GENETIC ENGINEERING AND THE INEQUALITIES

In his book In A Better World? Public Reason and Biotechnologies Elvio Baccarini discusses (and ultimately rejects) the argument that genetic engineering might deepen the inequalities in the society. However, this argument is grounded on the implicit assumption that financially successful people have certain characteristic C that explains their financial success, and that the lack of this characteristic explains why financially unsuccessful people are financially unsuccessful. This assumption is widely accepted, by Nagel, Rawls, Nozick, and many others. In this article I try to show that this implicit assumption is simply false. There is no such characteristic C. There is no independently identifiable single capability, talent, or asset that explains why rich people are rich and why poor people are poor. Social inequalities cannot be explained as effects of the inequalities in talents.