Once upon a time, wolves roamed the wild—majestic, cunning, and fierce. Fast forward a few millennia, and my dachshund, Zazu, naps in a sunbeam, snorts at his food bowl when dinner is two minutes late, and experiences existential dread when the neighbour’s cat walks by. His legs are too short to run fast, his bark too comical to intimidate, and his idea of hunting involves dragging his plush toy into the laundry basket. And yet—is he less authentic than his wolf ancestors?

This isn’t just a quirky thought about a pampered pet. It’s a window into a serious philosophical question: does genetic engineering threaten authenticity?

Critics of genetic engineering often say yes. Their argument is that if children’s genomes have been engineered—if their traits were chosen—then they somehow are not really themselves. That genetic intervention imposes a kind of inauthenticity. But this assumes that authenticity flows from genetic purity, from being the way evolution left us. Which brings us back to Zazu.

Zazu is not “natural.” He is the product of generations of deliberate human selection. Yet he is not haunted by the ghost of lupine dignity. He does not need to chase elk across the tundra to be real. He lives his life—ears flapping, legs flying, heart full. And therein lies the point: authenticity is not about where you come from. It’s about how you live.

In my recent article, “Existentialism and My ‘Postwolf’ Dachshund: Authenticity in the Age of Genetic Engineering” (Bioethics, 2025), I argue that we should understand authenticity through an existentialist lens, not an essentialist one. Existentialist philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre teach us that we are not defined by our origins, but by how we engage with the conditions of our existence. We are thrown into life—into a body, a time, a genome—and from there, we must choose. We must live.

From this view, genetic engineering does not inherently undermine authenticity. A genetically engineered trait is just one more part of the thrownness we must navigate. What matters is not whether a trait was chosen, but whether the individual can engage with it meaningfully, shape their life freely, and take ownership of who they become.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all genetic engineering is ethically unproblematic. It means we need to evaluate interventions based on whether they support or undermine the individual’s future autonomy and capacity for authentic living. In my article, I propose combining two guiding principles: Procreative Beneficence (choose traits that enhance flourishing) and Procreative Non-Maleficence (don’t impose harmful constraints). These principles together offer a framework for ethical genetic decision-making—neither blindly optimistic nor paralyzed by purity anxiety.

What existentialism reminds us is that there is no “true essence” to be protected in a pristine genome. The idea of a fixed human nature—like the idea of Zazu needing to recover his “authentic wolfness”—is philosophically brittle. We are not wolves, and that’s okay. Nor are we prisoners of our DNA. We are free beings, capable of shaping meaning from the givens of our lives—whether those givens arrived through nature, nurture, or a CRISPR edit.

If you’re interested in the full argument—including responses to Habermas and Fukuyama, a reconstruction of authenticity through Heidegger and Sartre, and the introduction of a dachshund named Zazu as an unlikely philosophical provocateur—you can read the article here:

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13428