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Is Genetically Engineering Your Children Ethical?
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For the purposes of this discussion we will define the following terms as listed. (I reserve the right to add or modify these definitions as the discussion proceeds.)
Genetic Engineering is the manipulation of an organism’s genetic endowment by introducing or eliminating specific genes through modern molecular biology techniques.
Ethical will be defined as:
–-1) Utilitarianism - The Greatest Good/Happiness for the Greatest Number
—2) Hedonism - The Greatest Good/Happiness, regardless of harm to others
—3) Divine Command - The theory that ethics derive from God/gods or some higher power
—4) Egoism - What’s good for me is good, what’s bad for me is bad.
—5) Relativism - What’s good or bad is relative to the individual or culture engaging in the act and we have no ability to judge if it is ethical or not since we cannot understand them/him/her fully.
—6) Deontology - people should adhere to their obligations and duties when analyzing an ethical dilemma. This means that a person will follow his or her obligations to another individual or society because upholding one’s duty is what is considered ethically correct
—7) Causist - that the ends justify the means
—8} Virtuist - that the means justify the endsLearned knowledge will be defined as any information or ability one can learn to do after birth. (ie kicking a ball, walking, algebra)
Genetic knowledge will be defined as any information or ability one knows how to do at birth. (ie breathing, blinking, peeing, bowel movements, etc.)
Cloning is to be defined as the growth of another human being to replicate, even with slight modification, another existing human being for benevolent or nefarious purposes.
Some issues to consider before making up your mind:
–-1) What if genetically engineering children could be used to translate learned knowledge into genetic knowledge?
—2) What if we could engineer the immune system of children to prevent disease?
—3) What harm is there, if any, to choosing the eye color or hair color or gender of your child?
—4) What, if anything, could go wrong?
We will refrain from discussing cloning or the growth of human body parts for transplanting. We will assume that we have a heterosexual couple, that are in good health, old enough to be of child birthing age but young enough to not be overly burdened by having children. We’ll also assume the parents to be are financially stable, neither incredibly wealthy nor destitute - but comfortable. We’ll assume the parents to be are law abiding with living parents and siblings of their own who can, and would want to, assist in the raising of the new child/children and that the parents to be are having their first child.
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Tricky question. What if you foiund out your kid is going to have cerebral palsy? You may be morally bound to correct the problem through genetics.
Would it be wrong to tweak my kids genes so he has blond hair? Probably not. Make it a boy instead of a girl? Genius instead of average? Musical prodigy? Gifted athelete?
The problem I see going down this road is parents “customizing” their children. And what if the parents aren’t happy with the outcome? Who are they going to blame? themselves or the child they thought would be “best” for them?
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Which is what makes this a fun exercise in rhetoric. What if you could catch and correct for cerebral palsy or down syndrome? Would you be ethically required to correct it? What if you thought the god(dess) created the child that way on purpose? Wouldn’t your divine command ethics require you NOT to correct it in that circumstance?
Again, what about eye and hair color? Is it cosmetic? Is it an integral part of who or what we are?
And yes, what if you engineer the perfect soldier, athlete, genius, doctor. What if s/he does not want to be what you created him or her to be?
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Hitlers Germany tried this with the proto-racial sciences of phrenology and Eugenics, both of which invariably lead to human rights abuses and violence.
Further a ‘Lebensborn’ type project would was adopted that had further deteriorated the view of the natural equality value of all humans under the law which is our underlying principle.
Its basically a pandoras box that should not be opened.
Stem cell research could become the spark that leads down this road.
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IL beat me to it. One thing would lead to another with this. Where would we draw the line?
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When I saw the topic title, my first thought was, “You kinda do that already…” :-D
I think the question is Are a creation of your body, which also happen to be a separate life, a work of art, and if so who is the artist, or a scientific anomaly?
If it is a work of art, then technically modifying it would be up to the creator. If we remove God out for a second, then I really don’t have a problem with you modifying your child. Now if you purposefully wreck them up out of some sadistic spite, I think you need your head checked and maybe you should.
If it is a scientific anomaly then I think that genetic engineering should be left out of the real world and kept in the lab, until it is necessary to sustain a life. And the real thing to ask is, is it a necessary empirical application, needed to keep our culture sustained or a selfish intervention on what is supposed to be entropic and organic?
GG
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I don’t think I can buy into the slippery slope argument on this one.
How is it a slippery slope for two parents to dictate their child will have blue eyes instead of green? Or that their child will not have ADHD?
