The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Eugenics! It's not just for Nazis and Christmas! Possibly!
poshniallo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, this is a tangent from the LGBT thread that I think is interesting.
Basically, is Eugenics OK, and what limits should there be on it if so? I'm particularly thinking of genetic manipulation of fetuses or zygotes, and abortion of fetuses known to have a congenital disorder, rather than totalitarian limits or other ways to affect who chooses which partner. I'm thinking of voluntary effects that parents can have upon their unborn child.
Please remember this is not an abortion debate, and also remember to keep ethics separate from law: For example, if amniocentesis had shown our daughter to have Down's, I don't think we would have aborted her. And aborting disabled fetuses is perhaps the most common form of eugenics available in the modern world. But whether it should be done and whether it should be legal are two different discussions - both relevant to this thread, of course. Just try not to get them mixed up.
I wish I could make a more definite and strong OP, but I am undecided myself, that's one of the reasons I wanted to make the thread.
In the LGBT thread, MrMr was (I think) starting to argue that it would not necessarily be as bad as is commonly imagined, and that we should avoid the slippery slope and not just assume it would lead to Gattaca or the Fourth Reich.
So, what do you think?
Basically, is Eugenics OK, and what limits should there be on it if so? I'm particularly thinking of genetic manipulation of fetuses or zygotes, and abortion of fetuses known to have a congenital disorder, rather than totalitarian limits or other ways to affect who chooses which partner. I'm thinking of voluntary effects that parents can have upon their unborn child.
Please remember this is not an abortion debate, and also remember to keep ethics separate from law: For example, if amniocentesis had shown our daughter to have Down's, I don't think we would have aborted her. And aborting disabled fetuses is perhaps the most common form of eugenics available in the modern world. But whether it should be done and whether it should be legal are two different discussions - both relevant to this thread, of course. Just try not to get them mixed up.
I wish I could make a more definite and strong OP, but I am undecided myself, that's one of the reasons I wanted to make the thread.
In the LGBT thread, MrMr was (I think) starting to argue that it would not necessarily be as bad as is commonly imagined, and that we should avoid the slippery slope and not just assume it would lead to Gattaca or the Fourth Reich.
So, what do you think?
I figure I could take a bear.
poshniallo on
+1
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
Edit: Also, can we talk about memetic engineering here as well? That's roughly on the same moral scope.
I need an adult!
The ethics is where it gets messy.
We're really in kind of a peculiar spot right now: on the one hand we know that this technology is going to keep advancing and increasing in what we can change. And on the other hand we really have no idea what it's going to look like when we get there.
There's a big fight right now over the use of synthetic DNA (designed in a lab for a purpose, instead of being cribbed from a healthy human)
One of the big concerns is that if synthetic DNA is considered OK to use, genetic treatments will shift from preventing inherited diseases by replacing the diseased segments with healthy genes (something most people are probably in favor of within reason) into doctors trying to upgrade genes, at which point things start getting a lot scarier.
Right. This.
BTW, I don't think that this issue is cleanly separable from the abortion debate. Some of the same values, rights, and arguments apply in each case.
If two parents (or one parent) determines that they cannot financially or personally care for a healthy baby, we* defend the mother's right to terminate that pregnancy. (* I feel safe saying this given that the vast majority of the forums, even including the forum centrists and conservatives, swings pro-choice.)
It would be hypocritical to refuse a given set of parents that same right just because their baby is disabled. A child's disability increases the burden on the parents.
However, I think we recognize that a fetus is not completely without value, it simply does not have a right to life that overshadows the rights of the mother to prosperity and happiness. So it's fair to say that not all abortions are morally neutral - we just recognize that the law is a blunt instrument, and tends to be very bad at splitting their ethical hairs.
It is also necessary to recognize that parental expectations may be unrealistic. Every parent hopes their child will grow up to be a race-car driving neurologist rock star, but obviously very few will be. Many parents, especially first-time parents, are unprepared for the actual burden of raising a child.
And on the other hand, the actual life quality impact of a disability may be more or less than expected. Downs syndrome is a good example - actual levels of disability with Downs syndrome vary wildly, and there is a good chance that a child with Downs syndrome can grow up to be a happy, independent adult.
As Peter Singer wrote (thank you, Wikipedia, for helping me find this quote):
So if we imagine a hypothetical set of parents - let's call them June and Ward - who were willing to have a child if that child is healthy, but not willing to have a child with Downs syndrome; there's a possibility that these parents were underestimating the burden of raising a healthy child while overestimating the burden of raising a child with Downs syndrome, and were consequently making a decision based on false assessments of the available options.
