Let’s go back to the example of the quest for designer children. To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, rather than to see children as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our ambition. It’s an interesting thing about parental love, if you think about it: parental love is not contingent on the talents and traits the child happens to have. It’s different from other human relations. We choose our friends, we choose our spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities that we find attractive. But we don’t choose our children, their qualities are unpredictable. […] As a result parenthood, more than any other human relationship, teaches us something […], it’s something that […] William May calls “An openness to the unbidden”. This idea of being open to the unbidden describes a quality of character and heart that restrains the impulse to mastery and control. It prompts a sense of life as gift. The deepest objection to genetic engineering for enhancement and designer children lies not so much in the perfection that it seeks, as in the human disposition it expresses and promotes. [….] And even if this disposition, the desire to control, doesn’t make parents tyrants to their children – it disfigures the relation between parent and child and deprives the parent of the humility and of the enlarged human sympathies that an openness to the unbidden can cultivate.

It is tempting to think that bioengineering our children and ourselves to succeed in a competitive society is an exercise of freedom. But if you think about it: changing our nature to fit the world rather than the other way round is actually the deepeest form of disempowerment. Why? Because it distracts us from reflecting critical upon the world. One time James Watson – Nobel Price winner for discovering with Francis Crick the structure of the DNA – came to a class that I teach on ethics in biotechnology. And he was saying: “Look, we should improve peoples IQ through genetic engineering because those at the bottom, those people who aren’t very smart, they have a hard lot in life. They get no rewards, they can’t get a good job, they have no life prospects.” And a student asked him: “Why not change the whole social and economic structure that gives them such a hard life? How about changing the system of rewards that leads to vast inequalities of that kind?” And his answer was: “Oh, you never going to change society, that’s why we need biotechnology - to lift up those who lack intelligence to succeed.” That seemed to me a chilling answer that illustrates the disempowerment that goes with changing our nature to fit the social rules that we’ve created rather than debating how to change those social rules and rewards themselves.