Is Genetically Engineering Your Children Ethical?

[Imperious Leader]

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.

[Jennifer]

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?

[Imperious Leader]

As for “weeding out” traits that the general world population finds unattractive, how is that any different then choosing your spouse?

.

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.

[Cobert]

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?

[Smacktard]

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?

[Imperious Leader]

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.

[dezrtfish]

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.

[Cobert]

Oh thats another thing I forgot to mention, would some sicko engineer their kid to be really ugly?

Or like have a third arm or something?

[dezrtfish]

Three arms could be usefull, I sometimes wish I had a couple extra arms or eyes…

[Jennifer]

But when beauty is the norm, then being different will be an advantage so parents, attempting to give their progeny all the advantages, will want to change what they look like and thus, we will not become Children of the Corn or Der Master Race.  But rather, I suspect, we will remain much as we are today, but without the genetic diseases.  After all, you marry your spouse because you like his or her traits, thus, wouldn’t it make sense you want those traits in your child?

You cannot make your child look like Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton if you do not have those traits to select from.  I’m not talking about splicing someone else’s genes in, you are limited to only what genes you have to offer.

That means, unless a black man had an irish ancestor centuries ago and somehow managed to keep a single gene for red hair, he cannot offer red hair to his progeny.

[Pervavita]

you allow even tweaking and some one in 20 years will want to add in the gens from some one else to get even better results. when ever you give some, then some one takes more.

by also getting rid of desiese we could also get rid of cures for other things or even eliminate gens that we don’t know what they do.
who is to say that dislexia (sp) crossed with Audtisam (sp) don’t creat some benafit? both alone are undesireable trates but together they may be what gives us geniouses or some other desireable trait.
by eliminating trates you destroy the chance of things happening that you don’t know about.

[Imperious Leader]

You cannot make your child look like Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton if you do not have those traits to select from.

Ahh but thats the problem. Things will as an outcrop of this technology push all the weird ideas forward. Specific gene traits or new “models” of genetic makeup will become available like a new cake recipe. Women will want instead of cute “toy dogs” “toy children” like Gary Coleman so they teach it to say “what choo talking about Willis” and everybody can have a big old laugh at genetic freeks. It would be a sad commentary on the human condition. For every new technology their are 2 times more idiots thinking of corrupt ways to use the new technology without regard to any moral implications.

As i said before its a Pandora’s box. Lets first get all the hungry people fed and not worry about using our technology to produce more genitic monsters.  Heck i can see North Korea using this to make an army of 7 foot soldiers to fight south Korea. Think of how this would disrupt the NBA. The basket will have to to to 12 feet and ill have to alter my shot from the 3 point line because somebody allowed giants to be made. NO way forget it.

[Jennifer]

Why worry about feeding people at all?  We could easily splice in sequences from plants so that we are fed by being outside for half an hour at mealtimes.  Heck, we could engineer it so we don’t need sleep, and thus, effectively increase human productivity by 25-33% (lots of Americans get far less then 8 hours of sleep, that’s why I put the range in.)

I mean, if we want to take this to ridiculous levels.

Or, we could remain in the realm of actual probabilities.  People will select the genes from both parents they like the best.  “I would like her to have my wife’s nose.”  Or “I would like him to have my husband’s chin.”

As far as appearances go, it’d be the same as plastic surgery, only much safer (no surgery, no anesthetics, no recovery, etc) and more realistic (if Mommy does not have DDD cups, Susie cannot either.)

[Guest]

You know, I would rather genetically engineer SPOUSES than CHILDREN.  :-D

[cyan]

@Cmdr:

Why worry about feeding people at all?  We could easily splice in sequences from plants so that we are fed by being outside for half an hour at mealtimes.  Heck, we could engineer it so we don’t need sleep, and thus, effectively increase human productivity by 25-33% (lots of Americans get far less then 8 hours of sleep, that’s why I put the range in.)

I mean, if we want to take this to ridiculous levels.

Or, we could remain in the realm of actual probabilities.  People will select the genes from both parents they like the best.  “I would like her to have my wife’s nose.”  Or “I would like him to have my husband’s chin.”

As far as appearances go, it’d be the same as plastic surgery, only much safer (no surgery, no anesthetics, no recovery, etc) and more realistic (if Mommy does not have DDD cups, Susie cannot either.)

if traits were good to our survival then they would be naturally selected, and all this artificial selection would not be necessary. in effect we would be making our selves more susceptible to pandemic disease and that kind of stuff.  and about this artificial selection, those fetuses are babies, not dogs or corn. we should treat our species with dignity and not try to completely destroy it.

[Cobert]

I hear this talk about choosing a spouse because of their traits:  I dont think most people consciously choose a spouse (or enter any relationship with the opposite sex) because they think their kids would be nice.

[balungaloaf]

could parents engineer their kids to have either huge knockers or a huge wang.  talk about kids owing you something later on in life.  :-D

[Jennifer]

@Cobert:

I hear this talk about choosing a spouse because of their traits:  I dont think most people consciously choose a spouse (or enter any relationship with the opposite sex) because they think their kids would be nice.

I argue that the ONLY reason you chose your mate is because on some level you realize their traits when added to yours would produce viable progeny.

[Guest]

Nah…  I had NO intention of having children (and still have none).

I chose my spouse based on CURVES :-D

[Jennifer]

The problem with engineering your spouse is that you have to adjust all the cells of an adult body vs adjust the cells of a single celled human being.  There’s kind of a huge difference in the work load, you know?

I’m still hoping someone can come up with a valid reason that fixing birth defects and inherited diseases is unethical and failing that, that choosing which parent’s genes will be the eyes, which the hair, what gender the child is, etc is unethical.

It would be convenient to have something other then an antiquated notion of divine command theory to justify a stance that genetic engineering is unethical. :)