It is conceivable that June and Ward in this scenario were not adequately mentally prepared for the burden of raising a child at all, and did not give enough room to all the different risks and challenges that can occur with introducing another human being into the world.
It's a little different if we're talking about a condition that is virtually guaranteed to result in severe disability, requiring lifelong parental support, or direct suffering on the part of the child.
Human beings are messy; children moreso - you can't expect your family life to be a perfect 50s sitcom. Shit happens, and you need to be emotionally prepared for shit happening. If you bail at the first sign of trouble, what does that say about you as a parent?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Wouldn't not bailing say something worse? Children are people, not tests of self-worth.
Things that I would find the use of prenatal genetic engineering abhorrent and unethical would be if the the uses were to establish what some asshole determines to be "normal" or to "fix" things that are an issue. For example, on the bullshit norm thing, the stereotypical blue-eyed, blond white kid thing. For things that don't need so called fixing, the theoretical trans curing pill that changes their brain into that of a cisgendered.
Really not trying to turn into an abortion thread, but the practice has been used to preempt the people being born with certain disabilities. I'm pro-choice but this is the area that leaves me uncomfortable and sometimes appalled by some people's choices. Person that develops crippling complications that will kill them moments after birth, I can agree with people making the choice here. I find it appalling when they decide to abort someone that might be born with something like down syndrome (the tests still are 100% accurate), this is a case where if the person does end up having down syndrome, they can grow up to be happy self-fulfilled individuals if society gives them a chance.
If we got to the point where we could genetically engineer fetuses, I don't think I would be opposed if the practice was limited to fixing genes that result in people being born with crippling complications or disabilities (hell, I wouldn't object if such engineering was used to prevent down syndrome.
The only problem I see here, besides the human race being fucking terrible on this whole front from like forever, is that people would abuse it, as Fong pointed out in the thread that got this whole discussion rolling. The first people with access to the tech will likely want money and finds ways to eek out as much as possible. The rich will probably be fucking hypocrites by get such practices outlawed in most 1st world countries because they feel it's immoral, while making sure to go on "vacations" to places that allow them to genetically engineer their offspring. So not only will the lower class not benefit from such tech, the rich will find some way to use it to widen the gulf between the classes and completely fuck over anyone that isn't born with what is considered "perfect" DNA (pretty much GATTACA, except they won't just stop at what is considered a perfectly healthy human being, they'll add several layers of cosmetic bullshit that people have to follow). Part of me hopes that the tech to do such engineering is still a far ways off because there are too many people in the human race that not only will abuse such tech, they have the means to make it happen. Another part of me wants to see it happen in my lifetime since it could be used to improve people's quality of life if people use it responsibly.
Eugenics programs are external to the family unit; they are a government or institutional attempt to force or persuade adults to sterilize, abort, or use birth control.
I personally consider family planning to be a basic human right, and efforts by institutional authorities to interfere with that basic human right to be ethically dubious. If a physician gives expecting parents accurate (if disheartening) information about the life expectancy and quality of life of a child with - for example - total Fragile X Syndrome, then that physician is acting within his professional capacity looking out for the good of the parents and the good of the child.
If that physician is not looking out for the good of his patients; but rather is coming at it from a point of view that FXS represents an undo burden on society, and believes that children with total FSX should be aborted for the good of the community, then that is ethically problematic. He has put aside his role as a trusted advisor to his patients, and is instead acting as an agent of the state, or at least an agent of a social ideology. This is not necessarily wrong in all imaginable cases, but it should be treated cautiously.
There's a gray area here... but upon inspection, it may not be quite as gray as it seems. No decision is made in a vacuum. Even when parents make a personal decision to abort (or an adult makes a personal decision to sterilize) because they feel unable to suffer the burden of raising a child, they are making a decision based on the social, economic, and historical circumstances in which they live. When a parent in southeast Asia terminates a female pregnancy for being female, the tragedy is not merely the loss of one fetus; the tragedy is that there are billions of people living in conditions in which simply being female makes you less worthy of life.
In the US, our resources for caring for children who are developmentally disabled are moderately robust. Parents who give birth to a child with Downs aren't alone; there is help for them out there. But perhaps there isn't as much help as there could be. And given issues in the US with healthcare, with social welfare, with the availability of psychiatric care, with the stigma towards behavioral disorders, with child care and family leave - problems that affect all parents, including parents of healthy children - a parent who aborts any child due to feelings of economic inadequacy is perhaps reacting to a culture in which we don't help any family as much as we could.
In principle, this is not that different from a Pakistani mother committing infanticide on a female child. It's mostly a matter of degree.
