“Always choose freedom,” Julian Savulescu repeats, wryly. “I can hear my dad saying that even now. As a guiding principle to pass on to your kid, it’s not bad.”

Savulescu himself has lived by it – he certainly thinks and speaks freely.

Personable, energetic and highly articulate, the 45-year-old Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford’s St Cross College looks fit and relaxed as he lounges back in his dim book-cluttered office. He’s casually dressed, affable, and humorous: he looks and sounds like the Australian he is, and he agrees that there may be something typically Austral­ian about his approach to ethics, too. 

“Australia has a strong commitment to free­dom – physical and intellectual,” he says. “We’re not encumbered by national guilt or rigid ideologies. We believe in equality and a right to a fair go, both in content and approach. We tend not to be shackled to received opinions. That can be a help when thinking about this kind of thing.”

Savulescu has built up a lively reputation as a controversialist and is much in demand in the British and international media. He’s to be seen and heard in interviews with the likes of Rich­ard Dawkins and the BBC’s Andrew Marr, with leading scientists and churchmen, at conferences and science festivals and literary gatherings.

“I don’t particularly enjoy contro­versy,” Savulescu claims, with a look of inno­cence. “I just go where the argument leads me. I think what I’m saying is common sense – very often it’s what other people would like to say, but for whatever reason they feel constrained. I don’t court notoriety, but I do see it as part of my job to bring forward arguments which are under-represented in public debate.”

His forthcoming book, Unfit for the Future? The Need for Moral Enhancement, is unlikely to dampen debate. Co-written with Ingmar Persson, the book will be out in July 2012, published by Oxford University Press.

Whether you agree with him or not, Savules­cu’s counter-intuitive but rationally argued ideas are all about creating better lives for people.  In particular, now that the human genome has been sequenced, he wants us to harness the power of stem cell research, embryo screening, and genetic engineering to enhance our wellbeing.

“Who wouldn’t want better kids?” he asks. “And by that I mean kids who could live better lives, with more opportunity and more capacity to fulfill themselves, and to be useful members of society.”

He acknowledges that not everyone will agree on what constitutes a “better life”, but says that some aspects of it are beyond argument.

“It must be better to be healthy than sick, for example. And we do already make genetic choices for health. We screen embryos for Down syndrome, and cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anaemia. Parents don’t have to act on the knowledge they’re given – but the choice is theirs if they want to make it. So why not screen for other disabilities and diseases?”

What – Even comparatively trivial ones?

“Why not? Personally, I suffer from asthma. That’s a nuisance, but not too serious. Still, if I had a choice between selecting an embryo with genes which coded for asthma and one that didn’t, I’d select the one that didn’t. That’s not to say I don’t have a fantastic life, asthma or no asthma, but given the choice, I’d rather not wish it on anyone else.”

And we don’t have to stop there. We could select positively, he claims, choos­ing embryos likely to develop desirable characteristics, including those which are not purely physical, such as empathy for fellow human beings or even morality itself.

Would it really be possible to select for morality?

“In principle, yes. Look at it the other way round. For 40 years and more, we have known that if a person has poor impulse control their lives are more likely to go bad. Such people see something they want, so they take it. Pro­voked to anger, they react violently. Long-term studies show that they are far more likely to get into trouble, to have broken relationships, and to end up in hospital or in jail.

“Now, we know that this characteristic has some biologi­cal basis. In other words it’s a disability, like my asthma, or anoth­er person’s cystic fibrosis. In the United States, people have even tried to use genes as a legal defence after committing violent crimes. But sup­pose we could screen out such dispositions? Or sup­pose we could engineer the genome so that the characteristic was never expressed? Wouldn’t eve­ryone be happier with that outcome? Well, that would be using genetics for morality.”

Not only would it be a good idea to take such a step if the technology permitted it, Savulescu insists, it would be unethical not to.

“You need a really good argument to justify any decision which increases suffering in the world,” he says. “Failing to select out poor impulse control, once we have the means to do it, would increase suffering for everyone involved.”

He points out that we humans have never been averse to artificially altering our psyches. We take stimulants and antide­pressants for medical purposes, and recreational mood enhancers like alcohol and nicotine. We do so even when we know the side effects may be damaging and the changes to our physiology irre­versible. We use tranquillisers to calm down aggressive dementia sufferers, and drugs to depress the libido of sex offenders.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he laughs. “This isn’t my life: it’s an argument. I don’t use mood enhancers myself, except alcohol. But as a society we do all these things. We argue about the ethics of it and we make choices. We should apply ethical thinking to the use of genetics for comparable purposes.”

