Downloaded from jme.bmj.com on December 16, 2011 - Published by group.bmj.

com

Theoretical ethics

BRIEF ABSTRACT

Sparrows song revisited

John Harris
Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, School of Law University of Manchester, UK Correspondence to John Harris, Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, School of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK; john.harris@manchester.ac.uk Accepted 9 August 2011 Published Online First 24 September 2011

Robert Sparrow1 has assayed a response to criticisms I expressed of his arguments in my Sparrows, hedgehogs and castrati: reections on gender and enhancement in this journal.2 Sparrow simply re-states at some length his view that the life expectancy advantage women enjoy of between 6 or 7 years gives those like myself who believe that we have a duty to have the best children we can have good reason always to choose to produce females, and that this is embarrassing to me. I reject this on the grounds that it is to the advantage of every human being to be part of a human, or post-human, community with two genders and that almost no sane person, including almost no men, wish otherwise. The differential in life expectancy is simply not enough to outweigh the overall advantages of the gender differences we most of us enjoy, men and women. Sparrow, moreover, thinks my appeal to the overall consequences of our actions or policies constitutes eugenics and an appeal to society s interests over individual interests. This is not so, both interconnect and cannot be sensibly separated in this case. Sparrow s somewhat triumphalist assertion that my position amounts to eugenics passes me by as the idle wind that I respect not, because I have always embraced eugenics dened as the attempt to produce ne healthy children. As I pointed out in the paper Sparrow now criticises, those who think as he does have no reason to select against

men. The decent thing to do would be to wait and let the men decide whether they will choose castration for the extra life expectancy it will probably deliver. I do not myself believe that, apart from Sparrow himself, there will be many takers. I have much enjoyed reading Sparrow s rejoinder but see nothing in it that calls for further comment, not least because it is full of rather strange, and sometimes on the face of it incoherent, claims. The one I enjoyed most is the following: Sparrow claims it is indeed possible to improve upon the normal functioning available to one sex (most plausibly males) by selecting children of the other sex1 (p. 4). It is not only difcult but surely quite impossible to see how producing females instead of males would improve upon the normal functioning available to males as Sparrow claims. It would be like attempting to improve the avour (or indeed the shelf life or any other attribute) of a crop of strawberries by growing oranges instead.
Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

REFERENCES
1. 2. Sparrow R. Fear of a female planet: how John Harris came to endorse eugenic social engineering. J Med Ethics 2012;38:4e7. Harris J. Sparrows, hedgehogs and castrati: reections on gender and enhancement. J Med Ethics 2011;37:262e6.

J Med Ethics 2012;38:8. doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100172

Downloaded from jme.bmj.com on December 16, 2011 - Published by group.bmj.com

Sparrow's song revisited

John Harris J Med Ethics 2012 38: 8 originally published online September 24, 2011

doi: 10.1136/medethics-2011-100172

Updated information and services can be found at:

http://jme.bmj.com/content/38/1/8.full.html

These include:

References Email alerting service

This article cites 2 articles, 2 of which can be accessed free at:

http://jme.bmj.com/content/38/1/8.full.html#ref-list-1

Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.

Notes

To request permissions go to:

http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions

To order reprints go to:

http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform

To subscribe to BMJ go to:

http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/