Consequentialism and the unforeseeable future
Analysis (United Kingdom), vol. 50, no. 4, 1990, pp. 253–256
Abstract
The National Institutes of Health/Department of Energy Human Genome Project has been funding directed research for only 5 years, and it is understandably difficult to cite important research advances directly attributable to the project. However, the project has been constructive in fostering multidisciplinary group research and an inspiring and synergistic ‘‘just do it’’ attitude in both political and scientific circles, domestically and abroad. This collaborative spirit has spawned large-scale genetic and physical mapping projects, with the most impressive and useful results to date being the dense genetic maps produced by the Genethon, a French organization largely supported by the French muscular dystrophy association. With the genetic and physical map reagents now becoming available, disease-gene cloning is proceeding at an increasingly rapid pace. More important than the predictable acceleration of disease-gene mapping are the unpredictable benefits: Will a dense PCR-based dinucleotide-repeat genetic map open novel alternative approaches to disease-gene isolation? Will it become possible to localize disease genes by simply analyzing unrelated, isolated probands rather than the rarer ‘’extended family’’? Proband-based ‘’linkage-disequilibrium cloning’’ may become possible if adequate density, informativeness, and stability of polymorphic loci are obtained. In addition, ‘‘genome exclusion cloning’’ will be added to the established positional, candidate-gene, and functional-disease-gene-cloning experimental approaches. The anticipated exponential expansion of human genetic disease information over the remainder of the 10-year tenure of the Human Genome Project unveils critical yet unresolved issues for medical education and the practice of medicine. As we strive for the epitome of preventive medicine-a personal genetic propensity database provided at birth-medical education must tool up to teach the meaning and use of this valuable information. The insurance industry seems ill-equipped to use this information. Will the Human Genome Project unintentionally force the hand of nationalized health care?
Quotes from this work
There may be a temptation to regard one life as trivial when compared with seven million. What difference will a choice of life or death for Smith make when compared with the millions who will surely die whatever you choose? Or perhaps we could say that it is not so much that one more life is trivial compared with several million, but rather than morality should not have anything to say about such a difference. Bernard Williams could be taken to be describing such a view when he talks of a moral agent for whom ’there are certain situations so monstruous that the idea that the processes of moral rationality could yield an answer in them is insane: they are situations which so transcend in enormity the human business of moral deliberation that from a moral point of view it cannot matter any more what happens’. Williams constrats such a view with consequentialism, which ‘will have something to say even on the difference between massacring seven million, and massacring seven million and one’. One can certainly sypmathize with the agent who is so horrified at the scale of a massacre that she fhinds it difficult to deliberate rationally in the circumstances. This does not, however, support the view that from a moral point of view it cannot matter anymore what happens. If there really is no moral difference between massacring seven million and massacring seven million and one, the allied soldier arriving at Auschwitz can have no moral reason for preventing the murder of one last Jew before the Nazi surrender. The Nazi himself can have no moral reason for refraining from one last murder. While Williams’s moral agent is berating the universe for transcending the bounds of rationality, the consequentialist is saving a life. It is not hard to guess which of these agents I would rather have on my side.