The way we understand humans shapes the way we think about many things, especially our morality. If we look at the various moralities on loan from the history of philosophy, we see that they all aim to elucidate a common problem, the problem of human happiness. For Plato, happiness came from wisdom; for Aristotle, from virtue; for classical Hindus, it is freedom from desire; and for many in Jacksonville Beach, where I live, it comes from a burnished and bronzed body that has no more than 13% body fat. How do we best understand ourselves so that the happiness we seek can be rightly found?

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In my bioethical work over the past twenty years, I have found the morality of in vitro fertilization (IVF) to be one of the most difficult issues for sincere people to grasp. One reason is that IVF involves bringing life into existence. People often have a niece or nephew or grandchild conceived that way. They love these children and feel the world is a better place because of them. Anything that casts doubt on the morality of their conception causes them to feel defensive. And yet, the ethical problems raised by IVF only continue to get worse. Read

An estimated 15% of women of childbearing age suffer from absolute uterine infertility (AUI), which means their uterus is either non-functioning or non-existent. Up till now, fertility specialists have told them that if they want a child they should either adopt or do surrogacy. Now there may be a third option, at least for wealthy women, who have $500,000 to pay for the expensive procedure. The desire for children runs deep, but is such a transplant ever morally legitimate? Read

You are speeding down a highway. You round a sweeping bend and confront a tragic dilemma. A family of four with two small children is standing in one lane and an elderly couple is in the other. They’ve had an accident. You have almost no time to react. Two lanes, one-of-two unavoidable outcomes: slam into the family or run down the couple. Which would you choose? Which would your driverless car choose? Read

Do experiments aimed at perfecting the CRISPR technique itself involve wrongful harm? Does CRISPR incentivize the creation of human beings through IVF? What about the morality of NOT using CRISPR to correct heritable diseases when we could? Do we have an obligation to use CRISPR for positive genetic alteration? These are just a few of the questions we need to be asking. Read

What rhymes with whisper, is simple and inexpensive to use, more significant to the history of medicine than the discovery of antibiotics, and was named a weapon of mass destruction by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence? It is called CRISPR, an elegant and perilous new scientific method for altering the genomes of living organisms.
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