Daniel Groll, "Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation" (Oxford UP, 2021)
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What is the central ethical question about donor‑conceived children that the episode introduces?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talis. I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co host the program with Carrie Figder, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Daniel Grohl. Daniel is associate professor of philosophy at Carlton College in Minnesota. He specializes in ethics and bioethics with a focus on applied issues concerning families. His new book has just been published with Oxford University Press. It's titled Conceiving People Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation. In the United States, tens of thousands of children are conceived every year with donated gametes.
Now, if you're like me, you might not have considered the range of philosophical questions that arise from this fact. Still, a moment's reflection makes many of them obvious. When people decide to create a child with donated gametes, they typically have to make decisions about whether the identity of the donor will be available to the resulting person. And this quickly raises many other moral and even existential questions about the value of knowing the circumstances of one's own conception. One mark of a great philosophy book is that it uncovers new sites of philosophical reflection. And Daniel Grohl's new book does this brilliant brilliantly. It designs a cluster of philosophical questions that I suspect many listeners hadn't considered and then develops intriguing answers to them.
As usual, there's a lot to talk about. But let's begin as we usually do with our guest. Hi, Daniel. Hi, thanks for
having me.
Well, uh thanks for joining me. Uh how are you today?
I'm very well. It's very, very chilly in Minnesota today. But other than that, I'm good. How are you?
I'm doing fine. It's chilly in Nashville today, but probably not as chilly as it is in Minnesota. Um Um, you know, we usually start with the author. Uh so uh Daniel, why don't you uh share something about yourself?
Sure, yeah. So I'm currently in Northfield, Minnesota, but I was born uh in Canada, in Kingston, Ontario, which is on the eastern edge uh of Lake Ontario. Um, and I went to uh McGill University in Montreal uh and actually my my first degree was in music. I was in the music conservatory there uh and did a degree, uh Bachelor of Music uh in jazz performance. Um, but I also did uh Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the same time. Uh that was the career I was gonna fall back on. Uh and uh after that I went and did graduate school um at the University of Chicago uh and was very, very fortunate to land a position um at Carleton um after graduate school in 2009. And I've been here ever since.
You know, um I have a friend who um uh w also has a jazz philosophy background and his joke is that he got into philosophy for the money.
Yeah, right, exactly. I I I had I knew I had my parents wrapped around my finger when they were like, Well, you can do the music degree so long as you've also got the philosophy degree in your backpack.
Um, well that's fabulous. Um, you know, I think Plato Socrates somewhere says philosophy is the best kind of music.
Yeah, I that that doesn't seem right. Music seems like the best kind of music. But uh philosophy's not so bad.
Great. Um, so um let's uh let let's talk about the book. How's that? That sounds
great.
Um, so this is uh you know, I I I really um r really enjoyed uh reading the book uh for the reasons I stated a a moment ago. Um You know, there are very clear um moral issues that I just hadn't, you know, that hadn't been legible to me. Let's just put it that way. Um, but uh in order to um make those issues um more salient, um I think we need to set down, as you do, uh some sort of terminology, so some nomenclature. Um Uh this is mostly a matter of sort of giving stipulative definitions of a somewhat philosophical, uh, technical sense uh to some common words. Um can you can you help lay down some of the some of the nomenclature before we get into the argument of the book?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central ethical question about donor‑conceived children that the episode introduces?
0:01–7:22
2
How does Daniel Groll categorize different types of sperm and egg donors?
7:22–15:18
3
What does Groll mean by “genetic knowledge” and why is it important?
15:18–23:02
4
Why does the book argue that intended parents should choose an open donor?
23:02–30:33
5
What is the “significant and worthwhile interest” view and how does it differ from the prudential‑good view?
30:33–38:14
6
How does Groll respond to the “sideshow” and “bionormativity” objections?
38:14–45:33
7
What tensions arise between parents’ interests and the child’s interest in genetic knowledge?
45:33–54:02
8
What policy implications and donor responsibilities does the book propose?
54:02–1:02:55
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