Genetic Enhancements and Relational Autonomy: Christian Ethics and the Child’s Autonomy in Vulnerability

Introduction

During the past six years, research on a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 has widely expanded technical possibilities for genome editing. A report by the American National Academies of Sciences (NAS) on human genome editing argued that parents should have the option of modifying an embryo’s DNA if it shows a predisposition to hereditary disease. Highlighting reproductive autonomy, the report assumes that parents have a legitimate interest in healthy children. ¹ Since then, researchers have refined the genetic modification of human embryos, and the question now looms larger of which medical conditions the technology might be applied to. The implantation of genetically modified human embryos is illegal in most Western countries, ² but with further technical advances, calls for a reconsideration of that policy may become louder. A recent survey in the UK showed about 75 per cent of the population in favour of genetically modifying human embryos to prevent disease. ³

Therapeutic genome editing for the sake of the parents’ reproductive autonomy would be in keeping with autonomy as a fundamental principle in bioethics. Yet what if parents seek treatment for a trait not commonly acknowledged as pathological or wish to ‘enhance’ the child’s capabilities genetically? The NAS report fails to mention children’s interests at all, presenting children as a helpful means for parents to pursue their own autonomy as one wishes ‘to see one’s self … reflected in the appearance of the children’. ⁴ Between a quarter and a third of respondents to the UK survey approved of futuristic genetic enhancements such as choosing the child’s eye colour or improving intelligence. ⁵ Like an enhancement of the child’s physical height or athletic abilities, choosing the eye colour is conceivable with genome editing, although scientifically unrealistic at the moment. ⁶ The NAS report rejects genetic enhancements ‘at this time’, ⁷ but seems very pragmatic in offering no further reasons. A wider political debate on enhancements is likely.

One significant response to this problem has come from the secular philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who pointed to the child’s autonomy in arguing against genetically enhancing embryos. ⁸ This argument has provoked significant opposition among philosophers and theologians. ⁹ In theological ethics, the prominence of autonomy in bioethics is often critiqued. The communitarian theologian Robert Song and the secular philosopher John Harris agree in their critique of Habermas that parents are simply unable to ask children about many important things. ¹⁰ An embryo also cannot choose its own genes. So if autonomy plays a role in genome editing, it seems to be the autonomy of the parents, who might choose genetic enhancements. However, Song and other theologians argue that attributing autonomy to children just illustrates a wider problem inherent in the liberal concept of autonomy.

In this article, I will argue that the way certain theologians portray God’s action vis-à-vis creation provides compelling reasons to endorse an account of relational autonomy, which differs both from classic liberalism and communitarianism, but helps make sense of claims about the child’s autonomy. Relational autonomy also incorporates the more recent discourse on vulnerability. I will then interpret Habermas’s critique of genetic enhancements in the name of the child’s autonomy as an example of relational autonomy, as he locates the moral question within the particular relationship between parents and children.

The liberal tradition defines autonomy as unencumbered, critically reflected choice ¹¹ or intentional action with understanding, free from external controlling influence. ¹² Critics argue, by contrast, that if autonomy is ultimately about the maximisation of choice, ¹³ then putting a premium on autonomy in ethics leaves individuals with even less moral guidance for how to choose. ¹⁴ With the principle of autonomy focused on protecting individuals from encroachment by others, the liberal tradition seems to consider the moral subject in unrealistic isolation and abstraction, subscribing to a dubious ideal of a non-social self. ¹⁵ A maximisation of individual choice reduces others to ‘self-interested, independent, rational contractors’. ¹⁶ This critique has been voiced notably by adherents of the Aristotelian tradition, in the classic natural law sense ¹⁷ as in the communitarian tradition, ¹⁸ and in both theological and philosophical ethics. Some feminist critics have also pointed out that autonomy may reflect an inherently ‘masculinist’ striving for control. ¹⁹ If autonomy is about minimising vulnerability, it may also render agents insensitive to the vulnerabilities of others, as Sarah Coakley has argued. ²⁰