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the same way you can argue that your kids will not be dwarfs, or they will not be female. if you can start changing some things, then you can start changing other more drastic things. look at China, under there law you can only have 1 kid or pay a fine. by culture they want boys, so with this technolagy and culture you now are creating a culture of where they start exterminating there female population.
this same princable can apply to a dictatership where they can force all citizens to undergo this prossess and have only females be produced in all but there chosen few who can have males making a eliet group who can have males and all the rest who have females.
this could even go so far as to have it be a chemical put in water to do this.on the dwarfs (little people) or other genetic adnormalities you creat a tolarance problem. eventually you will have the rich being the ones that can afford this and then those who can’t are stuck with the inperfect children and sociaty will change to reflect this. watch the movie Gatica (i think thats it’s name), where they talk about this vary issue. a kid wants to be an astronaut but due to this technolagy he can’t because he was not enganiered from birth.
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Yes, but let’s try to limit our discussion to the United States. None of us are intimatally familiar with the laws of Communist China, I dare say.
And, for that matter, what is wrong with wanting children of “normal” height? Dwarves tend to have more accidents then “normals” because the adult world is not designed for their height specifications. I’m not saying being a dwarf is “bad” just that it is more challenging then what we would consider normal.
Is it not a greater good to give your child all the best advantages you can? Do the rich write their children out of their wills to force them to work on an even playing field with the poor? Do they find the worst possible schools for their children, or do they instead find the best possible schools, doctors, trainers, etc they can afford? Don’t we all?
I’d never take my children to the free medical clinics because I have a doctor I know does a good job. He costs more, but my progeny are worth the extra sacrifice. If I wanted to teach them music, I would not train them with only my own skills in piano, but would hire a teacher.
I don’t see genetic manipulation as any different. If you are screening for genetic diseases and weeding them out, why not tweak them a bit to have the traits you find attractive in your mate? If you think green eyes are hawt and if your husband thinks your mammary glands are phat, why not pass those traits on to your children, if you have a choice?
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the problem is that it promotes discrimination based on things you can now alter. would it not be the same as some one who is dark skinned to marry a light skinned person and then have the genes altered in there children to make them all light skinned?
would this also not promot in the long run exactly what Hittler was trying for with his Airian Race of all blue eyed/blond haired race of athaliets that are smart.
the problem is that this starts creating the domino or cascade effect of the alterations becomeing so main stream that diversity is lost. -
How is it a slippery slope for two parents to dictate their child will have blue eyes instead of green? Or that their child will not have ADHD?
What will happen is given the modern realities of good looks gets a better start in life, I suspect most Anglos will pick Blue eyes and blond hair and tall, while the short dark skinned types with brown eyes would go extinct. I can get into specifics but i would get in trouble. So everyone will come out looking like tom cruise and nobody will ever look like Caesar Chavez. The differences would become acute and beauty and ugly will lead to greater stereotypes and eventually nations of the latter will be viewed as savages and war will result. The homogeneous mixing of all racial types is the only REAL thing thats breaking down these barriers because everybody is basically is getting mixed from something else.
so given your point Green and blue will become exclusive choices and brown and black will go extinct.
In the Pure breed dog/horse world it would be akin to all dogs being muts, thus losing the moniker “pure breed”
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But how is it unethical for all the men and women of the world to chose to make their children “beautiful” (at least their own opinion of what beauty is)?
And how would it be unethical if all the people of the world ended up looking similar on the outside? Wouldn’t it actually be ethical in that there would no longer be any racial strife? There would be no more hate crimes (based on race). Wouldn’t that be a net good effect and thus, more ethical then what we have today?
And who’s to say that all the people in the world would decide blue or green eyes are better? If we believe Darwin’s works, and we look at what anthropology has told us, we can see that the vast majority of the world had and has had black or brown eyes and black or brown hair. So is it not safe to say that black and brown are the two traits with the best survivability? Perhaps we will all end up with black and brown traits! Not to mention, the ability of Africans to resist the damage from the sun (resistance to skin cancer) with increased solar radiation hitting us more and more would be a good thing to propagate in our children, right?
BTW, was reading an article that says that blue eyes was a genetic mutation in Europe and the reason it (and some of the other recessive traits we find in Europeans) survived is because a “splash of color” helps to “sell your product in a monochrome world.” Thought it was interesting, given this discussion.
