Abstract
In the ethical debate on genetic modification (GM), it is common to encounter the claim that some anti-GM argument would also apply an established, ethically accepted technology, and that the anti-GM argument is therefore unsuccessful. The paper discusses whether this argumentative strategy, the Similarity Argument, is sound. It presents a logically valid, generic form of the Similarity Argument and then shows that it is subject to three types of objection: (i) It does not respect the difference between pro tanto reasons and all-things-considered judgments; (ii) it relies on the unproblematic transferability of reasons from one case to another; and (iii) it runs the risk of equivocations, especially in cases where the anti-genetic-modification argument relies on gradable features. The paper then shows how these issues play out in three specific Similarity Arguments that can be found in the literature. Finally, the paper discusses what conclusions we can draw from the fact that genetic modification and established technologies are similar for the ethical status of genetic modification.
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Notes
By ‘genetic modification’ I mean technologies that directly alter the genomes of organisms, such as transgenesis, genome editing and synthetic biology. Several ‘borderline’ technologies could be included, e.g. mutagenesis and protoplast fusion. These are rarely discussed, and I will not say anything specific about them in the paper. I am mainly concerned with the debate concerning GM applied to plants and microorganisms, but I presume similarity claims and arguments occur in the case of human- and animal GM as well – and indeed in many other fields of applied ethics.
In a different version of the same article (Pugh 2015b), it is described merely as “familiar”.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer and Julian Savulescu for pressing me to clarify this.
Or more precisely, other considerations may provide a reason to judge that the original consideration is not, after all, a reason for the original judgment. The notion of exclusion (and enabling) that is the basis of the default view also constitutes Dancy’s grounds for defending particularism. It is thus plausible to take the default view to capture all the worries about transferability that Dancy’s view does.
The relation between excluding considerations and enabling considerations is unclear – they may simply be different ways of describing the same thing. My sense is that the main difference between considerations that are most aptly described as excluders and enablers, respectively, is whether the situations they point to can be described as ‘standard conditions’ or the ‘normal’ state of affairs.
To avoid unnecessary confusion: Note that Paul B. Thompson is a different person from R. Paul Thompson, cited in §1
Histories of such interventions that support this view are provided by Richard W. Bulleit (2005) for the case of animals, and by Denis J. Murphy (2007) for the case of plants. It is plausible, according to these accounts, that early domestication was entirely unintentional, i.e. that humans exercised no conscious control of organisms’ genotype.
Of course, biocentrists within environmental ethics have ways of arguing that our intuitions about the moral standing of microorganisms and plants does not decide the issue of their moral standing.
Tom Douglas has suggested (in conversation) that some similarity arguments are used simply as interpretative tools, designed to bring out what the critic’s view most plausibly is.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Thomas Douglas, Darien Haim, Sune Holm, Martin Marchman Andersen and Julian Savulescu for valuable comments on this and earlier versions of the paper.
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Christiansen, A. Similarity Arguments in the Genetic Modification Debate. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 239–255 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9757-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9757-y