These concerns must be taken very seriously. However, a simple dismissal of autonomy runs the risk of paternalism. ²¹ It would also be insufficient both to critique and to affirm autonomy at the same time, as some thinkers do, with tensions remaining undertheorised. ²² Moreover, the critics of autonomy rarely acknowledge the feminist discourse on relational autonomy, ²³ which widens the focus from classic liberal individualism to the wider social context of the subject. Relational autonomy views a person’s social embedding as essential, rather than accidental to a person’s autonomy. ²⁴ Like liberal autonomy, relational autonomy seeks to reduce certain forms of vulnerability, such as drug addiction or homelessness, which ‘undermine autonomy’. ²⁵

Relational autonomy does not, however, reduce authentic decisions free from manipulation to critically reflected choice. Agents are not only rational but also ‘emotional, embodied, desiring, creative and feeling’. ²⁶ In focusing especially on rationality—on procedures of informed consent, for example—liberal autonomy looks merely at the tip of the iceberg of human identity, although the deeper dimensions of identity reveal our thoroughly social nature. Coakley made this point early on from a theological perspective. ²⁷

Since our social nature makes us inherently vulnerable, relational autonomy does not seek a consistent reduction of vulnerability—it even ‘requires certain forms of vulnerability’. ²⁸ Relational autonomy is not to be conceived of as a maximisation of choice. True autonomy aims at a balance between a protection of individual interests and a commitment to community. Such a revised account of autonomy has only rarely been acknowledged in mainstream bioethics, ²⁹ and even less in the discourse on genetic enhancements. ³⁰

The Philosophical Enhancement Discourse

Practical issues in genome editing make a straightforward appeal to autonomy difficult. ³¹ Almost every cell contains a complete copy of a person’s genome, and a genetic intervention—whether therapeutic or ‘enhancing’—is often unable to access a sufficient number of individual cells. A child’s or an adult’s organ singled out for genetic changes consists of an extremely high number of cells, which are also often inaccessible. Technically, the editing task seems more manageable when working on an embryo, which consists of one or a few cells. The genome might be edited soon after an egg-cell is fertilised in a dish in IVF, but before implantation. These changes would also be inherited in future generations. So when far-reaching genetic enhancements can be implemented technically—when the embryo has not yet been implanted—the child cannot decide whether it wants enhancements, and once it can decide, many genetic enhancements are no longer technically feasible, such as increased physical height. So the question about enhancements relates to genetically editing embryos.

When the embryo’s genome is modified for enhancement purposes, there are of course great differences to reproductive cloning—i.e., the implantation of an embryo whose nuclear DNA was taken from a somatic cell of another person—but the targeted intervention can also be seen as a parallel. The philosopher Philip Kitcher, for example, addresses both issues using a liberal account of autonomy. He argues that the child’s autonomy is the crucial reason why cloning is ethically indefensible. With the DNA donor as an ideal in mind, clone-parents would likely restrict the developing child in her own life choices while raising the child—even though we cannot predict the influence of genes on the actual traits of the future child. ³² Further, he tentatively rejects a genetic ‘enhancement’ of one’s child. ³³ He fears that to ‘enhance’ children would lead to ‘a rat-race for creating perfect people’. ³⁴ He presumably believes this is undesirable due to his main concern: in ‘enhancing’ an embryo genetically, parents would pre-empt or override their child’s autonomous choice, and a ‘life theme’ would be ‘imposed from without’. ³⁵

Here the child’s autonomy should take precedence over the parents’, but Kitcher sees things differently if the embryo is diagnosed with disability: ‘parents who find the risk of a low-quality life [of the child] too great will be moved to abort’. ³⁶ Disability not only reduces a child’s autonomy, but also the parents’, so even a mild form of Down’s can justify abortion, according to Kitcher.

