when parents are given direct control over the genetic components that make a child who they are, what moral responsibilities does that power create? And what does it mean for the child's autonomy, identity, and sense of self?
• The pressure of human enhancement applied to the whole range of capacities we value, and what happens to a society when every human trait becomes a competitive variable subject to modification
• The justice problem: if genetic enhancement is available to those who can afford it and not to those who cannot, what does that do to equality, opportunity, and the social contract? Is a genetically stratified society a just one?
• What philosophy's oldest questions about human nature, identity, and the good life have to say about biotechnology's newest possibilities, and why the examined life has never been more necessary than in a moment when the self itself is becoming redesigned
• Whether there are things about being human (vulnerability, mortality, the randomness of birth) that we should choose to preserve even when we have the power to eliminate them
• What Rudy's interest in genetic re-engineering of his own introductory skills tells us about the limits of self-improvement, and what Professor Bess would say in response

🏆 Silver Davey Award — General: Educational, Individual Episodes & Specials (18th Annual, 2022)

Sanctioned by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, an invitation-only body of top-tier media, advertising, and marketing professionals.

Guest: Professor Michael Bess — Chancellor's Professor of History, Vanderbilt University. Guggenheim Fellow. MacArthur Fellow. Fulbright Scholar. Author of Our Grandchildren Redesigned (Beacon Press, 2015), Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006), and The Light-Green Society (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh Prize of the American Society for Environmental History. Co-editor of Posthumanism: The Future of Homo Sapiens (Macmillan, 2018). Teaching at Vanderbilt since 1989.

Good Is In The Details is hosted by Gwendolyn Dolske, Ph.D. and Rudy Salo — a philosophy, books, and ideas podcast exploring the examined life in the spirit of Socrates.

Learn more about Professor Bess: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/michael-bess

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Podcasting Resources here.

This episode is featured in Philosophy Unplugged!