Tribalism is often derided as a morally primitive form of human organization. But for most of human history, people organized themselves into tribes that facilitated collective action and provided their members with a sense of security and identity. In stark contrast, liberal cosmopolitans have promoted the ideal of the world community. They tend to diminish the moral importance of tribal attachments and instead claim that altruism should have a more universal scope. We argue that although tribalism can encourage needless conflict, it can also provide meaning, promote important virtues, and increase the long-run viability of human groups better than liberal cosmopolitanism. We call the view that we endorse “enlightened tribalism.” We end by identifying some of the problems tribalism can create, and distinguishing the kind of tribalism that leads groups of people to flourish from the kinds that lead to unnecessary suffering or self-destruction.

Creating Future People offers readers a fast-paced primer on how new genetic technologies will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their intelligence, moral capacities, physical appearance, and immune system. It deftly explains the science of gene editing and embryo selection, and raises the central moral questions with colorful language and a brisk style. Jonathan Anomaly takes seriously the diversity of preferences parents have, and the limits of public policy in regulating what could soon be a global market for reproductive technology. He argues that once embryo selection for complex traits happens it will change the moral landscape by altering the incentives parents face. All of us will take an interest in the traits everyone else selects, and this will present coordination problems that previous writers on genetic enhancement have failed to consider. Anomaly navigates difficult ethical issues with vivid language and scientifically informed speculation about how genetic engineering will transform humanity. Key features: Offers clear explanations of scientific concepts Explores important moral questions without academic jargon Brings discoveries from different fields together to give us a sense of where humanity is headed

Liberal political institutions have been an enormous boon for humanity. The free market aspect of liberalism has led to an explosion of innovation, ranging from new kinds of technology and novel forms of entertainment to advances in science and medicine. The emphasis on individual rights at the core of liberalism has increased our ability to explore new ways of living and to construct an identity of our own choosing. But liberal political institutions around the world are facing two crises: low fertility and declining social trust. In particular, liberalism's focus on individual liberty rather than group cohesion can increase economic productivity by encouraging the free movement of people and capital, but this movement is associated with declines in social cohesion and fertility. In this essay, we highlight some challenges to the long-term evolutionary stability of liberalism. In other words, we raise the question: Can liberalism last?

This chapter will focus on how the Holocaust shaped the concepts of race and eugenics in bioethics. I will begin with a brief account of how these terms were used before the Second World War, and then discuss how the Nazi eugenics programs and the Holocaust altered how scholars think about race and eugenics. In particular, I will discuss the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and 1950 Statement on Race, which signaled a change in how race and eugenics would be used in the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, I will consider how liberal eugenics in contemporary bioethics differs from older forms of eugenics, and how newer views about human populations (as genetic clusters) differ from older views of race. In doing so, I will explore how the Holocaust shaped modern taboos related to human genetics research.

In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of 'genetic enhancement' has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR 'eugenics', rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether 'eugenics' can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancement should engage with each other.

Public health programs began as an attempt to fight infectious diseases that are difficult to address without collective action. But the concept and practice of public health has ballooned to encompass an expanding list of controversial public policy goals ranging from reducing obesity to raising self-esteem. As the list of controversial goals expands, support for “public health” measures contracts. I’ll briefly defend the view that we should define public health as the provision of health-related public goods. I’ll then show that being a health-related public good is not a sufficient condition for counting as a public health goal, since virtually any private good can be converted into a public good by government fiat. This is the conversion problem, which challenges the way we ordinarily think about public goods and public health.

The use of antibiotics in animal agriculture is steadily increasing, especially in developing countries. The European Union and a handful of developed countries have implemented policies to scale back the use of antibiotics, recognizing its role in the global rise of antibiotic resistance. But many farmers who raise animals live in poor countries without public health regulations, or work for large corporate entities that can move their operations to places with weak regulations. To minimize the careless use of antibiotics around the world, we need multi-lateral coordination between states on some common standards for the use of antibiotics in animals.

In this paper we will discuss the status of gene editing technologies like CRISPR. We will examine whether this technology should be considered a form of enhancement, or if CRISPR is merely a medical technology analogous to many of the common medical interventions of today. The importance of this discussion arises from the enormous potential of CRISPR to increase human health and welfare. If we interrupt or delay its investigation and implementation based on misconceptions about its nature and consequences, we may fail to achieve great benefits. Clarifying what CRISPR is and how it compares to other medical procedures should create the right environment to discuss its development and introduction in society. We argue that gene editing is both a conventional medical technology and a potential human enhancer. It is important to separate these different applications. Just as in the cloning debate, it is possible to sort out therapeutic gene editing from enhancement gene editing in considering regulation or policy.