Alternative liberal views on autonomy reinforce the view that disability is simply negative. Some thinkers consider enhancements legitimate if they increase the potential functioning of the child. They do not view the parents’ choice to raise a child with disability as an autonomous decision, but measure the value of life by the level of physical functioning that the prospective body affords, and the range of choices thus open to the child. ³⁷ Enhancements would then seem to contribute to the child’s autonomy. Several secular thinkers argue this way, ³⁸ but so do some ethicists in the Jewish tradition, for example. ³⁹

This tradition provides little motivation to bear a child with disability to term. From a theological perspective, however, the categorical subjection of the nascent life of a child with disability to this view of autonomy does not reflect the Christian conviction that all life is due to undeserved divine mercy. ⁴⁰ It also does not reflect the appreciation of disability inspired by Paul’s conviction that God’s ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor. 12:9). Indeed, many Christian theologians reject a maximisation of physical functioning, contrasting it with a religious sense of the meaningfulness of life even in suffering. ⁴¹ In sum, from a theological point of view, although one may find Kitcher’s critique of enhancements helpful, his appeal to liberal autonomy has severe limitations.

In philosophy, enhancement critics engage in dialogue with religious traditions. ⁴² Nonetheless, there are also Christian enhancement advocates who value greater physical functioning. ⁴³ As the pursuit of higher functioning is often justified in the name of autonomy, autonomy requires renewed theological attention.

Communitarianism and Autonomy

In the work of many theologians, the concept of relational autonomy is not typically deployed to develop alternatives to the liberal concept of autonomy in bioethics. For example, to varying degrees, theologians Celia Deane-Drummond and Robert Song draw on classic virtue theory and communitarian thought in their ethical discussion of genetic technologies. Speaking of autonomy mostly in a tone of detached scepticism, ⁴⁴ they devise alternatives to the crucial role autonomy plays in philosophical ethics.

One important question is how ethicists relate individual identity to communal life. Song, who has published repeatedly on genetics and ethics, strongly highlights the communal constitution of identity, contrasting this with the focus on individual choice in the liberal tradition. According to Song, personal identity results as a community enacts the commitments that give meaning to life, such that gratuity and mutuality distinguish such communality from individualism. He even calls the principle of equality of opportunity ‘intrinsically hostile to community and mutuality’. ⁴⁵ In liberal autonomy, by contrast, equality of opportunity provides guidance about how society should shape the circumstances in which individuals exercise self-determination. ⁴⁶ Song is right, however, that community and mutuality likely remain abstract ideals if people invoke equality of opportunity merely in order to maximise individualistic freedom. Along similar lines, when the communitarian Stanley Hauerwas contrasts the autonomy tradition with an emphasis on community and virtue, he replaces equality of opportunity with biblical texts that are reflected in the church’s practices, such as hospitality. In this account, agents need to find their social role in that larger context rather than holding on to formal criteria such as maximum choice. ⁴⁷

Nevertheless, autonomy can play an important constructive role in theological ethics, even for communitarians who critique it. For example, Song reintroduces equality of opportunity and autonomy in the question of reproductive cloning, albeit only in an implicit way. He argues that cloning would consign children to a life ‘in the shadow of one’s clone-parent’. ⁴⁸ The secular ethicist Søren Holm popularised the shadow metaphor when he critiqued cloning in the name of the child’s autonomy and self-determination. ⁴⁹ The metaphor rephrases the open-future argument, by which the philosopher Hans Jonas argued that cloning endangers the child’s autonomy: ‘It is the known [genetic] donor archetype that will dictate all expectations, predictions, hopes and fears [that parents will have about the child] … The trial of life has been cheated of its enticing (also frightening) openness’. ⁵⁰ These arguments do not rely on genetic determinism. ⁵¹ The influence of genes on later development is difficult to predict, but it is unlikely to be entirely negligible, and for the parent that is enough to confront the clone with undue expectations later in life. For this reason, Michael Sandel, another prominent communitarian critic of liberal autonomy, makes use of both the shadow metaphor and the open-future argument to protest against enhancements and cloning. ⁵² Ultimately, Song and Sandel claim that the child should enjoy autonomy and equality of opportunity—‘an open future’—vis-à-vis the parents in finding her own way through life—even though this contradicts Song’s explicit rejection of equality of opportunity.

