Eugenics can create designer babies

The argument

On this view the dangers of people abusing eugenics far outweigh its potential benefits, and the clearest illustration is what the technology permits parents to do. The creation of modified human embryos and gene editing can lead to creating humans that are defined as perfect by the parents. Once modification is available, the standard applied is a parental preference rather than a natural outcome, and parents modifying their children can lead to designer babies that are dictated by the parents' preferences rather than nature. That is the shift the argument treats as decisive: a trait that was previously a matter of chance becomes a matter of choice, and therefore of whoever is in a position to choose. The first consequence is stratification. This could lead to a societal separation between humans that are genetically modified to have perfect health and physical enhancements versus those that do not. Designer babies would cause inequalities between enhanced and unenhanced groups, and proponents argue this inequality would be unethical because it creates an opportunity gap that no effort on the unenhanced side can close. As a result, people who cannot enhance their children would land at society's lowest rung, not through any failure of their own but because of a decision made before their children were born. The second consequence concerns how disability and difference would be regarded. In a society where perfection can be specified in advance, anyone with a disability is measured against a manufactured standard rather than the ordinary range of human variation, and society would immediately look down upon them because they are not as perfect as a genetically modified child. The same selection pressure narrows the range of traits that appear at all, leading to less diversity. Because these are the predictable results of allowing parents to build children to preference, proponents conclude, the practice of eugenics is unethical.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is nothing wrong with parents preferring specific traits over another as long as they are not motivated by prejudice against other people with different traits. If there is not any coercion or influence from society, the preference of a parent about what their child should look like is not unethical. This is comparable to potential parents that decide to become pregnant via sperm donor. A sperm donor is typically asked to submit photos of themselves throughout their life, medical history, a voice recording, and other personal information to help inform the potential parent think about what their child would be like. If parents are able to pick and choose certain features in a sperm donor, it is ethical for parents to have the ability to alter a child they have conceived.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The counter-argument on record denies that parental preference is objectionable in itself, provided it is not driven by prejudice against people who have different traits and is not coerced. It draws the comparison with donor conception, where prospective parents already choose on the basis of physical characteristics, medical history and other attributes without that being treated as unethical. [Rejecting P2] The inequality objection is an argument about distribution rather than about the technology. Every effective medical intervention is unequally available at first, and the response is generally to widen access rather than to prohibit the treatment — the premise gives no reason why this case differs. [Rejecting P3] The claims about stigma and diversity are asserted without support and pull against each other: if the concern is that society already looks down on disability, that attitude precedes any editing, and preventing a heritable disease in an individual is not the same act as devaluing people living with it. [Rejecting C] The argument also concerns speculative enhancement while the question asks about eugenics generally, and it makes no distinction between preventing serious heritable disease and selecting cosmetic traits — so its conclusion sweeps in cases the premises never address.