Department of Philosophy, Western Michigan University

Fritz Allhoff is an assistant professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University; his specialties include bioethics, ethical theory, and philosophy of biology.  Before coming to WMU, Fritz was a senior research fellow at the American Medical Association’s Institute for Ethics.  He has published in various areas of bioethics, including genetic enhancement, cloning, stem cell research, research ethics, and bioterrorism defense.  Fritz is also very interested in the ethics of emerging technologies, especially nanoethics, and currently has an NSF grant under review to investigate nanotechnologies and human enhancement (with John Weckert, Jim Moor, and Pat Lin).

Genetic interventions raise a host of moral issues and, of its various species, germ-line genetic enhancement is the most morally contentious.  This paper surveys various arguments against germ-line enhancements and attempts to demonstrate their inadequacies.  A positive argument is then advanced in favor of certain germ-line enhancements, which holds that they are morally permissible if and only if they augment Rawlsian primary goods, either directly or by facilitating their acquisition.