ABSTRACT
While the principle of beneficence has been and continues to be an almost universal consideration for bioethics, and the ethics of care is sometimes deployed in the literature, it is exceedingly rare for secular bioethical arguments to draw upon the concept of love. However, an explicit appeal to love does appear in the literature focusing on the ethics of prenatal selection against disability. Namely, some arguments deploy a certain view of how parents ought to love their children as a key step in the case for why parents should not use the technologies of prenatal selection to avoid having a disabled child. Roughly, they take the position that prenatal selection is morally troubling because parental love ought to be unconditionally bestowed upon any child and not just those that have certain qualifying properties; and prenatal selection is inevitably somehow in tension with this moral commitment. In this essay, I summarize and critically analyze some of the most prominent versions of the unconditional love argument against prenatal selection, placing them into a sort of taxonomy. While there are probably several plausible ways to parse these arguments into categories, I will be distinguishing between the kinds of unconditional love arguments based on the identity of the beloved. For each of these arguments, their place in my taxonomy will be determined by the answer to the question: who, exactly, is the parent failing to love unconditionally? Ultimately, I call each of these arguments into question. Yet, I do not offer a principled line of reasoning against any possible unconditional love argument opposing prenatal selection. Indeed, while I raise problems for every argument in the current literature that has been examined in this essay, I do not give any reason to think that a more convincing unconditional love argument against prenatal selection couldn’t be made. Along these same lines, while I am skeptical about these specific arguments regarding prenatal selection, there are several other critiques of the practice that appear in the literature and this essay shouldn’t be read as saying much of anything about the general conclusion that selection is morally problematic.
