Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 19:50:38 2006/07/12
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by rlruby
You construe the analogy with the irresponsible mother who continues, say, her alcoholism, with the irresponsible type 1 diabetic who, despite the risks, decides to have a child. The point is not that no one chooses to have diabetes, but rather, the totally different one, that someone with diabetes should not choose to have a child. Having diabetes is not a free choice, and therefore it is neither moral nor immoral. Choosing to have a child with a high risk of diabetes is a free choice, so it is immoral.
The Pullman Car Company case and thousands of other cases like it are a branch of the law of negligence, which by definition involves no DELIBERATE infliction of harm, but just an accident. A deliberate infliction of harm belongs not to civil law, which includes negligence, but to criminal law. In negligence, a party can be successfully sued for an act which is reckless -- where the risk is seen in advance but the party decides to take it anyway, or which is below the normal standard of care and caution expected of all people. Applying the law of negligence to the case of the diabetic contemplating having children, to proceed to have children while knowing the risk in advance and being able to prevent it would fall under the law of reckless negligence. So my original analogy stands.
While it is true that some cases of diabetes may arise from new combinations of genes which could not be anticipated by looking at the family history of either parent, that does not change the fact that the risk for diabetic males having diabetic children is 20 times higher than normal, and for females is 12 times higher than normal. If both of these groups decided never to have children there would be a reduction of new type 1 diabetics in the United States of about 25,000 below the expected number in the very first generation. These reductions in the overall number of diabetics would snowball over the generations, since not only would diabetics not be being replaced at the normal rate, but also, the base of diabetic breeders would be constantly shrinking. We could probably never eradicate the disease entirely, because new genetic combinations could always be forming some new cases, and spontaneous genetic mutuations, as well as unusual cross-overs in meitosis, could also generate new cases, but the major force contributing to the perpetuation of type 1 diabetics would be removed, and it would become a truly rare disease.
Also keep in mind the phenomenon of genetic anticipation, in which inherited diseases often show as worsening pattern from generation to generation. My own family exhibits this well, since my paternal grandmother developed type 1 diabetes at age 54, three or my five paternal aunts developed it between the ages of 35 and 45, and I developed it at 14. If I had had children, they might have developed it at age 2! So by weeding out the genes of people with established type 1 diabetes, we prevent genetic anticipation from perpetually worsening the disease.
As to the problem of future generations and our responsibility to them even if they do not now exist, consider the following example: Suppose we know that global warming will cause the Earth no problems until 200 years after our deaths, at which point it will produce a catastrophe that will destroy the human race. Do we still have no responsibility to combat global warming, as your arguments would require, because none of the human beings who would be affected by it now exist to constitute an object of moral obligation? I am sure you can see the nonsense of that!
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