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Depends on who you ask, right?
Therein lies the slippery slope, and why the word eugenics is uttered in hushed tones among polite people. That and it is typically attributed as a misnomer - human eugenics is more often just oppressive, authoritarian, xenophobic, evil,madness dressed up in pseudo-scientific rationalizations to treat the persecuted underclasses as cattle. The real question is whether or not we, as a species, can be trusted with the unprecedented power and responsibility of direct control over our own evolution.
Modern medicine is fundamentally dysgenic. My line alone has tendencies towards bipolar disorder, poor vision, asthma, and crippling congenital foot defects. I was fortunate to have escaped most of them. However, the mere fact that I was born carrying these traits can be credited to the fact that my grandparents were treated for them (club feet in the case of my grandmother) and survived to pass them on. Great for the individual, but in the cold calculus of survival, it can only be said that the more serious genetic maladies that we can correct for with medicine and surgery, the more they will build up in the gene pool. The promise of these new gene modification techniques is that we can put the hands on the wheel of our own genetic destiny rather than leaving it to the Ouija-board control of whatever god one would choose to cede them to. One might well expect this thought to make a great many people very uncomfortable. This is entirely justified given the human track record. However, another ethical standpoint to take might be this:
If I am told that my child, in utero, has a 100% chance of being born with cystic fibrosis, but that a reasonably priced (hey, it could happen) treatment could apply a patch to that nasty little mutation, would that somehow be less ethically sound than abortion, abstaining from childbearing, or allowing the child to come to term to a life of certain, now trivially preventable, suffering? Contrarily, if the burden depressive moodiness is 'cured' from our genetic makeup, what cost do we pay in losing the creative pearls built up around the pain of the melancholic soul? A world without Poe, van Gogh, or even Morrissey? Tough questions. |
No. Check back in 50-100 years.