Alternatively, can theological ethics disregard the concept of autonomy entirely? A determined communitarian, social account of identity would encourage parents strongly to communicate beliefs and practices to their children, whether or not that leaves them living in anyone’s shadow. Indeed, Hauerwas is not opposed to cloning in principle, although he rejects the procedure. Together with Joel Shuman, he portrays cloning as analogous to incorporation into the body of Christ: as Christians are patterned after Christ, cloned cells are patterned after donor-DNA. ⁵³ As an organ enjoys less autonomy vis-à-vis the larger body, ‘the uniqueness and the autonomy of the individual’ ⁵⁴ are not helpful in the cloning debate. Not thinking highly of the principle of free choice, ⁵⁵ Hauerwas sees little reason to be particularly concerned with manipulation in communicating one’s own values and views to a clone-child.

Hauerwas and Shuman specifically reject therapeutic cloning, which would create replacement organs for the DNA donor. They do not argue that therapeutic cloning infringes the human dignity of the clone, but that it would be an attempt to escape from suffering and to extend temporal life. By contrast, the church as the body of Christ cultivates hope for life beyond death in the midst of suffering. An argument against an escape from suffering, however, could also be made against all other major medical interventions such as heart or brain surgery, chemotherapy, organ donation, or thrombolysis after stroke. A large number of Christians would be unwilling to forgo them entirely. Being part of the body of Christ by itself does not rule out major medical interventions and, by extension, cloning, if understood in Hauerwas and Shuman’s sense.

If there were genetic enhancements that increased participation levels in church life, Hauerwas might not object in principle. He rejects autonomy in the belief that ‘true freedom comes by learning to be appropriately dependent’. ⁵⁶ He is right in rejecting the wish to maximise autonomy in order to be fully independent, which is unrealistic. Yet his emphasis on dependence can even be used to argue for social accommodation of particular forms of injustice. For example, his teacher John Howard Yoder argued that women should be subordinate to men, which everybody involved should understand as ‘subversive’ as women thus relativise worldly status in Christ. ⁵⁷ Dependence alone is a problematic criterion, given its potential for religiously-sanctioned injustice, which is one reason why autonomy is often invoked in the first place.

Here as in the cloning debate, we should not dismiss autonomy easily. Neither should it remain merely implicit, as with Song and Sandel, whose explicit rejection of autonomy makes their arguments inconsistent. Neither should we simply affirm liberal autonomy, which is too individualistic. A better account of autonomy is required.

A Theological Account of Relational Autonomy

Rowan Williams’s theological understanding of sexuality can point to a better understanding of autonomy. Williams argues that it would go against an account of sexual maturity to invoke some authority or ‘marital duty’ according to which one marital partner had to make herself available sexually to the other. ⁵⁸ Williams argues that being desired physically is a form of grace, by which he means an appropriate desire that does not overpower or use the other person. Indeed, human sexuality is best understood in the light of God’s desire for us. God’s desire for humanity does not overpower humanity, but in God’s self-giving, God seeks to elicit a free response from the creature, and God thereby becomes vulnerable. ⁵⁹ Sarah Coakley has made a similar argument, considering divine desire fundamental to the multi-faceted human eros. ⁶⁰

In foregoing control, respect for the other’s autonomy is a crucial ingredient in Christian sexual ethics, although Williams and Coakley do not use this language. Neither would simple autonomy be true to their views of sexuality. In wishing for physical intimacy, a person chooses to become vulnerable, as that wish can be denied by the other. If the wish is reciprocated, then vulnerability and risk are voluntarily extended to both sides—with sexuality presenting many opportunities for intimacy but also the risk of getting hurt or ‘making a fool of yourself’. ⁶¹ Not only respect for the other’s potential reserve is crucial, but also the embrace of vulnerability. If both partners voluntarily agreed to objectify each other, choosing to disregard their vulnerability, there would be no grace involved, and the sense of profound relationality would be stunted.

If Williams’s argument can be claimed for a re-evaluation of autonomy, this cannot mean the maximisation of unencumbered choice. In interpreting autonomy as maximisation of choice, by contrast, liberalism understands social relations in a strongly transactional sense. If instead we understand autonomy as complementary to vulnerability, the relationship takes on a more personal character, and a relational account of autonomy results. While autonomy can be understood in problematic ways, the grain of truth in the concept is its aversion to manipulation, authoritarianism, and patronising social forms such as a one-sided emphasis on dependence or a contrast between equality of opportunity and community or mutuality. By contrast, autonomy and vulnerability are complementary in Jesus’ teaching that ‘whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’ (Mk 10:44). Here Jesus gives leadership privileges to those who are especially vulnerable and demands vulnerability from those with leadership privileges.

