Julian Savulescu

Julian Savulescu is an Australian bioethicist who holds that parents have a moral reason to select the children expected to have the best lives, that enhancement is continuous with medicine rather than opposed to it, and that humanity's moral capacities are now the binding constraint on its technological ones. Trained as a physician and as a philosopher under Peter Singer, he has been the most systematic academic defender of Human enhancement since the early 2000s, and the figure whose arguments bioconservative critics most often answer.

§Career

Savulescu qualified in medicine at Monash University and completed a doctorate there in philosophy, working on rationality and end-of-life decision-making. He took the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at Oxford in 2002 and founded and directed the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, which became the main European base for analytic work on enhancement, neuroethics and research ethics. He edited the Journal of Medical Ethics for close to two decades. Since 2022 he has also held a chair in medical ethics at the National University of Singapore, directing its Centre for Biomedical Ethics, and he leads a biomedical ethics group at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne.

His output is unusually broad for the field: embryo selection, doping, organ donation, conscientious objection by clinicians, the ethics of research in emergencies, and during the pandemic a prominent argument for human challenge trials of vaccines.

§Procreative beneficence

The 2001 paper that made his name states a principle: couples who select embryos or gametes should select the child, of the possible children they could have, expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, on the basis of relevant available information.¹ The principle is deliberately narrow. It applies only where selection is already occurring, it does not license coercion, and it concerns non-person-affecting choices — the child selected is a different individual from the one who would otherwise have existed, which is why the non-identity problem does so much work in the surrounding literature.

Savulescu extends the principle beyond disease traits to any characteristic that improves expected wellbeing, which is where the disagreement begins. If a test predicts a small advantage in some trait, the principle appears to make selection on it obligatory rather than optional — a conclusion critics find either objectionable or a reductio. The argument has become directly practical with the arrival of Polygenic embryo screening, which produces exactly the sort of probabilistic trait information the principle takes as input; Savulescu has argued that the resulting obligations are modest because the predicted gains are small, while objecting to bans on the technology as such.

The strongest objection

Disability-rights scholars argue that selecting against a trait expresses a judgement about people living with it. Savulescu's reply relies on a welfarist account of disability — a condition is a disability if it reduces expected wellbeing in the circumstances, not because it deviates from a norm — which critics say relocates the judgement rather than removing it. See Disability rights and enhancement.

§Moral bioenhancement

With Ingmar Persson, Savulescu argues that human moral psychology evolved for small groups with limited technology, and is poorly suited to a world where a few individuals can cause catastrophic harm.² Cognitive enhancement in this framing is dangerous on its own, because it increases the capacity for harm without improving the disposition to avoid it. The proposed response is research into biomedical means of strengthening altruism and a sense of justice — the illustrative candidates in the literature being oxytocin, serotonergic drugs and beta-blockers, none of which does anything close to what the argument requires. Their 2012 book Unfit for the Future connects the argument to Existential risk.

The obvious objections have been pressed hard. John Harris argued that moral enhancement, if effective, would remove the freedom to do wrong that makes moral action valuable.³ Others ask who specifies the target morality, and note that any state with the capacity to administer moral enhancement is the last actor that should be trusted with it. Savulescu and Persson's response distinguishes enhancing dispositions from determining choices, and accepts that compulsory application would be illegitimate. The empirical position is weaker than the philosophical one: no intervention has been shown to produce durable, general improvements in moral behaviour. See Moral enhancement.

§Sport and doping

Savulescu has argued that the anti-doping regime is incoherent — it permits altitude tents, hypoxic chambers and extensive pharmacological recovery while banning functionally similar interventions — and that a safety-based regulatory model, monitoring physiological parameters rather than prohibiting substances, would protect athletes better than prohibition does.⁴ The position is a minority one among sports physicians and anti-doping bodies, and it has become more salient with the emergence of openly enhanced competition formats. See Enhancement in sport and Gene doping.

§Reception

Savulescu is among the most cited living bioethicists, and the Uehiro Centre trained a generation of researchers now working on neuroethics, AI ethics and enhancement. His method is characteristically analytic: state a principle, follow it to conclusions most readers dislike, and treat the discomfort as data about the principle rather than a reason to abandon it. Admirers regard this as intellectual seriousness. Critics regard the same trait as a willingness to reach eugenic-sounding conclusions through formally valid steps, and note that his arguments almost always assume a regulatory and economic environment in which access is fair — an assumption addressed at length in Access and inequality.

He is on the opposite side of most debates from Leon Kass, and the two positions define the range of serious argument in Bioethics of enhancement: whether the given human form has moral weight in itself, or whether wellbeing is the only thing that finally matters.

§Legacy

The practical test of Savulescu's programme is arriving now. Embryo selection on polygenic scores is commercially available and unregulated in several jurisdictions; In vitro gametogenesis, if it works in humans, would remove the constraint that a cycle yields only a handful of embryos and would make the principle of procreative beneficence bind much harder. Savulescu has been consistent that the resulting decisions belong to prospective parents rather than states. Whether a technology that makes his principle powerful also makes it acceptable is a question his framework poses more sharply than it answers.

§See also

• Procreative beneficence
• Bioethics of enhancement
• Moral enhancement
• Polygenic embryo screening
• Disability rights and enhancement
• Enhancement in sport
• Leon Kass
• Nick Bostrom

§References