Designer babies - PPR style

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Well, I think we've had several arguments like this in the News forum but never one here. Anyway, the new eugenics is coming in some form or another - whether filtering out undesirable babies (which we already do), up to perhaps engineering babies in some fashion to have the kinds of traits we want. Should we let nature do whatever it wants, even if that means the offspring will suffer? If we can control the outcome, is there a limit; can we have fully custom babies to be beautiful and smart? What about people who might choose something controversial (e.g. deaf people engineering deaf babies, or people with ASDs engineering babies with ASDs)?

Poll options are fairly self explanatory I think.

I, for one, want to have a whole batch of aspies! Let's do this!

There's an old scifi novel called Beggars In Spain that deals with this. The author is fairly obscure, and the book is out of print. I was told that in the novel, billionaires pay to create perfect kids. The resulting adults have every advantage and take over the planet, causing a backlash that results in a revolution and the dispossession of the perfect people. Like Cain, they are forced to wander the world forever. They are easily identified, so people know not to feed or comfort them.

I suspect that something similar would happen should we create perfect people, or even people with Heroes-like superpowers. Superpowered people would have an extra problem in that they might be powerful enough to destroy earth or even the spacetime continuum, and could institute a dictatorship under threat of absolute destruction.

The other side is the forced elimination of undesirables, either Nazi style or via abortion/infanticide. The Nazis came frighteningly close to eliminating not only Jews but Gypsies, the latter of who had so many killed that they now only exist in the US. The Germans were reportedly a single won battle away from sweeping into Palestine and eliminating the half million Jews it held. Had that happened, there likely would not be an Israeli state, or it would be in Alaska or Africa or someplace different. Humanity has the power if it so wishes to eliminate ALL undesirables.

The FLDS, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon splinter group once in Arizona but now mainly in Texas, tried to create a perfect race via inbreeding and parental selection, and the result was massive numbers of genetically deformed babies and the near collapse of their society. Now imagine that on a planetary scale. The survival of humanity would be under serious threat. But people seem bent on it. It appears we'll have to learn the hard way, by extinguishing ourselves.

This is really already being done, to some extent. You have already mentioned filtering out undesirable babies. People also actively seek all of the other things you mentioned when seeking in vitro fertilization. Sperm donors are selected based on their health history, physical traits, IQ score, education background, and so on. In vitro recipients can also select the baby's gender, with a certan margin of error of course. These things have been going on for a long time. It is not for me, but I do not have much to say about what others choose to do in these types of situations.

Design away. Let your accursed spawn do whatever you desire.

Transhumanism is inevitable, whether by genetic manipulation, cybernetic implantation, or both.

Mutant Cyborgs Rule!

Transhumanism sounds great, but this goes two ways. For example, as I pointed out, deaf people may choose to have deaf children. What degree of freedom do people have in engineering their children? If I wanted an ugly baby, would that be okay, given the poorer life outcomes for ugly people, if I thought ugly people had character or some moral superiority? Who even knows what people could concoct. Does the new eugenics imply a standard eugenics where we select for "positive" attributes on the reasoning that anything less would be damaging to the child? Who makes these decisions and on what authority? Can people engineer children with autism, which would result in poor lifetime productivity (and hence a burden to the welfare state). All of those standard eugenic issues which ordinarily seemed beyond consideration due to the widespread condemnation of eugenics suddenly seem slightly more pertinent because the quality of children would be in the control of people producing them in all circumstances and they know what they're getting and what they're doing to high probabilities. Even if you don't see a relevant contrast, I'd be willing to suspect a number of people would.

And then there's the class implications. If engineering a baby is expensive, do people fear that this would produce greater class divides? Or what if the whole thing turned out like Gattaca (not a horrible future in my mind, but apparently it is in everyone else's) where there was discrimination against people who weren't engineered?

Specifically, what responsibilities would prospective parents have towards the genetic fitness of their offspring?

You know what's interesting about this topic? It's extremely difficult if not impossible to show that eugenics is wrong. The ways mankind has gone about it thus far? Definitely wrong. But, just because we're autistic, why must we be autism's cheerleaders to infinity? Eliminating autism is not eliminating people. It's part of us, but it's not yet part of future generations. So, we're not taking anything away from them by eliminating it before they are born. Fume all you want, but it's true isn't it?

Should we engineer a caste system, twoshots?

Brave New World style!

I don't think engineering someone's DNA is going to make them more likely to be the perfect garbage man.