Should parents aim to make their children as normal as possible to increase their chances to “fit in”? Are neurological and mental health conditions a part of children’s identity and if so, should parents aim to remove or treat these? Should they aim to instill self-control in their children? Should prospective parents take steps to insure that, of all the children they could have, they choose the ones with the best likely start in life? This volume explores all of these questions and more. Against the background of recent findings and expected advances in neuroscience and genetics, the extent and limits of parental responsibility are increasingly unclear. Awareness of the effects of parental choices on children’s wellbeing, as well as evolving norms about the moral status of children, have further increased expectations from (prospective) parents to take up and act on their changing responsibilities. The contributors discuss conceptual issues such as the meaning and sources of moral responsibility, normality, treatment, and identity. They also explore more practical issues such as how responsibility for children is practiced in Yoruba culture in Nigeria or how parents and health professionals in Belgium perceive the dilemmas generated by prenatal diagnosis.

The volume offers a unique collection of articles on pediatric neuroenhancement from an international and multidisciplinary perspective. In recent years, the topic of “neuroenhancement” has become increasingly relevant in academia and practice, as well as among the public. While autonomous adults are free to choose neuroenhancement, in children it presents its own ethical, social, legal, and developmental issues. A plethora of potential (neurotechnological) enhancement agents are on the market. While the manifold issues surrounding the topic have been extensively discussed, there is little work on the specific questions that arise in children and adolescents. This book addresses this gap in the literature: Next to conceptual and normative work on autonomy and self-control, the collection explores the implications for parenting and schooling, and provides input for a discussion of public attitudes. It is a valuable resource for the different academic communities confronted with questions of how to evaluate and approach enhancement in children and is of interest to neuroethicists, scholars in applied ethics and neurology, psychiatrists and psychologists as well as scientists developing enhancement interventions for children.

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. We tend to hold people responsible for their choices, but not for what they can’t control: their nature, genes or biological makeup. This thought-provoking collection redefines the boundaries of moral responsibility. It shows how epigenetics reveals connections between our genetic make-up and our environment. The essays challenge established notions of human nature and the nature/nurture divide and suggest a shift in focus from individual to collective responsibility. Uncovering the links between our genetic makeup, environment and experiences, this is an important contribution to ongoing debates on ethics, genetics and responsibility.

This book rethinks procreative responsibility considering the continuous development of Assisted Reproductive Technologies. It presents a person-affecting moral argument, highlighting that the potential availability of future Assisted Reproductive Technologies brings out new procreative obligations. Traditionally, Assisted Reproductive Technologies are understood as practices aimed at extending the procreative freedom of prospective parents. However, some scholars argue that they also give rise to new moral constraints. This book builds on this viewpoint by presenting a person-affecting perspective on the impact of current and future Assisted Reproductive Technologies on procreative responsibility, with a specific focus on reproductive Genome Editing and ectogenesis. The author shows that this perspective is defensible both from a consequences-based person-affecting perspective and from a person-affecting account that considers morally relevant intuitions and attitudes. Procreative Responsibility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in bioethics and procreative ethics.

Health and social care decisions, and how they impact a family, are often viewed from the perspective of the individual family member making them--for example, the role of the parent in surrogacy questions, the care of the elderly, or decisionis that involve fetuses or organ donations. This volume represents a concerted, collaborative effort to depart from this practice--it shows, rather, that the family unit as a whole shapes and influences the patient's decisions and very understanding of the choice at hand. The family is intrinsic and inseparable from such ethical choices. This deeper level of thinking about families and health care poses an entirely new set of difficult questions. Which family members are relevant in influencing a patient, and why is this so? What is a family, in the first place? What duties does a family have to its own members? This volume, edited by bioethicists Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk, and Janice McLaughlin, develops an ethic radically distinct from health care ethics, feminist ethics, or an ethic of care, even though authors draw on many of the resources those approaches offer. What makes an ethics of families distinctive is that it theorizes relationships characterized by ongoing intimacy and partiality among people who are not interchangeable, and remains centered on the practices of responsibility arising from these relationships. What About the Family? represents an interdisciplinary effort, drawing, among other resources, on its authors' backgrounds in sociology, nursing, philosophy, bioethics, and the medical sciences. Contributors begin from the assumption that any ethical examination of the significance of family ties to health and social care will benefit from a dialogue with the debates about family occuring in these other disciplinary areas, and examine why families matter, how families are recognized, how families negotiate responsibilities, how families can participate in treatment decision making, and how justice operates in families.

In this rigorous and necessary book, Kristien Hens brings together bioethics and the philosophy of biology to argue that it is ethically necessary for scientific research to include a place for the philosopher. As well as ethical, their role is conceptual: they can improve the quality and coherence of scientific research by ensuring that particular concepts are used consistently and thoughtfully across interdisciplinary projects. Hens argues that chance and uncertainty play a central part in bioethics, but that these qualities can be in tension with the attempt to establish a given theory as scientific knowledge: in describing organisms and practices, in a sense we create the world. Hens contends that this is necessarily an ethical activity. Examining genetic research, biomedical ethics, autism research and the concept of risk, Hens illustrates that there is no ‘universal’ or ‘neutral’ state of scientific and clinical knowledge, and that attending to the situatedness of individual experience is essential to understand the world around us, to know its (and our) limitations, and to forge an ethical future. Chance Encounters is aimed at a broad audience of researchers in bioethics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, as well as biomedical and environmental scientists. It will also be relevant to policymakers, and the artwork by Christina Stadlbauer and Bartaku will be of interest to artists and writers working at the intersection of art and science.