And urgently, he says. It’s already possible for genetic technologists to insert new pieces into the human genome, and to engineer a desired result.

There are those who say that to make such claims for tech­nology is exaggerated or premature. Francis Collins, the eminent American geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, argues that intelligence, to take one example, results from extremely subtle interactions between many different genes, with environ­mental factors acting on the result. It won’t be possible, Collins says, to manipulate such a complex interplay of factors in any meaningful way. “It ain’t gonna work,” Collins declared boldly in a recent BBC interview.

But the truth is that no-one really knows what will be possible nor how soon. What is certain is that some specific genes or groups of genes code for spe­cific characteristics, and many of these links have been identified. Within five to seven years, as Collins him­self has estimated, it will be cost effective to sequence the genome of every child at birth. This would unlock an undreamt – of store of information about that child’s likely development. The question will be – what to do with that knowledge? To whom should it be revealed, and when? Who will decide what action should be taken?

Of course, there are plenty of people who think that it could never be right to manipulate the mental and physical nature of a child yet unborn. The child has no say in the matter, and the whole process involves someone, or some authority, ‘playing God’.

“But we already manipulate and modify the development of our kids,” Savulescu argues. “We give them vitamins and vaccines to improve their health, we send them to the best schools we can find, we push them to play sport or do music lessons. Generally they don’t have much say in any of this, and quite often don’t enjoy it, but we do it because we hon­estly believe it will open up their opportunities for a better life.”

It’s in no way different, he says, to select a particular embryo, or to genetically enhance one, so that the resulting child will have the best possible chance of a rich and well-adjusted life.

“We’re on the brink of a genetic revolution which will be as profound as the Industrial Revolution. And sure, there are dangers. Genetic power is power, after all. It would be a disaster if some interest group were able to enhance the cognitive abilities of its mem­bers and its members’ children, and use those abilities for its own ends.

“Which is exactly why we need to consider the ethical issues in a rigorous and practical manner, he says, so that our choices are informed.

But, at the same time, we’re enter­ing a period when the human race’s abil­ity to destroy itself has never been greater. The danger might be war, or our inability to cooperate on climate change, or some gross act of biological terrorism. We live in megacities in a globalised world, and possess technology capable of enormous destructive power, yet we are equipped with a morality which evolved to help us survive as small groups of hunter-gatherers compet­ing for resources.

We’re xenophobic. We free-ride. We are violent. We’re very poorly adapted to think about the distant future, or about people remote from us. It’s crucial that we enhance our moral attributes, and minimise our immoral ones, in any way we can. We need an ethics fit for the future, not the past.”

The one thing we can’t do is ignore it all.

 “Imagine you’re about to cross a river. You check for crocodiles and piranhas or whatever. And maybe you won’t see all the dangers in advance. But just the same, you want to be armed with all the knowledge you can muster because sooner or later you will have to step into that river. You can’t just pretend it isn’t there.”

FROM GEELONG TO OXFORD

Savulescu was born in Geelong and grew up in Melbourne. He entered Monash University in 1982 to study medicine, but as an extra subject he took a course in philosophy given by Peter Singer. It was to change Saveluscu’s life.

“I was just blown away,” he says, “I thought it was amazing to hear about life and death, euthana­sia, animal rights, abortion – all discussed openly and rationally in this way.”

Savulescu went on to qualify in medicine and to practise as a doctor. Then in 1991 he took three years off to study with Singer for a PhD in philoso­phy. At that time he was still practising part-time as a doctor, but the philosophy bug had really bitten him, and he would not recover. His new career took him to the University of Melbourne, and then on to Oxford.

 “Oxford is an unparalleled intellectual envi­ronment,” he says. “But I sometimes feel that I become more Australian the older I get. I do miss the open­ness – and the weather, the surfing, the outdoor life. And I have great hopes for the country, especially if it invests now in education, science and technology.

It could have a really great future, and it would be exciting to be part of that.”

And what has it been like for a boy from Gee­long settling into one of the bastions of British privi­lege and learning?

“When I arrived, a wise colleague told me that I would make many mistakes – but all I had to say was ‘I’m sorry, I’m Australian.’ he grins. “I’ve milked that like you wouldn’t believe!”