An implicit premise is an egalitarianism in which nobody has privileged claims to authority over others merely by virtue of power, family background, race, or sex. The liberal idea of equality of opportunity can be in keeping with this principle: ‘social and economic inequalities’ must not rest on inherited privilege, but must be ‘attached to offices and positions open to all’. ⁶² Modelled on Jesus’ understanding of leadership and vulnerability, Christians should thus affirm a liberal idea of equality of opportunity.

The connection between leadership and vulnerability reflects the Christian account of God’s own kenosis in Christ. Karl Barth argues that God’s election of humanity was fundamentally non-patronising; in electing humanity, God accepted great ‘risk’ and chose to be ‘foreordained to danger and trouble’. ⁶³ Although a creature contradicts the meaning of life in rejecting God, God still prefers ‘free human partnership’ ⁶⁴ to a creature ‘engulfed and covered as by a divine landslide’. ⁶⁵ The fact that God chooses vulnerability over force makes the communion between God and human persons more precious, or even possible. Wolfhart Pannenberg pursues a similar train of thought in speaking of the reciprocal self-distinction of the three persons of the Trinity from each other. ⁶⁶ The Father and Creator chooses not to impose his rule over creation directly, but to depend on the testimony of the incarnate Son. Although without sin, the incarnate Son is not immune to temptation and sin, so in relying on the Son, the Father is making himself vulnerable. The Son stays true to his calling and asks the creature to have faith in the Father—even when the Son is faced with crucifixion. The Father then raises the Son and transfers his reign to him, but again the Son does not simply enforce his rule, but chooses vulnerability in leaving it to the Spirit to inspire the creature to acknowledge Christ’s reign. In turn, the Spirit does not replace the creature’s own will, but respects and enlightens the creature. The congregation then reflects this recognition of autonomy in vulnerability in how members honour each other, especially the weak (1 Cor. 12:23).

This echoes what Sarah Coakley has called an ‘empowered vulnerability’ and a ‘loss of repressive control’. ⁶⁷ Autonomy and vulnerability must go together. By contrast, a mere emphasis on dependence is likely to compromise on issues of justice. If a legitimate concern for mutuality and community is played off against equality of opportunity, if autonomy is reintroduced only in implicit, undertheorised ways, then marginalised groups are likely confronted with calls to make further sacrifices in the name of community. By contrast, in Christian congregations, marginalised groups like women, people of colour or people with disability have often been right to lobby for greater equality of opportunity. As long as autonomy is not understood simply as a maximisation of independence and choice, but as a rejection of patronising and authoritarian forms of power, and as long as autonomy goes together with vulnerability, the insistence on autonomy and equal opportunity is helpful and legitimate theologically.

Respect for autonomy must be the default, therefore, especially when vulnerable people are unable to find ways to embrace vulnerability freely without capitulating to injustice. The grain of truth in liberal autonomy is that Christians must counter unjust and manipulative forms of vulnerability, even if they seem to enhance community life. A relational account of autonomy does not, however, minimise vulnerability and maximise choice. In simply minimising vulnerability, we would also reduce the chances for shared flourishing that is at the heart of relational autonomy.

Habermas on Autonomy and Genetic Enhancements

This Christian account of relational autonomy paves the way for a discussion of Jürgen Habermas’s case against the moral right of parents to enhance their children genetically. Habermas builds on the argument against living in the shadow of a clone-parent. Although Song made the same argument against reproductive cloning, he critiques Habermas’s approach in principle. From a Christian point of view, however, there is much of value in Habermas’s arguments, even if he himself holds secular views and does not explicitly spell out his case in terms of relational autonomy or vulnerability. This section will lay out Habermas’s claim that, in the enhancement debate, not only the parents’ autonomy deserves respect, but also the child’s. The following section will argue that a certain vulnerability is legitimate on the child’s side, but that simultaneous respect for the child’s autonomy assigns some degree of vulnerability to parents as well.

