The paper, "Designing humans: A human rights approach," was published in Bioethics in 2018 and builds on Liao's previous writings, including The Right to Be Loved, a 2015 book in which he makes the case that children, as human beings, have the right to certain "fundamental conditions" necessary to pursue a good life (love is one such condition, according to Liao; so are food, water, and air).
In "Designing humans," Liao applies the same approach to gene editing and argues that part of the fundamental conditions necessary to have a good life are so-called "fundamental capacities," which might include but are not limited to: the capacity to act, to move, to reproduce, to think, to be motivated, to have emotions, to interact with others and the environment, and to be moral.
"The basic idea is that if we think about what human beings need in order to pursue a good life, maybe from there we can generate some principles that can guide us in reproductive genetic engineering," he says.
Liao introduces those principles with four "claims" on the ethics of genetic engineering:
Claim 1: It is not permissible to deliberately create an offspring that will not have all the fundamental capacities
Claim 2: If such an offspring has already been created, it is permissible to bring that offspring to term
Claim 3: It Is Not permissible to eliminate some fundamental capacity from an existing offspring
Claim 4: If it is possible to correct some lack of fundamental capacity—without undue burdens on parents or society—it may be impermissible not to do so
Liao's four claims neglect the question of superhuman augmentation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @09:51PM
Yep it's like decommissioning nuclear reactors. If it's in our country it's a careful process that takes years. If it's in Iraq, all that's required is two unguided Mark-84 2,000-pound delay-action bombs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera#The_attack [wikipedia.org]