McDougall R
Mansfield College, Oxford OX1 3TF, UK.
J Med Ethics. 2005 Oct;31(10):601-5. doi: 10.1136/jme.2004.008813.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's (HFEA) recent restrictive recommendations on sex selection have highlighted the need for consideration of the plausibility of ethical arguments against sex selection. In this paper, the author suggests a parental virtues approach to some questions of reproductive ethics (including sex selection) as a superior alternative to an exclusively harm focused approach such as the procreative liberty framework. The author formulates a virtue ethics argument against sex selection based on the idea that acceptance is a character trait of the good parent. It is concluded that, because the argument presented posits a wrong in the sex selecting agent's action that is not a harm, the argument could not function as a justification of the HFEA's restrictive position in light of their explicit commitment to procreative liberty; it does, however, suggest that ethical approaches focused exclusively on harm fail to capture all the relevant moral considerations and thus that we should look beyond such approaches.
人类受精与胚胎学管理局（HFEA）近期对性别选择提出的限制性建议，凸显了考虑反对性别选择的伦理观点合理性的必要性。在本文中，作者提出一种基于父母美德的方法来探讨一些生殖伦理问题（包括性别选择），以此作为诸如生育自由框架等仅关注危害的方法的优越替代方案。作者基于接受是好父母的一种性格特征这一观点，构建了一个反对性别选择的美德伦理学论证。结论是，由于所提出的论证假定性别选择行为存在一种并非危害的错误，鉴于HFEA对生育自由的明确承诺，该论证无法作为其限制性立场的正当理由；然而，它确实表明仅关注危害的伦理方法未能涵盖所有相关的道德考量，因此我们应超越此类方法。
