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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Can't believe I have to tell you that deliberate genetic modification for the enhancement of individuals and species is the definition of eugenics, and that eugenics is not "so obviously acceptable that it’s impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny".
The problematic aspect of eugenics is sterilizing or killing people deemed inferior, people modifying their own children has none of the same issues.
That's really incorrect. I hate that this episode is spurring eugenics apologia like this
It is correct actually. Make an counterargument if you can, but as I've been saying, there really isn't one beyond trying to smear something reasonable like enhancing children with the brush of something bad like forced sterilizations by lumping them under the same "eugenics" label.
What you think "enhancement" means now is very different from what people might have said "enhancement" meant in the 60s which is very different from what they thought "enhancement" would have been in the 20s and is very different from what we might think it means in the 2050s. Homosexuality used to be a mental disorder, and it would have been an enhancement to "cure" it. There would have even been gay people who would have voluntarily taken that cure because of the distress society subjected them to, there are records of patients coming to medical professionals looking for treatment. I like the alternate solution to that problem we're currently making progress towards, in which we accept and support that there are diverse ways for people to exist, and I do not trust that we have correctly figured out what things about human being are currently "wrong" and which things can be "improved"
Is it really so different? I think the whole "smarter, faster, stronger, healthier" package we see in the enhanced Star Trek characters is pretty universal. Talk of curing real or imagined mental disorders seems like quite a different question - nothing in the show or in the reality of genetic engineering points to that possibility.
The idea that you can modify someone's genes to "enhance" them is bog standard "positive" eugenics. It's literally the definition of eugenics and it's upsetting to me that you are treating this like a debate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127045/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-019-0088-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_eugenics
You can see that you're just doing what I described and making an argument solely based on "eugenics" being a broad term that includes evil things right? What is the concern you have about letting parents modify their unborn child's genes, besides the fact that it could ungenerously be described as eugenics?
It's literally eugenics. There's nothing ungenerous about calling it what it is.
If you don't see the issue with genetically modifying children without their consent to "enhance" them or make them racially "superior" then I can't help you.
Children don't consent to their genes regardless. Not sure where you get "racially superior" or all these quotation marks around "enhance" - we're talking about the kind of augments we see in Star Trek, no racial component, just improved health, intelligence, strength, etc.
So yes, I am once again standing by the claim that parents should be allowed to help their children out in that way, and that we'd all be better off if doing so was possible. I guess I'm no longer expecting any reasoning from you about why such a world of healthier, tougher, smarter people would be worse except that the idea of encouraging those traits via genetic modification supposedly constitutes eugenics.