We could argue that this is different from eugenics. We're not actively pressuring adults to abort, we're giving them the choice - and offering what help we can. I think that's a naive outlook.
One of the ideas being eugenics as a social engineering strategy is that through abortion and sterilization, we can reduce the burden that genetically inferior children place on society at large. It is a conscious decision that rather than take care of our disabled, rather than accommodate them, rather than find them homes and jobs that are appropriate for their disability, we'd rather just prevent them from being born. The calculus isn't all that different - we have finite social and economic resources, and we'd just rather not take care of the most burdensome of our population.
So, really, we can see inadequate disability resources, inadequate health care, inadequate child care as a form of passive eugenics. The motivation is the same. We just don't want to care for unproductive people. We just figure parents will come to the dire mortal conclusion on their own, rather than have it forced on them.
That works for the libertarian element, I suppose, but it doesn't work for me.
A fundamental duty of civilization - one of the major reasons we have laws and government at all - is to protect the weak and the sick. It is our duty to take care of those who can't take care of themselves, to give a little help to those who need a little help, make room for those who can get by on their own but are just a little different from us.
Saying "well, we just can't really find the money or time to help people with disabilities" in a country with the NFL, the Pentagon, NASA, Wall Street, and Wal-Mart is downright chickenshit.
In my opinion.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Perhaps. Depends on this I suppose: are we talking about a condition that reduces the child's quality of life, or simply makes things inconvenient for the parent?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's also worth asking if the parent has a moral obligation to allow the "inconvenience"* the define the course of the rest of their life? If we've established the worth of an unborn fetus is less than the rights of the adult parent then why would we impose the obligation on the parent to spend their life dealing with a random act of fate?
*I kind of object to the word "inconvenient" because I feel it downplays the severity of the problem
I thought that eugenics aimed to eradicate certain traits from human population. In this context, this could only be done by pre pregnancy selection. It's the parents that are screened and deemed worthy of reproduction.
This difference is especially true in the case of Down syndrome, which in most cases results from an abnormality in the production of reproductive cells, so it's not a "bad gene" per se, more like a malformation at the chromosomal level. This means that even if you go full Reich and selectively breed all humans to be blonde and blue-haired, you will still get babies with Down syndrome.
So this discussion is not really about eugenics, which I think are unethical by principle.
Now, I think gene therapy on a fetus is perfectly fine. And in cases of disability continuing the pregnancy should be the parent's choice, since it is a situation heavily dependent on the social, economic and emotional situation of the family. In a perfect world where everyone had good health care and parents were properly supported if they had to take care of a disabled child I would understand some restrictions on this. But in the current situation a state that would forbid the abortion while not giving a single fuck about the child once it's born would be very hypocritical and unethical.
As for gene modification for non-health reasons. How far are we down that road? Right now I don't really think we can do any meaningful modifications to a baby and honestly, I don't think dystopic scenarios where we have the rich übermensch and the poor "normals" are even possible because genetics are just not as simple as that. I don't think we need to legislate that right now. As for the ethics of a hypothetical modification possibility. Well, we can discuss for hours about them, but we would all know what would happen the way society is right now. A dystopian scenario would most likely happen. I just hope that if we ever reach the point where such modifications are possible (and I don't think we ever will) society itself will be very different.
Hell, if there was a way to rejigger some of my own genes, I'd be up for it in an instant. So much bad shit there that I'd like to fix. I don't see why this should be prevented for parents if it's going to lead to a better life quality for parents and children. I know my life would've been better with some fixing of my genes.
There's no need to go silly nazi eugenics on the issue. It's often the aspect touted by the "MAN HAS NO RIGHT TO PLAY GOD"-crowd.
Eugenics is a social movement directed at improving the genetic material of a population, typically a human one. Given current limitations, that almost always means selective breeding, but we could imagine a future (hopefully somewhat like Gataca, but without the hateful bullshit) where you could just muck with the genes before a child develops too far (like the blastocyst phase or something).
In selective breeding, yeah, you screen the parents and determine if they have the traits you're trying to select for. If they do, you mate them, if not, you don't. Obviously, we can't select who gets to mate with whom in a human population; that's fucking monstrous. I wonder how close we could approximate that with financial incentives / disincentives (eg No history of type 1 diabetes in your families? You get twice the child tax credit!).
I hate to say it SKFM but that's kind of what this thread is about, so there's going to be a lot of that talk. I understand why it could be hard to read for some people though, if that's the case for you, you should probably consider just sitting this one out.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
Have any of you heard this debate from Intelligence Squared? "Should We Prohibit Genetically Engineered Babies?"
