Pretty much all of us are massive hypocrites when it comes to Eugenics: it is a taboo subject when applied to populations, yet everyone apart from the insane is looking for a genetically fit partner.
It is not hypocrisy to believe that something is appropriate as a free individual choice and reprehensible as compulsorily-imposed State policy.
Saying that that makes us hypocrites about eugenics is like saying supporting adults freely engaging in consensual sex but opposing government-mandated compulsory intercourse as soon as one reaches the age of majority makes us hypocrites about sex.
I disagree: it's the concept of voluntary vs. involuntary decisions. If I look for a genetically fit partner to have kids with, that's my decision, and it's my choice as to what I consider "good" genes (which is arbitrary, after all). If the state does it, then I have no choice, plus I might be getting paired with someone who I don't consider to have "good" genes, or I might not even be allowed to breed at all.
> it's my choice as to what I consider "good" genes (which is arbitrary, after all)
But is your choice yours, or just your genes speaking? I'd also dispute the idea that there aren't universal indicators of genetic fitness that we all find attractive. Given free choice we would all prefer someone with better skin, brighter eyes, more lustrous hair, better teeth, etc. etc. wouldn't we? No one sets out to look for an ugly, physically lousy mate, do they?
> If the state does it, then I have no choice, plus I might be getting paired with someone who I don't consider to have "good" genes, or I might not even be allowed to breed at all.
Like it or not, Eugenics of a type is probably coming down the track anyway via gene editing. Who would turn down the chance to upgrade their offspring's intellect or height, given the option?
Some people have no plans to reproduce. Many women are quite willing to get with some ugly old geezer with money in order to get a cut of his money.
Your hypothesis doesn't hold any water on the face of it, even before getting into much more complicated edge cases.
I once saw a comment on a cystic fibrosis forum by a woman with CF who had a previous boyfriend with CF. CF causes significant reproductive problems, including that 97 percent of men with CF have vas deferens, so their ejaculate contains no live sperm. On top of that it is a homozygous recessive disorder, so it's very controversial for someone with CF to want biological children of their own since you have no hope of not passing on a defective gene. Two people with CF wanting a child together would be guaranteed to have a child with CF and it would almost certainly require medical intervention to happen at all.
The CF community frequently has heated, emotional discussions about the morality of having more kids if your first child has CF, having biological kids at all if you have CF, etc.
I also have read of people with certain disorders having intervention so they could have a biological child and select out the ones that got the bad genes because they knew how torturous the condition was and had no desire to do that to their own child.
The ability to identify problematic genes via testing and the option to have certain kinds of fertility intervention is creating a whole slew of new questions. This complicated by the fact that genetic disorders profligate when they offer a survival advantage.
This is the story behind Sickle Cell, which helps protect against malaria. It is also the reason CF is so much more common in Caucasian populations of European descent: Having only one of the genes doesn't give you a deadly condition and protects against an infection that rampantly killed people in Europe historically.
So it is entirely possible that after designer babies become a thing and we remove too many "bad" genes from the gene pool, someday this will come back to bite us for some reason.
>Having only one of the genes doesn't give you a deadly condition and protects against an infection that rampantly killed people in Europe historically.
>So it is entirely possible that after designer babies become a thing and we remove too many "bad" genes from the gene pool, someday this will come back to bite us for some reason.
Maybe, but unlikely. Those infections were a problem back then because we lived in huts and didn't have antibiotics or anything resembling modern medicine. A comment below says that this gene helps protect against cholera, for instance. Well cholera isn't a problem in places with proper sanitation, so this gene isn't really a help for people living in rich, industrialized nations. Sickle cell protecting against malaria might be useful to people living in malaria-prone areas still, but we do have immunizations against malaria these days, and in the future it's really not going to be a problem at all.
Finally, with "designer babies", presumably we'll be at the point where we'll just be able to genetically engineer ourselves to deal with any remaining environmental problems/diseases directly, instead of relying on some accidental mutation that gives us a little better resistance at a huge cost.
we lived in huts and didn't have antibiotics or anything resembling modern medicine
When antibiotics were discovered, the world announced the end of disease. Today, there are endless articles about the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, plus dystopian fiction about a post antibiotics world.
I'm not 100 percent convinced we are as clever as we imagine ourselves to be.
You've got to be kidding. Just because we haven't achieved perfection as far as medical science, you think we're still just as well off as the days where people routinely died young from various infections?
Antibiotics aren't going away, they're just having to get better to cope with the evolution of bacteria.
> Many women are quite willing to get with some ugly old geezer with money in order to get a cut of his money.
Resources are arguably a proxy for genetic fitness, in that those resources must have been acquired somehow, and discounting luck that would indicate success in the acquisition of resources - on its own a useful trait to pass on to your offspring. Apart from that, it's perfectly possible for women to marry the ugly old geezer and be promiscuous with attractive young men, and this is backed up by statistics on the number of children unknowingly raised by men that are not the biological father.
I never said that Eugenics is desirable or that I support it. All I said is that I think there is a discrepancy - if we took the same approach to personal attraction as we do at a societal level towards Eugenics we would forbid attraction based on physical factors, which would be a very different world from what we have now.
This is the same as capitalism vs communism: capitalism is good at individual level, not so good at society level. Communism is good at society level, not so good at individual level.
Sure, you just have to look at various primitive societies that lived in villages to see how communism actually works well for society.
The problem is that no one has been able to scale it up to a modern industrialized nation-state and get it to work out well there. Every time they've tried, it's been a disaster.
Saying that that makes us hypocrites about eugenics is like saying supporting adults freely engaging in consensual sex but opposing government-mandated compulsory intercourse as soon as one reaches the age of majority makes us hypocrites about sex.