Epigenetics Beyond Blame: How Inherited Marks Could Empower Families Instead of Judging Them

Few areas of modern biology have generated as much anxiety as epigenetics, the study of molecular changes that alter how genes are expressed without changing the underlying DNA sequence. Over the past two decades, researchers have accumulated evidence that experiences such as stress, nutrition, smoking and exposure to pollution can leave chemical marks on the genome, and that some of these marks can be passed on to children and even grandchildren. Intergenerational human studies increasingly suggest that epigenetic marks may be inherited by the first generation of male offspring and by the first and second generations of female offspring. For prospective parents, this science can feel like a burden: every choice before conception suddenly seems to carry consequences for generations yet unborn. But a new wave of ethical scholarship argues that this framing is not inevitable, and that the same knowledge could be turned into a source of connection, understanding and even collective empowerment rather than guilt.

In a recent open-access article published in Epigenetics Communications, philosopher Emma Moormann of the University of Antwerp reimagines how epigenetic knowledge should be communicated and used in thinking about parenthood. Her starting point is a striking observation about the existing literature on the ethical, legal and social aspects of epigenetics, often abbreviated as ELSA research. Almost unanimously, this literature warns that epigenetic discoveries tend to inspire policies and public discourses that blame and stigmatize individual parents, and women in particular. Narratives about maternal stress, diet and behaviour during pregnancy echo what scholars describe as a long history of society blaming mothers for the ill health of their children. Moormann does not dispute these warnings; she considers them important and correct. Her argument is that they are not the only shape the ethical conversation can take, and that ethicists should also work to imagine genuinely positive uses of epigenetic knowledge.

The technical heart of her critique lies in the classic conditions for moral responsibility. Philosophers generally hold an agent responsible for an outcome only if three conditions are met: the agent knows or could reasonably have known the effects of their actions, the agent is capable of acting on that knowledge, and there is a genuine causal connection between behaviour and outcome. In the context of epigenetics, all three conditions are problematic. Political scientist Maria Hedlund has argued that the structural conditions shaping epigenetic health often lie beyond the capacity of individuals to influence, and that acting in an epigenetically responsible way would be a demanding task for any single person given the complexity of the relevant information. Epidemiologists Bastiaan Heijmans and Jonathan Mill have catalogued the biological, technical and methodological obstacles that make it extraordinarily difficult to isolate the effects of individual behaviour on the epigenome. The causal chain between a parent’s choice and a child’s health outcome is tangled, probabilistic and context-dependent.

These difficulties deepen when the role of social circumstances is taken seriously. Epigenetic mechanisms are sensitive to social determinants of health such as poverty, pollution, housing and occupational stress, and these are distributed very unequally across societies. Luca Chiapperino has extended the critique of individual responsibility by pointing to the influence of moral luck, the way factors beyond one’s control affect the justification of responsibility claims. Crucially, he shows that the same critiques apply to collectives: knowledge, capacity and causality conditions are just as hard, if not harder, for collective agents to fulfill. Meanwhile, researchers such as Charles Dupras and Vardit Ravitsky warn against both simplistic individual blame and simplistic state-focused solutions, noting that the very definition of a normal or healthy reference epigenome is contested. According to the mismatch model of epigenetic disease development, an adverse phenotype depends not merely on the presence of a specific epigenetic variant but on the mismatch between that variant and a person’s living conditions, meaning the full impact of any epigenetic alteration can only be assessed contextually.

Moormann argues that these persistent obstacles justify a pragmatic shift: alongside continued work on responsibility, ethicists should explore approaches that do not hinge on the concept of responsibility at all. She frames this through the lens of nonideal theory, a style of normative reasoning that refuses to assume just background conditions and instead takes seriously the unequal distribution of social, economic and material resources among parents. Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended, gender inequality still concentrates the burdens of reproductive health on women, and many families lack the means to secure healthy food or a clean environment. General statements about the responsibilities of all parents risk adding insult to injury. Instead, Moormann proposes focusing on empowerment, drawing on the political philosopher Iris Marion Young, who distinguished a purely individual notion of freedom from a dialogical, collective one in which relatively powerless people come to understand the social sources of their disadvantage and act together to change them.

