You were fired the day you were conceived
Genetic testing and employment
The ethical boundaries of the 21st century have increasingly focused on the rapid pace of scientific and technological advancement. The more we seem to know about how our world works, the fuzzier that world grows ethically.
In a week, one of those boundaries will be tested when the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act comes into effect. The Act prevents employers from either engaging in genetic testing or taking genetic information into account when deciding whether to hire, fire or promite someone. It will also bar health insurance companies from considering genetic information in decisions to provide coverage or set premiums.
This approach broadly reflects the sensibilities of modern liberalism, with one twist. American liberalism generally tries to mitigate the role of morally irrelevant factors in individual opportunities. Put simply, this means that accidents of birth, such as race, disability, or economic status, shouldn’t dictate whether or not a person has a chance to succeed. The only variable that is truly morally relevant is a person’s work ethic–whether and how hard someone is willing to work.
This aspiration is not perfectly realized in practice. In part, there’s not complete consensus about what constitutes morally relevant versus morally irrelevant characteristics. Many believe that smarter people, and especially those who cultivate that intelligence, deserve to do better. Others counter that, first, intelligence is also an accident of birth and, second, that those who might worker harder to do more with their natural traits usually benefit from other morally irrelevant factors. These critics tend to point to racial and economic achievement gaps in schools that have nothing to do with native intelligence and everything to do with resource inequities.
The second challenge to an equal opportunity society are certain limitations that remain difficult to overcome. Disability creates an insurmountable obstacle to many careers. Socioeconomic inequalities are often endemic. All of these present enduring challenges to a perfect meritocracy of effort.
Preventing the use of genetic information to interfere in efforts to provide equal opportunity seems like a sensible way to affirm our liberal goals. It effectively regulates the role of morally irrelevant factors in individual advancement by simply banning them from the conversation.
But here’s the twist. Making something invisible isn’t the same as deciding it doesn’t matter. People with wheelchairs can’t serve as ground troops in Afghanistan. This probably isn’t a bad thing given the requirements of the job, but it does suggest that some inscrutable limits to truly equal opportunity remain.
Genetic information that might predict someone is likely to drop dead of a heart attack at age 50 would be relevant if that person were to become, say, a commercial airline pilot. Like wheelchaired commandoes, this is one of those cases that feels slippery. We want to say that health history shouldn’t matter, but neither would we want to be on that plane.
The hardest ethical question is whether we’re willing to endure the risks that morally irrelevant factors generate in society. Banning use of genetic information in employment will probably help advance the values that underlie our society. But it will do more to put hard questions out of sight and out of mind.
-Sam
Image is original work of the federal government, available through Wikimedia Commons.
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- Who should pay for health care reform?
- The morality of espionage
- Casey at the battaca
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