Journal article
Genome editing in livestock, complicity, and the technological fix objection
- Abstract:
- Genome editing in livestock could potentially be used in ways that help resolve some of the most urgent and serious global problems pertaining to livestock, including animal suffering, pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and the spread of infectious disease. But despite this potential, some may object to pursuing it, not because genome editing is wrong in and of itself, but because it is the wrong kind of solution to the problems it addresses: it is merely a ‘technological fix’ to a complex societal problem. Yet though this objection might have wide intuitive appeal, it is often not clear what, exactly, the moral problem is supposed to be. The aim of this paper is to formulate and shed some light on the ‘technological fix objection’ to genome editing in livestock. I suggest that three concerns may underlie it, make implicit assumptions underlying the concerns explicit, and cast some doubt on several of these assumptions, at least as they apply to the use of genome editing to produce pigs resistant to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and hornless dairy cattle. I then suggest that the third, and most important, concern could be framed as a concern about complicity in factory farming. I suggest ways to evaluate this concern, and to reduce or offset any complicity in factory farming. Thinking of genome editing’s contribution to factory farming in terms of complicity, may, I suggest, tie it more explicitly and strongly to the wider obligations that come with pursuing it, including the cessation of factory farming, thereby addressing the concern that technological fixes focus only on a narrow problem.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 590.8KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10806-021-09858-z
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 34
- Article number:
- 16
- Publication date:
- 2021-05-11
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-04-29
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-322X
- ISSN:
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1187-7863
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1173975
- Local pid:
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pubs:1173975
- Deposit date:
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2021-04-29
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Katrien Devolder
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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