I was reading that story about a couple who had a baby so they could use it as a bone-marrow donor for their daughter. Some “ethicists” (how do you become one of those, by the way?) said “this is the slippery slope to making designer babies, we can’t let that happen!”
Well, why not? Women already eat and exercise to ensure their babies are healthy. What’s wrong with doing what they can to make sure their babies are smart and attractive, too? It’s not like we’re talking about euthanizing “unacceptable” babies at birth. You can say, “oh, that would marginalize ugly, less-intelligent people.” Well, I got news for you, that’s been going on since the dawn of time.
Wouldn’t designing babies simply result in a healthier, smarter human race? Why is this bad?
Because the stupid, weak people would be left behind by progress. As we’d get better at designing humans with only desirable attributes, the rift between healthy, smart people and stupid, weak people would grow until they would be known as the Eloy and the Morloks respectively. I, for one, would not like my imperfect offspring to become creepy, midget cave monkeys. That’s just weird.
[sub]It’s been a long time since I’ve read The Time Machine. I don’t really remember the proper spellings.[/sub]
I’ve heard “ethical” arguments about how unnatural (or downright wrong) it would be it design your offspring.
So, I guess the elimination of Down’s Syndrome, Muscular Dystrophy, Spinal Meningitis, etc, is somewhow unethical. The end of The Special Olympics due to lack of participants would be a bad thing, huh?
IMHO, designer children represent our next step in evolution, since we have seemed to have stepped beyond natural selection in our species.
Jeez, Eve, that would be horrible! Right out of Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD!
Think about it! Everyone would be attractive…happy with their lot in life…productive…fulfulled…having a simply fabulous sex life…reaching for a panacea pill every time they had a slight headache or a bout of depression…
I’m with ya, really. I see no reason not to exploit our technology and knowledge in order to better ourselves whenever we can. It would be great to have a clone of myself that I can use for spare parts. It would be great to edit my own genetic material for my benefit or the benefit of my progeny. There probably won’t be that many opposing views at the top level.
There are issues of concern, though. The best medicine and benefits of science are already rapidly escaping the grasp of the poor. As a man who’s rather in love with humanity, I have a tough time thinking that the poor should be left behind – that their genetic material does not merit enhancement and continued development.
Also, what about the feelings of the spare parts people? Is this couple of which you speak intending to inform their new child that it exists only as an incubator for the spare parts of their prized daughter? How is the kid going to deal with that? I’m about the least touchy-feely guy around. I don’t care much about emotional response to scientific advancement, but I do wonder about the ethics of breeding complete humans as nothing more than repair kits. That’s a little funky.
Well, people shouldn’t breed “spare part” clones like fetal pigs to be slaughtered; this would never be allowed anyway. But they can tell this bone-marrow baby, “you were a wonderful gift—not only did you enrich our lives, but you’re a hero for saving your sister!” and similar crapola. Still beats the hell out of “you’re here because the condom broke, ya little creep.”
As far as the “poor wouldn’t be able to afford it” argument. Well, I can’t afford a $500,000 pearl necklace with platinum settings. Does that mean they should all be destroyed or outlawed?
I am not poor, but I cannot afford Lasik surgery for my eyesight, and my wife and I are desparately trying to save for IVF. Are we being “left behind?” Certainly not. Like everything else, it would be nice to have, but we can’t afford.
I can’t ever imagine in our lifetime that designer babies would be the norm (although, thanks to the the completion of the Genome project, we may well see an end to genetic diseases). If we ever reach that point, our entire society will be different then, and it’s impossible to project whether the poor will actually be left out.
Also, I doubt that anyone is making the claim for a newborn to be an incubator. The donation of bone marrow does not kill the donor, and it was probably much easier to find a compatible donor in a sibling, so they had one. I see no ethical problem with 2 healthy children.
Genetic engineering is problematic in that the person being engineered cannot give consent to the procedure ahead of time. So, we must go with the principle of implied consent. I would argue that reasonable people would consent to being cured of horrible genetic diseases before they are born. So this is not a problem.
But would they consent to third arms growing from their foreheads? Probably not, unless society has changed so much that people with third arms are looked up to, not considered circus freaks. So genetic enhancements must be reasonable, they cannot leave the child freakish or horribly mutated. Increased intelligence? Sure. Green fur? No.
A guide would be that genetic manipulation would be moral if the same result achieved through surgery, drugs or other conventional techniques would also be moral.
There is no “person” being genetically engineered; it is, at best, embryo (perhaps even an egg or sperm in vitro). Let’s face it, you have to determine what it’s going to be before it starts on its way.
After the engineering, 9 months later, a person is born. Now, that “person” having a say in his/her genetic engineering is like you telling your parents you would have rather them both be blond, otherwise they should not have been allowed to have you.
Wouldn’t designing babies simply result in a healthier, smarter human race? Why is this bad?**
Eve, are you sure intelligence is a heritable trait? The data are too inconclusive at this point. How much is heritable and how much is enviromental? IQ tests are shown to be culturally biased, so they’re a poor indicator of intelligence or “potential” intelligence.
And who decides what is beautiful? What is stunningly beautiful to one person might be mud-fence ugly to another. Do we really want to have a society of Christy Brinkleys and Tom Sellecks clones walking around?