Habermas claims that children have the moral right to live lives that are genuinely their own. If parents were to ‘enhance’ their child’s biology by modifying the embryo, they would predispose the child’s life too strongly towards particular values. Song, although critical of Habermas, agrees that some forms of parental influence go too far indeed, such as exaggerated academic ambitions. ⁶⁸ Habermas sees genetic enhancements placing children at the disposal of parents. The question of genetic determinism will require attention later on, but for Habermas, such disposal does not do justice to the fundamentally relational status of children ‘as equal members of the moral community’. ⁶⁹

Habermas’s account differs from John Rawls’s classic exposition of liberal justice. According to Rawls, social questions are to be considered impartially behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, ⁷⁰ in fundamental abstraction from the social embedding of persons. As part of this abstract distribution, Rawls also argues that it would be unfair to children not to provide enhancements from which they would benefit later on. ⁷¹ This is a generalised theory of rational choice that purposefully minimises the specific relational dynamic taking place between parents and children. Habermas, by contrast, insists that the relationship between parents and children must not be covered by a ‘veil of ignorance’. ⁷² Instead, the moral issue is a fundamentally relational one, in which moral equality rather than unilateral disposal is crucial.

Habermas is less than clear on what the child’s autonomy could imply. He asserts that children have the right to be ‘the undivided authors of their lives’. ⁷³ Song rightly objects that ‘co-authorship [by parents] is an inescapable feature of our lives’. ⁷⁴ Children cannot make a choice for or against, say, tennis lessons, unless parents have already provided them with a sense of what playing tennis is like. The same holds for a child’s religious education. Parental influence on the child is inescapable. Hence, the question is how one might ascribe autonomy to young children and, by extension, to the embryo.

Habermas and other advocates of the child’s ‘right to an open future’ are fully aware that parents must make decisions for their children unilaterally. ⁷⁵ Habermas does not envision the child choosing how it is raised, but argues for the child’s future ‘critical reappraisal’ (Aufarbeitung) in retrospect and a ‘revisionary learning process’. ⁷⁶ In hindsight, the maturing child can either—approvingly—discover the wisdom in parents’ past decisions or—disapprovingly—preserve her integrity in maintaining a subversive stance against the way the parents raised her. Despite ambiguities, Habermas does not consider children the ‘sole authors of their own life history’ in the full causal sense. Instead, children will face the hermeneutical task of coming to terms with the way their parents raised them: ‘we are called upon to be the authors of a critically appropriated life history’. ⁷⁷ The hermeneutical task crucially involves the relationship with one’s parents; it is fuelled by a sense of equal moral standing. It may not be in the foreground in every moral decision, but without it, we would not be able to speak meaningfully of autonomy. In making unilateral choices for the child, parents need to be fair and act in the child’s best interests. In order to preserve the child’s autonomy, they must think critically about their own wishes for the child. What does that mean for enhancements?

The Child’s Relational Autonomy: The Parents’ Vulnerability

A relational account of autonomy raises the question not just of how parents need to respect the child’s autonomy, but also how parents need to be vulnerable to the child’s autonomy. In drawing on Habermas, I am arguing that parents who ‘enhance’ their children fail to do so. This means to see enhancements in genuinely relational terms.

Theologian Maureen Junker-Kenny, who sides with Habermas in the enhancement debate, suggests a relational understanding in arguing that parents would be too manipulative in choosing enhancements: she argues that certain character traits are inborn genetically, so that parents directly dispose of the child in making genetic changes. ⁷⁸ However, genetic predispositions do not generally allow us to predict future abilities and preferences apart from environment and behaviour. ⁷⁹ Song critiques Habermas for failing to take seriously his own awareness ⁸⁰ that few genetic factors truly determine a trait. ⁸¹ If an athletic enhancement becomes effective only with increased training, it could even seem to increase the child’s autonomy, by providing more athletic choices. When Habermas claims that parents dispose of their children in choosing enhancements that are ‘irreversible’, ⁸² he seems to miss the point. If genes do not determine traits and children’s preferences are plastic rather than innate, then how would the child be especially vulnerable to manipulation?

