• Draft due by 5 pm, Thursday 10 June, 1999. 2000 words.  Late penalty, 5% per day, including the w/e.
• Final paper due by 5 pm, Tuesday 22 June, 1999.  3000 words.  Late penalty, 5% per day.  No papers will be accepted after Friday 25 June.  Hand in the draft with the final version.

I will give you comments on your draft.  Your final version should be a substantial revision of your draft, addressing the comments I have given you.

Your draft should have enough room in the margins for me to add comments.  Number the pages, and at the end of the paper give the word count (including bibliography).  If you want written comments on your final paper, you should supply me with a stamped self-addressed envelope.

You can choose one of the following topics, or you can design your own question.  However, if you want to design your own question, you have to give me a written draft of it by class on Thursday June 3.  Your question draft must include two books that you plan to use as a research resource.  I will approve, reject, or amend it by Friday June 4.

For guidelines about writing style, plagiarism policy, and links to useful web sites, see my Instructions for Papers page.

For your research, you should use at least 3 books and/or articles from professional journals.  You can also use the Internet as a resource, but this should provide no more than half of your sources of information.

a. What reasons are there for and against the federal government allowing and even supporting research into cloning humans? With these in mind, discuss what you think the government policy should be towards human cloning, giving careful justification of your answer.

b. Set out some of the attempts that have been made to give a general criterion which would distinguish genetic maladies from non-maladies. Discuss whether these proposed criteria are dependent on views of what sort of life is worthwhile, and if so, how much intersubjective agreement could be achieved on those criteria.

c. Explain what criticisms of genetic technology are implicit in the movie Gattaca. Then assess how reasonable those criticisms are in the US today, given the structure and values of US society and the role of medicine in our society.

d. How much control do parents presently have over what kind of people their children will become? Does the possibility of genetic enhancement promise parents of the future the ability to significantly more power to determine what kind of persons their children will become? Given your answers to these two questions, discuss carefully whether the possibility of genetic enhancement should cause us to worry about the moral implications of the new technology.

e. Choose some aspect of eugenics in the US and research its history. Then discuss whether this history gives us strong reason to be concerned that there is the potential for a substantial popular support of eugenics in the near future.

f. What moral stance should counselors working for a for-profit genetic testing service take towards their counselees? Using careful discussion of real cases, provide a set of guidelines for new counselors that will be helpful in telling them how to work through morally difficult cases.