(Re)producing Identities: The Assumptions in (non)Identity-Affecting Debates

Abstract

Advances in procreative technologies can entail changes on a number of levels: changing scientific realities but also changing ethical considerations, and changes to the concepts they use or assumptions that some ethical arguments rely upon.  One such case has been how the move from the idea of selection to the idea of gene editing can affect arguments around what it is meant to benefit or harm the future offspring. With help of the recent framework of Ying‑Qi Liaw (2024), as well as insights from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2019), we question the assumptions of ‘identity’ and ‘disability’ that are often used in ‘person-affecting identity preserving (gene editing)’ versus ‘non-person affecting identity changing (selection)’ debates (McMahan & Savulescu 2023). In so doing, we recognise that there is an additional ‘person-affecting, yet identity changing’ category emerging, when the trait changed or corrected is itself definitive of the identity in important respects. From this, we also explore how such debates have an echo of genetic determinism about them, and the appreciation of our social, environmental identity makes for a much more complex discussion than such debates initially suggest. Consequentially, we suggest moving beyond the narrow confines of such debates to one about the ways identities can be seen to be generated in positive (or negative) ways, rather than a concern about whether some identities are preserved or changed, for the better or worse.