Disabled Bodies and Norms of Flourishing in the Human Engineering Debate

In this paper, I argue that Jonathan Glover, a prominent advocate of human genetic engineering, relies on a limited naturalistic account of normal human function in his defense of genetic engineering as a means of decreasing future instances of disability. I show that his concept of disability and the normative argument informed by it in his Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design fails to incorporate the phenomenological dimension of embodiment, and that this dimension should be included in any account of disability and human flourishing. Such inclusion, however, requires us to consider seriously the counterintuitive view that racial minorities are constitutionally disabled in racist societies.