The main thrust of the pro argument (ie: no gene-mod kids) mostly cited the difficulties of developing the technology needed to really do good. It was too hard, too expensive, and ultimately unethical and dangerous should something go awry. The con argument was a plea for humanity, essentially, "we can help these children, so we should".
But man, thinking about how we get to the scientific point where we can effectively do something like benign eugenics is terrifying.
We've spent millennia developing new means of improving the human condition. Why stop now? I remember a post on tumblr once declaring transhumanism to be inherently sexist and racist.
It was one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Especially since the person posting it was using a computer, has more then likely used medicine, and doubtless has used some means of transportation.
When the person started saying I was "mansplaining" I knew there would be no convincing them about how wrong they were.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
edit: whoops!
When it comes to eugenics, I think that deliberate attempts to use technology to improve the human condition tend to be largely positive. But I think in a world with as many lingering structural inequalities, the negative effects on a significant segment of the world's population aren't worth the gains. What we should be doing is trying to address the structural issues first, because then we'll have a better sense of what kinds of genetic interventions we as a species really would benefit most from exploring.
Still does not open the way to nazi-like eugenesia, racism or whatever, because intelligence, race etc. are all complex traits derived from a lot of different genes, and that's leaving epigenetic factors out. Race is also pretty meaningless when we are talking about the genes of an individual, if anything we could talk about skin color, and even that is a complex trait.
In short, even though we may have the ability to substitute a specific defective gene, complex modifications and possible dystopias are still a science fiction thing, unless I'm very disinformed.
Which one is the correct definition for you?
I have never heard the eugenesia term before and google doesn't return any english results on the term.
Edit: Obviously, as we approach the ability to directly tinker with our genes the definition could use some advancement but I'd be leery to extending it to just gene therapy rather than inheritable changes.
Sorry. Eugenesia is a Spanish term. Eugenics is the correct one. I agree with your definition, but other people in this thread were arguing that fixing defective genes on developing humans could be considered a form of eugenics, since it was effectively removing those defective genes from the gene pool.
I still don't agree with that (as I say in my first post on this thread: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/27215201/#Comment_27215201), but I'm too lazy to dispute their definition so I just adopted it for the purposes of this discussion.
Yes, I'm leery about that, too, because then you mix it with proper, hardcore eugenics, which are ALWAYS problematic. I'd rather call it "gene therapy".
Genetic diversity is always good. I know that at this point of history we may think we are not at the mercy of natural selection anymore, but we may be in the future. And also who knows, a gene that gives you a lower IQ could also make you less likely to die of cancer. So there's that. Genes are just too complex to say "we are going to remove X trait and there will be no other consequences whatsoever". It's just not realistic.
I mean, what is the difference between changing a child's genes to not has diabetes and giving that child insulin? Both are just chemical changes.
Or Downs syndrome, if there was a pill to make it so a couple could never conceive a child with down downs everyone could take it but if it happens after the egg is fetilized suddenly it's a moral conundrum.
No, not all diversity is good. But we should be very careful with what we consider "bad" diversity, and I'm my opinion it should be limited to things that result in severe disabilities for an individual. Diversity should never be reduces in the name of vague benefits for society, such as you said with skin color.
My main point is that the abnormalities of today can be the adaptations of tomorrow. Some people say, for example, that the adaptation of dolphins and whales to aquatic life is partially based on achondroplasia.
What is the value of Sickle Cell Anemia?
Monocultures are bad.
Because it's a stupid solution. If people are looking down on people with blue eyes then your problem are not the eyes, your problem is that your society is full of assholes and it's better to educate them than to remove their pet peeve of the century from the gene pool.
Because you will eventually run out of traits to remove, but assholes will never run out of stupid irrelevant stuff to discriminate against.
Diversity is good in itself, not only because it's a value like any other (or if not what's the point in having any animals if we just need chickens to eat?) and because genetic diversity will make genetic problems less common and will promote beneficial mutations. The benefits of "irrelevant" diversity may not be huge, but they are certainly much higher than the benefit of removing it, especially if we take the cost into account.
Also, I'm curious, how would you decide which skin or eye color should we remove? What if different countries decide different things? Now we will have a variety of genetically homogenous countries that will look down on each other. Good luck with that.
I mean, would you seriously defend that we should all dress in grey overalls because people look down on the way hipsters dress?
Actually, the mutation that causes sickle cell anemia also provides a measure of immunity to malaria, IIRC.
....that was my point.
We slap a label on this as an illness because it has negative consequences most of the time but under certain conditions it is actually quite beneficial.
I am somewhat concerned that in our incomplete knowledge of these biological conditions we eliminate them and "clean" the human genome we'll be eliminating the variation that makes a species able to survive new conditions.