A central debate in bioethics is whether parents should try to influence the genetic basis of their children's traits. We argue that the case for using mate selection, embryo selection, and other interventions to enhance heritable traits like intelligence is strengthened by the fact that they seem to have positive network effects. These network effects include increased cooperation in collective action problems, which contributes to social trust and prosperity. We begin with an overview of evidence for these claims, and then argue that if individual welfare is largely a function of group traits, parents should try to preserve or enhance cognitive traits that have positive network effects.

Wiebers & Feigin identify intensive agriculture and trade in exotic animals as the main sources of novel zoonotic viral infections. They recommend a transition away from meat. I would add that we would do well to invest in the mass production of cultured meat, derived from stem cells, as a radical alternative to animal agriculture.

This chapter provides an overview of problems factory farming raises for human health, with special emphasis on antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can arise in animals and infect people. It concludes that there are legitimate disagreements about what we should do about factory farming but that everyone should agree on two things: first, we should defer to the best available science rather than viewing these issues through the prism of political ideology; second, we should think carefully about the moral trade-offs of different policy proposals rather than pontificating from an armchair.

Many intellectuals enthusiastically denounce those who argue that genes play some role in cognitive differences between human populations. However, such proposals are perfectly reasonable and are, in fact, consistent with the Darwinian research tradition in which most modern social scientists profess to operate. We argue that population-based cognitive differences are congruent with our best understanding of the world because there are strong reasons to believe that different environments and niches selected for different physical and psychological traits, including general cognitive ability. Like most hereditarians (those who believe it likely that genes contribute to differences in psychological traits among human populations), we do not believe there is decisive evidence about the causes of differences in cognitive ability. But we will argue that a partial genetic hypothesis is most consistent with the Darwinian research tradition.

For over a century, scientists have run experiments using phage viruses to treat bacterial infections. Until recently, the results were inconclusive because the mechanisms viruses use to attack bacteria were poorly understood. With the development of molecular biology, scientists now have a better sense of how phage work, and how they can be used to target infections. As resistance to traditional antibiotics continues to spread around the world, there is a moral imperative to facilitate research into phage therapy as an alternative treatment. This essay reviews ethical questions raised by phage therapy, and discusses regulatory challenges associated with phage research, and phage treatments.

BioethicsVolume 34, Issue 7 p. 735-735 BOOK REVIEW DESIGNING BABIES Robert Klitzman Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019. 360 pp. ISBN: 0190054476 (Hardcover) $29.95 Jonathan Anomaly, Jonathan Anomaly anomaly@upenn.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-5485-0121 School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaSearch for more papers by this author Jonathan Anomaly, Jonathan Anomaly anomaly@upenn.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-5485-0121 School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 June 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12746Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume34, Issue7September 2020Pages 735-735 RelatedInformation

Many people greet evidence of biologically based race and sex differences with extreme skepticism, even hostility. We argue that some of the vehemence with which many intellectuals in the West resist claims about group differences is rooted in the tacit assumption that accepting evidence for group differences in socially valued traits would undermine our reasons to treat people with respect. We call this the egalitarian fallacy . We first explain the fallacy and then give evidence that self-described liberals in the United States are especially likely to commit it when they reason about topics like race and sex. We then argue that people should not be as worried as they often are about research that finds psychological differences between men and women, or between people of different racial or ethnic groups. We conclude that if moral equality is believed to rest on biological identity, ethnically diverse societies are in trouble.

It is likely that gene editing technologies will become viable in the current century. As scientists uncover the genetic contribution to personality traits and cognitive styles, parents will face hard choices. Some of these choices will involve trade-offs from the standpoint of the individual's welfare, while others will involve trade-offs between what is best for each and what is good for all. Although we think we should generally defer to the informed choices of parents about what kinds of children to create, we argue that decisions to manipulate polygenic psychological traits will be much more ethically complicated than choosing Mendelian traits like blood type. We end by defending the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when legislation is necessary to prevent serious harms, we should aim for simple rules that apply to all, rather than micro-managing parental choices that shape the traits of their children. While we focus on embryo selection and gene editing, our arguments apply to all powerful technologies which influence the development of children.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing public health problems humanity faces. Research into new classes of antibiotics and new kinds of treatments - including risky experimental treatments such as phage therapy and vaccines - is an important part of improving our ability to treat infectious diseases. In order to aid this research, we will argue that we should permit researchers to pay people any amount of money to compensate for the risks of participating in clinical trials, including 'challenge studies' that involve deliberately infecting patients. We think that standard worries about paying for participation in risky research are reducible to concerns that can be addressed with the right screening mechanisms.