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the end dose not always justify the means.
if to get this utopia where we are all the same means generations of exsesive discrimination to weed out the trates that are not desireable then we are going down the wrong path. the change won’t happen over night and that means it will take generations at best to make the change over. so then we hyper agrovate descrimination.
as for the blue eyes and blond hair being less common, that is because they are resesive genetic traits. i remember this from biolagy class. you as a person have 2 trates for eye color. say you have blue yes so your trates read BlBl (Blue Blue). you marry a person with trates BBl (Brown Blue). now you will have children. if you have 4 (statisticly the best number for this example) you will have 2 children with BBl and 2 with BlBl; or 2 brown eyes and 2 blue eyes.
now say both parents are BBl, then with 4 children they will have 1 BB, 2 BBl, and 1 BlBl. so 3 brown eyes and 1 blue eyes.
the same holds true to hair and other traits. so the reason that blue eyes are so uncommon (even with them being primarally Europen traits) is that they are resesive traits, not that they are less desired.oh ya, also by doing this you can posibly eradicate a gene that we don’t know that we need in our sociaty, this could caus prboblems down the road that can not be for sceen.
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Basically the poor people will have have the opportunity to have children of the type they wish and the poor will not. Eventually all the Lessor people ( less popular) will get weeded out, Indians, Eskimos,Pacific Islanders, Latins, Blacks, Some Asians, anybody with different skin, curly hair, dark eyes, all gone in 200 years. 2 billion Tom Cruise look alikes, and 2 billion stupid Paris Hilton’s all trying to get their own TV show. I think the world has enough problems.
I personally don’t have a problem with this but id rather get a few brilliant people to carry us in the future than billions of actors.
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Perv,
I understand what recessive means, thanks. I was pointing out that blue eyes and green eyes are considered a mutation that happened a long time ago, but they stuck around because they were deemed attractive and thus, we had genetic diversity. Not that I didn’t understand why we only have say 12% blue eyes and 88% brown eyes. :)
As for “weeding out” traits that the general world population finds unattractive, how is that any different then choosing your spouse? If a white lady decides to only date white men, is she somehow unethical because she does not want to propagate the traits of a black man? That’s a pretty racist statement if that’s what you are trying to say. I, honestly, don’t see a difference between picking the traits from a list you and your spouse have to offer and engineering your child and choosing to only date black men with red hair and blue eyes that are under two meters tall.
The only difference is that the genetic de-diversification of the race may happen at a faster pace. Which, I may remind you, may actually be considered ethical as we may all have very similar traits resulting in absolutely no inter-racial strife any more on this planet. Wouldn’t it be ethical if no one was murdered because their skin color was different? No one was murdered because they had the wrong eye color?
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As for “weeding out” traits that the general world population finds unattractive, how is that any different then choosing your spouse?
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In the real world people settle for less than their “dream” no matter how many times they protest to the contrary. The choice was made in many cases to include among other things that other persons soul,spirit, and brain and not only the looks. So this ‘choosing the mate’ includes checks and balances. This is removed by the 4 billion Tom Cruises/Paris Hiltons that will soon appear replacing all the others. So now you have reduced the human race to a few personality traits, mental aptitudes, and the brilliant people will disappear leaving a canvas of robots to push humanity forward.
The only tangible benefit will be clothing factories will only have to turn out fewer sized clothing and choices.
Of course better looking people usually hook up with like kinds. Now the problem occurs when the choices are reduced by 2 century’s of people picking from an increasing smaller pool of choices. All the special traits will be lost. Just like when all the animals go extinct. Will these then be placed in human zoos to “protect” them from total extinction. Look ahead. thats what will happen much latter.
Could make for good science fiction. They had a twilight zone episode on this.
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No, genetic engineering is terrible. I would get into details, but every point I could argue has been said by Imperious Leader, even with the twilight zone point. One of the many great episodes to deal with themes of beatuy/perfection/genetic engineering pointed out that in order for there to be beauty, there must also be ugly (or rather, atypical beauty, however you want to look at it :wink: ).
Also, imagine a person having to deal with the fact that theyre not good at basketball because they practiced, but because theyre parents wanted them to be? Would they even feel joy over doing good in a game? Could they understand their teammates emotions and feeling of accomplishment?
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We all know parents who try to live through their children (e.g, sports). do we reallly want to give those kinds of parents power to gentically tailor their kids?
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Thats a good point. The notion of beauty will change as more and more Tom Cruises appear. Then a new paradigm of this beauty will arise, but then all the traits will be weeded out after centuries never to return, then real problems will surface. It will turn into Gattaca where the slightest imperfection leads to personal ruin and loss of happiness. It would be a terrible world indeed. Id rather have ugly people to make fun of. Heck… all the stereotypes would be lost which is 95% of comedy.
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Yeah, I want some engineered kids, but I don’t want anyone else getting them. I wand a Bret Favre, a Kathy Ireland (with slightly bigger hips for making my grand kids) an I want one with a huge head and tiny feet, for comedic relief. Yeah that’d be great.
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