Song’s critique of enhancements, by contrast, does not focus on the role enhancements play in the relation between parents and children. For him, genetic enhancements are immoral because they would be a sinful attempt to overcome creaturely finitude, which would contradict the Christian belief in the goodness of creation. ⁸³ Yet that might still leave open the possibility of enhancements that do not question creaturely limitations but make it more likely for underachievers to catch up with high achievers. ⁸⁴ In biblical traditions, moreover, it is not clear that humans are faced with an authoritative moral order in creation. Creatures can be portrayed as active participants in the divine act of creation (Gen. 1:9, 11, 20, 24), ⁸⁵ in which case enhancements might be seen as human co-creativity. When Paul calls on the Corinthians to ‘be reconciled to God’, he characterises being in Christ as the ‘new creation’ with a polemical edge: ‘everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ (2 Cor. 5:17, 20). The promise of eschatological consummation, moreover, includes a radical transformation of the created order (e.g., Rev. 21:1).

If the argument that enhancements are ‘unnatural’ is not sufficient to take them off the table, the question why parents should not choose enhancements for their children is all the more urgent. Moreover, enhancements may be reversible. Somatic genetic enhancements, which are implemented after birth, would be reversible. What if scientists found ways to reverse modifications done at the embryonic stage?

More to the point than reversibility is ‘revisability’: will the child have the ‘opportunity to take a revisionist stand’, as Habermas hopes, ⁸⁶ or will the choice to ‘enhance’ the child be a step with which the child can only come to terms with the greatest difficulty? If parents chose genetic enhancements for their child, they would be highly likely to be overly directive in raising the child, after not even shrinking back from ‘editing’ their preferences into the child’s genes. Even if a child’s preferences are not determined genetically, that does not mean that they are entirely pliable either. For some inscrutable reason, the child’s preferences may fail to coincide with those of the parents. Even if genetic enhancements can be reversed, the relational dynamic that takes place between parents and children while the enhancement is in effect cannot simply be discounted.

Ultimately, the point is not that enhancements would be certain to result in particular capabilities. The point is that parents may go to extreme lengths in implementing their own wishes when the child does not yet have a voice, and hence they are likely to do so even if the child speaks out against these wishes later on. The point is not so much the genetic enhancement itself, but the parenting dynamic that it encourages. The assumptions that a critique of enhancements presupposes genetic determinism and that such a critique would be undercut by genetic reversibility fail to acknowledge the social, relational dimension of parenting. It was argued above, however, that from a theological perspective, the relational dynamic of autonomy and vulnerability in the emergence of communion between God and the creature as well as within the Christian congregation is highly significant.

If parents have paid a lot of money for genetically enhanced athletic abilities, even accepted a slight medical risk in genome editing and perhaps chosen the burdensome procedure of IVF only for this reason, they are unlikely to respect the child’s preferences if they go against sports. ⁸⁷ It seems unrealistic to think that genetic enhancements would not make parenting more directive. Yet, even if parents respected the child’s preferences, an enhancement would be harmful for the relationship if the child merely thought the parents would rather see him as a sports enthusiast—hence the enhancement. The child’s interests may lie in some other activity than the enhanced one, and he could wonder if he is a disappointment to his parents. Enhancements are thus likely to increase the trend towards a ‘Tiger Mother’ education or ‘helicopter’ and ‘hyper parenting’. Empirical studies show that these approaches tend to reduce the child’s feeling of self-worth and increase levels of anxiety, stress-related disorders, substance abuse, and suicide. ⁸⁸ Over-ambitious parents signal to the child that they value not the child, but her ever greater achievements, and over-protective parenting suggests that the child’s mistakes reduce not just her opportunities, but even her parents’ love. The enhancement might be reversed genetically, but not the manipulative approach to raising the child that becomes more likely with enhancements. Eager for the moral approval of parents and exposed to their initiative, children are highly vulnerable in this sense. Parents, by contrast, too often act as if they were not.

