Genetic information, discrimination, philosophical pluralism and politics

Abstract

In the paper ‘Genetic information, insurance, and a pluralistic approach to justice’, Jonathan Pugh1 develops an argument from unresolved pluralism in our theories of justice, via the pluralism this occasions in relation to the specific question of the use of genetic test results (GTRs) in insurance underwriting, to the conclusion that the UK regulatory approach in relation to the use of GTRs in insurance is broadly correct.1 Pugh’s argument is wide-ranging and I cannot provide a complete critique of it in this short comment, but I will gesture towards some strands of the argument that are potentially problematic.

The first potential problem in the argument is that Pugh bases his argument on a very extensive range of accounts of justice, including pure maximising consequentialism (he calls it ‘utilitarianism’), strict egalitarianism and libertarianism, among many others. If these are all accounts of justice, it is not strange that there is pluralism of conclusions in relation to a specific question of justice or discrimination, such as the use of GTRs in the underwriting of specific kinds of insurance contracts. Pugh’s range, for instance, includes accounts of justice that deny the direct importance of distributive concerns as well as accounts that see distributive concerns as crucial. These accounts disagree not only about the answer to Pugh’s question but also about whether taxation is theft, a legislated minimum wage can be justified and many other justice issues that are settled in modern welfare states. This matters because there is an unacknowledged slide in Pugh’s use of the fact of pluralism in his arguments, for example, when he writes,