The most provocative part of the paper is its proposal to connect epigenetics with narrative identity, the internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense of their life, a concept developed by psychologists such as Dan McAdams. Moormann illustrates the idea with hypothetical cases. In one, a postdoctoral researcher named Farah continues her stressful academic career during pregnancy; ten years later her son Alex is diagnosed with ADHD, a condition for which some epigenetic evidence links prenatal stress to offspring outcomes. Rather than blaming his mother, Alex might, through honest conversation about her reasons, values and constraints, come to understand her choices and integrate the story into his own sense of who he is. In another case, a child named Jenn learns that her parents moved away from a polluted neighbourhood before her conception, and that inherited marks of that exposure may still influence her susceptibility to conditions such as asthma. Such knowledge could contextualize her biology within her family’s biography.

What epigenetics specifically adds to this project of identity formation, Moormann argues, is an expanded timeframe and scope. Intergenerational epigenetics suggests that marks sustained long before conception may persist across multiple generations, while environmental epigenetics reveals that less visible influences such as stress can shape biology in ways previously unappreciated. This gives people a wider menu of potentially relevant elements for their life stories, from which they can select and edit as they see fit. Importantly, absolute etiological certainty is not required. The stories people tell about themselves are always partly speculative, as philosopher David Velleman has observed in reflecting on his own family history, and the epigenetic component of a biography need not be quantified or absolutized to be meaningful. Some Indigenous communities have already found environmental epigenetics a helpful framework for linking ancestral experiences of slavery and dispossession to contemporary bodies and health, and researchers have debated whether descendants of Holocaust survivors carry a kind of biological memory of trauma.

Moormann is candid about the risks of her proposal. The first is overweighting etiology: knowing the causes of a condition is not always necessary or even desirable for living well with it, a point emphasized by neurodiversity scholars, even though some autistic people do welcome biological research as a basis for diagnosis. The second risk is bionormativity, the culturally dominant assumption that biological ties are what matter most in family life. Talk of maternal and paternal epigenetic influences must not gloss over adoptive families, surrogacy, assisted reproduction and stepparenting, and Moormann endorses the view that nothing important need be lacking for a child raised without a biological connection to their parents. She also cites philosopher Daniela Cutas, who suggests that epigenetics may actually broaden the category of biological parenthood, since everyone closely involved in raising a child helps shape the child’s environment and, through gene expression, their molecular biology. If empowerment language is misused, it can also serve a neoliberal agenda of devolving health responsibility from states to individuals, a warning issued by Chiapperino and Giuseppe Testa.

The conclusion Moormann reaches is a call for creative, compassionate science communication. Because epigenetic research is advancing rapidly and already influences public and political debates, ethicists cannot limit themselves to issuing warnings; they must also articulate positive alternatives. She suggests empirical research into how people actually feel about epigenetic knowledge, and novel dissemination methods such as storytelling podcasts and artistic projects that convey the complexity of biosocial influences without deterministic exaggeration. If epigenetic findings are framed carefully, conversations between parents and children about inherited exposures could foster self-knowledge, mutual understanding and a shared recognition that health is socially embedded, perhaps even motivating collective action against pollution or injustice. The double-edged sword of epigenetics, on this view, need not always cut toward blame. Wielded with nuance, it could help families weave biology and biography into a single, more forgiving story.

Subject of Research: Ethical and social implications of intergenerational epigenetic knowledge for parenthood and science communication

Article Title: From parental responsibility towards mutual understanding: reimagining the employment of epigenetic knowledge

Article References: Moormann, E. (2024). From parental responsibility towards mutual understanding: reimagining the employment of epigenetic knowledge. Epigenetics Communications, 4(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43682-024-00026-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s43682-024-00026-8

Keywords: epigenetics, intergenerational inheritance, parental responsibility, narrative identity, bioethics, science communication, nonideal theory, empowerment, social determinants of health, bionormativity, DOHaD, procreative autonomy