Of course some degree of nudging and coaxing is legitimate in raising children. Even the greatest sports enthusiast has sometimes been unwilling to attend sports practice, and later on she was grateful that her parents made her attend. Children sometimes resist attending church services, but that by itself does not mean that parents should give up religious education. However, if it eventually turns out that there is simply a stubborn mismatch between the parents’ ideals and the child’s overall wishes, parents will need to decide how much pressure they are going to use to pursue their ideals for their child.

In the debate with Habermas over enhancements, Song instead places the emphasis on the legitimacy of parents’ formative contributions to the child’s identity when it comes to religious formation. In consequence, he is much less concerned with parental accountability in child rearing. He argues for the child’s ‘negotiation’ of identity in ‘selectively appropriating the things that can be changed, and coming to terms with—and perhaps even learning gratitude for—those aspects that cannot’. ⁸⁹ Song considers parents responsible for the child, but not responsible to the child. If children cannot come to terms with their parents’ highly directive actions, that may be tragic, but the parents have not done anything wrong, in Song’s estimation.

For this reason it is unclear why Song critiques strong academic ambitions that parents may pursue in their child’s education. Extra tutoring does not seem to be against a moral order in creation. As in the cloning debate, Song’s concern with overly directive parenting remains undertheorised in the debate with Habermas.

The question for parents is, then, will they make themselves vulnerable to the child or will they be authoritarian parents? With enhancements, parents take an important step towards implementing their own ideals, and that makes it less likely for them to concede if their ideals consistently fail to match the child’s wishes. To be highly directive in raising a child and then to leave it up to the child to come to terms with the consequences later would be a non-relational understanding of parental autonomy that disregards the communal aspect.

Parents’ autonomy must go together with their vulnerability to the child. In legitimate unilateral parental choices for the child, such as raising a child as part of a Christian church, parents need to remain vulnerable to rejection in the possibility that the child becomes estranged from the practices the parents chose. In remaining thus vulnerable, they will adjust their religious education to the needs and joys of a developing young mind. If this consistently fails, parental authority is not the remedy. No child must be forced to live in the shadow of the parents’ ideals, athletic or religious. After all, Christians believe in a God who encounters humans in vulnerability and does not manipulate and force them into worship.

Conclusion

A concept that sees autonomy not as social independence, but as constitutively relational is still rare in mainstream bioethics. In Rawls’s rational choice model, an individualistic bias has encumbered the ethical discourse around genetic enhancements, at a time when genome editing methods are heading towards greater technical maturity. This has resulted in a polarisation between enhancement advocates arguing for parental autonomy and communitarian theologians who show too little concern for autonomy.

I have argued for a theological account of relational autonomy. God does not overpower the creature, but seeks to elicit the creature’s positive answer to God’s revelation in choosing vulnerability. God autonomously pursues God’s own goal of communion with the creature, but in aiming at communion, divine autonomy goes together with vulnerability. In respecting the creature’s own autonomy, God seeks other means than force and formal authority to win the creature over. Yet the creature’s autonomy cannot be reduced to a maximisation of choice. Only in also embracing a certain vulnerability in relation to others does the creature do justice to the divine desire for the creature. Hence, a Christian account of autonomy must be relational, and it does not choose autonomy over vulnerability or vice-versa. A one-sided emphasis on community or dependence, by contrast, would run the risk of accommodating injustice.

This Christian account of relational autonomy reverberates with crucial insights in Habermas’s critique of genetic enhancements for children. Habermas’s point is that in retrospect, children face the biographical, relational task of coming to terms with how their parents raised them. The danger with enhancements is not that they change the child’s preferences and physical capabilities, which would be erroneously envisioned as genetically determined. Rather, enhancements are highly likely to reinforce the authoritarian temptation to measure the child by the parents’ overly ambitious ideals. It can be legitimate for parents to influence children according to their own ideals, but in remaining vulnerable, parents should resist enhancements, which increase the temptation of overly directive parenting choices. Taking guidance from how Scripture describes God’s own activity towards the creature, parents should strike a balance in complementing their autonomy with a vulnerability to the child’s own wishes, in the interest of greater community.