Genetic information: making a just world strange.
In an article recently published in this journal, I raised a puzzle about the control of genetic information, suggesting a situation in which it might turn out that we have a duty to remain in ignorance about at least some aspects of our own genome. In this article, I propose a way that would make sense of how the puzzle arises, and offer a way to resolve it and similar puzzles in future: in essence, we would consider genetic information to be something the distribution of which may be more or less just. We would not know in advance what a just distribution would be, though, and in some cases there might still be a justice-based reason to deny a person genetic information about himself. However, others might also have justice-based claims to be able to access that information. This suggests that there is a possible world in which one person is entitled to at least some genetic information about another, while that other person--to whom the information refers--is not, and that this world would be just.
CSEP/iSEI, School of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK, iain.brassington@manchester.ac.uk.
Iain
I
Brassington
D001364:Awareness; D030661:Genetic Privacy; D006801:Humans; D012935:Social Justice