Re: [DIYbio] Re: Privately funded designer babies

Volume is a poor proxy for quality, though. Not to disparage list old-timers like you or Bryan of course, but if someone posts less or arrived more recently, it really has no bearing on the validity of an ethical argument or a well-sourced/well-reasoned scientific argument.

Anyways, on the core subject I've said my piece, and my view is unlikely to change only by-the-numbers. The ethics of meddling in embryos' genomes ultimately comes down somewhere similar to abortion, in that the fulcrum is whether you consider an embryo to have personhood yet. If it does have personhood, then it has rights that must be weighed against the other agents in an ethical discussion. If it does not have personhood, then it has no rights (yet) and any future evils visited upon it can be waved off as speculative or the costs of progress.

This discussion puts that fulcrum less in focus, because with abortion you are writing off the entire future of an embryo in one case (so, in effect, there is only one circumstance where the embryo goes on to experience a future at all), whereas with gene editing you are trying to alter the future of the embryo (so there are two futures, and you may be called to account by the person whose future you wrote).

This then brings another fulcrum into play, which is, I think, what Quetzal was getting at. It's well-trodden turf in ethics that if you interfere in someone's life or health without consent, then there is a distinction to be made between "medical" or "remedial" interventions, and everything else. So, when you are called to account for why you made a designer baby with double-muscling, and that baby ends up having severe issues giving birth naturally to her own children.. the question is, did you do this for the child's own good (medically/remedially) or for reasons more frivolous?

And this, then, raises an even greater, more intractable question of whether you can even say with any seriousness that you know what's "better" and what's not. For a big span of recent history, it was considered "better" to have a penis and pale skin.

Today, it would still be considered "better" by many to have a better-than-mean IQ, and to have more muscle mass, and to be neurotypical, and to see into infrared and ultraviolet..
Some parents will want their kids to be immune to alcohol, cannabis, cocaine. Some will want their kids to have no sex drive, to reduce risk of sin. Some will want their kids to be cis-heterosexual, and will happily buy into someone's scam to make it happen even in the absence of a scientific basis. Some will want their kids to have animalistic features because uwu furry babies.

None of these are medically or remedially justifiable things. "Designer Babies" invites people to make these life altering decisions for other people. That's why this debate is not new. It started with the Eugenics craze, reignited with PGD, and with gene editing it's appearing again. But the technology improving doesn't actually change the underlying ethical quandary, which is that outside of limited cases (where a harm or loss or failure to thrive can be identified), you and I have no right to decide another person's fate without their consent.

So bring on your perfect gene editing that doesn't ever lead to unintended consequences or scores of discarded embryos, sidestep all the other ethical questions around this, and you're still left with a question of authoritarianism versus personal agency and liberty, with a mucky mix of temporal ethical discounting, scientific egoism, implicit racism/ablism/exceptionalism, and parent/child rights.

But, it's a startup so I guess ethics is for the C-round.

February 15, 2019 8:31 AM, "Nathan McCorkle" <nmz787@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 11:56 PM Cathal Garvey
> <cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
>
>> oi, don't shame anonymity, this is the internet. We are nameless!
>> Besides, apparently post count is a proxy for knowledge and validity in these degenerate
>> social-media days.
>
> I was going more for proxy of peer-review and web-of-trust.
>
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