Designer babies

Designer babies is an ambiguous concept as there is a big difference between designing a perfect child to fit our own perfectionism and designing a baby to save another sick child (so-called saviour siblings). Bentham’s utilitarianism seeks to maximise the balance of pleasure over pain measured by the hedonic calculus which uses seven criteria (acronym PRRICED) to gauge the pleasure derived from different actions. In this calculation everyone is to count as one and no-one as more than one – we all have the same stake in the utility calculus. The issue of designing babies hinges on the likely future pleasure of the potential child, or the pleasure of a saviour sibling curing a sibling through donation of cells or marrow. For example, a hedonistic act utilitarian might see the future pleasure of a newly created child plus the pleasure to the sibling helped as vastly outweighing the risks that the saviour sibling might feel undervalued as just a means to an end (the Kantian objection to this)- so the rational decision might be to have the saviour sibling. This needs to be considered with the pleasure or pain of the wider family. Because of the difficulty determining likely consequences it is very difficult to do this calculation in practice – with the added problem that the hedonic calculus is frought with difficulty, as how do we know my hedon is the same value as your hedon of pleasure? How too can we be sure of the likely psychological results of all those affected – including any donor parents? An act utilitarian is likely to support wholeheartedly any such attempt to give pleasure to infertile parents, or sick children represented by IVF treatments.