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6. Epigenetics

  • COMPOST Collective (author)
Chapter of: Bioethics: A Coursebook(pp. 89–108)

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Metadata
Title6. Epigenetics
ContributorCOMPOST Collective (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0449.06
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0449/chapters/10.11647/obp.0449.06
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightCOMPOST Collective;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2025-05-12
Long abstractIn this chapter, we show various ways in which researchers and students can engage in ethical discussions of developments in epigenetics. After a brief introduction of the scientific background of epigenetics, we formulate several ethically relevant aspects to epigenetic findings that we can take into account when we are considering the moral impact of such findings: the influence of the environment, heritability, unpredictability and reversibility. We mention ethical issues which are recurrently being discussed in bioethical literature on epigenetics and presented readers with a few cases that invited them to ask ethical questions and practice moral reflections and the application of concepts and theories. Finally, we discuss two particular issues in more detail: 1) how the case study of epigenetics demonstrates that scientific research projects and are never value-neutral and 2) how research findings can be employed in multiple ethical discourses in the specific debate on the responsibility of (prospective) parents for the health of their offspring.
Page rangepp. 89–108
Print length20 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

COMPOST Collective

(author)
Research Group at the Department of Philosophy at University of Antwerp
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/compost/

COMPOST Collective is a research group at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Antwerp. This interdisciplinary collective has a specific interest in (bio)ethics and is embedded in the department's Center for Ethics.

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