What your proposing sounds like homogenizing the gene pool, maximizing for certain traits at the expense of others. And in that rush to maximize some traits we could inadvertantly get rid of some that down the road would do us some good.
Evolution turns on the fact that the enviroment changes, unexpectedly and in ways that not always imaginable. By maximizing for some traits and ignoring others we could breed out of ourselves the very thing that would make us able to capable of surviving those unforseen changes.
And all the intelligence and beauty in the world won’t help you when some virus or bacterium decides that your great-grand child’s body is a heaven-sent banquet table.
While I admire your goal, our lack of understanding of ALL of the genetic programming we can and how it interacts leaves us woe-fully disadvantaged to carry out this experiment.
“Wouldn’t designing babies simply result in a healthier, smarter human race?”
With our current state of technology noone is having/creating designer babies. What is going on is the selection of embryos which have been produced in the pseudo-usual way. Actually designing/tinkering with a child’s DNA is a few years away - 5 to 10.
As far as the ethics of having a second child so that the first might have a chance to live, it’s a much better reason to have a child than 1) to save a marriage (which won’t work) or 2) because you didn’t want to wear a condom etc.
Tymp does bring up a good point. In the book <i>Remaking Eden</i> Lee M. Silver suggests that with the dawn of the age a genetically engineered children the human race will “evolve” into two separate species. The genetically rich and the genetically poor drawn along the lines of the economic groups of the same distinction: Rich and Poor. Additionally, it’ll be an exponential progression as the descendants of anyone who has been genetically manipulated will automatically be granted the fruits of those efforts in addition to anything done for them before they were implanted into the uterous of their “mothers”.
“Is this couple of which you speak intending to inform their new child that it exists only as an incubator for the spare parts of their prized daughter?” In this particular example, the couple wanted more kids anyway and couldn’t have had them without a high probability that they too would have this same lethal disease without this same technique. However, even if they did not want to have more children, I’d like to point you toward my previous point about reasons to have children. Adam’s gonna’ find out somehow that he saved his sister’s life. I don’t think he’ll mind all that much. I wish I had been conceive with such a noble purpose.
“I can’t ever imagine in our lifetime that designer babies would be the norm.” Designer babies will not become the norm any time soon, but they will be common - certainly so if you include the offspring of selected/engineered children. Adam’s kids will be free of the disease. Molly’s might not be.
Finally, clones will not be necessary as doctors are now coming close to being able to regrow your organs from scratch either in the lab or, later, inside your body where they’re supposed to be.
Lemus has a good point. I mean, designing kids without horrible crippling ailments and making them rocket scientists to boot? Sure! Three eyes? No way!
But what about a few things that are not so easy to decide on.
Some people think hoosexuality is a disease. Even a lot of people who do not share this view would not wish their progeny to be gay if they had the ultimate decision (don’t want to get into a debate about the reasons why, except to say that being gay makes life harder on people in our society and no parents likes obstacles for their children, even if it’s society’s fault).
I’m sure there are other examples such as this, but needless to say, this is probably the most touchy one.
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This is a difficult issue, and I don’t mean it as a cop-out. To every difficult question there’s an easy wrong answer. I have a few problems with it.
A class-based analysis. These procedures will probably be very expensive, meaning that they will be the domain of the rich. The poor are already less healthy than the average and I see this as having the potential to even more firmly cement the poor in their position in a stratified society.
Consequently, I fear discrimination against people with genetic ailments. Think “Gattaca”, where Ethan Hawke couldn’t get a job because the corporations didn’t want to pay to train someone who (in their analysis) could die before returning their investment.
I also fear the ability to unilaterally decide what is a disease. I worry, if homosexuality is found to be genetically caused, about parents choosing to alter their proto-gay fetuses. I worry, in general, about an artificial standardization by removal of supposedly undesirable features and the consequent drop in diversity. Nature made us genetically diverse for a reason.
I worry about side effects.
I worry about the self-esteem issues of knowing that you were defective as a fetus but that your parents had you altered. As someone whose parents tried their damnedest to improve certain features of my personality that I later determined were not as clear-cut as they were supposed to be, this issue has particular resonance for me.
I don’t think it’s wrong to “design” one’s offspring, so long as that design has its sole effect and purpose the best interests of that offspring.
However, when the design may perhaps contravene the best interests of the offspring, or is without regard to its interests, the I think the designer becomes guilty of treating a person as an object. I know of no legitimate moral philosophy that does not condemn the treatment of a person as an object.
The pen upon which I was idly chewing as I read the updates to this thread has been successfully launched into the next office thanks to your last post.
I don’t know how else to evaluate intelligence than asking problem solving questions and evaluating answers. Do you? IQ test may not be perfect but it’s one of the best tools we have developed thus far. If little Johnny is being tested within culturally similar criteria to his own then the results should be fair indicators of his intelligence.
Mmmmmm… Christy Brinkley…
I don’t really see that. I don’t think Eve is suggesting tight interbreeding here. We are still operating with the same general gene pool as before.
But since we cannot predict what particular trait will or won’t be missed in the future we may in fact be helping ourselves by strengthening some features that are presently weak. It’s kind of a hard thing to speculate about with any real success given that we cannot predict the future. Also, if we are smart enough to do genetic engineering, chances are we’ll be smart enough to overcome the threats of unforseen diseases as well.