Jonathan Anomaly is the academic director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program in Quito, Ecuador. He also works with a company that offers embryo selection for polygenic traits. Prior to his current appointment, Professor Anomaly taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. This talk is a book launch for the new edition of Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement (Routledge, 2024).
Anomaly will begin with an overview of the transformative reproductive technologies that will soon be available to people around the globe. He’ll then consider the policy challenges these technologies raise, including concerns some will have over the pursuit of positional goods, the emergence of large genetic inequalities, and the potential for governmental abuse. Anomaly will end by considering the potential benefits of various kinds of government regulations. He ultimately defends the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when regulations are needed to solve a serious collective action problems for which social norms are insufficient, those regulations should be few in number, easy to interpret, and sensitive to what other countries are doing. Otherwise, Anomaly argues, black markets in reproductive technologies will exacerbate the kinds of problems they are intended to solve.
Join us on Zoom here. Location: Rowling Hall 3.414, 300 W Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Austin, TX 78705