Modern science has changed eugenics for the better

The argument

The modern boundaries ensure that the practice of eugenics is ethical. The primary motivation behind modern eugenic practices is improving the overall health of the human race. People that decide to alter the genetic makeup of their child in the womb are doing so in order to ensure a healthier child. It allows a way to eliminate negative traits that may harm the child’s health. In addition, a patient can voluntarily undergo gene therapy in order to improve their ability to fight disease. All of this is done by the free will of the parents or the patient, making it an ethical practice. The role of ethics in the scientific community has drastically improved since the first eugenics movement in the United States and Europe over the 1900s. The dangers of abuse have been addressed through the passing of documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Organizations like the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues have set up programs to safeguard ethical eugenic practices. These practices foster an environment for patients to make safe and ethical decisions.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Even with regulations and guidelines, there is always the potential of eugenics being abused again. While it is more difficult to abuse it on a national scale as in the 1900s, it can still be abused on an individual basis. Eugenics can be used for all sorts of enhancements beyond helping a person battling disease. This can easily lead to the abuse of eugenics by creating inequality between those than have the resources to undergo physical enhancements and those that cannot or choose not to.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise assumes health improvement can be cleanly separated from selection, but the two practices it names differ in exactly that respect. Gene therapy treats a patient who already exists; altering or selecting an embryo determines which child comes into existence, and the judgement that a given trait is harmful is the contested part rather than an agreed medical fact — as disability advocates argue in the case of conditions they do not regard as defects. [Rejecting P2] Free will carries more weight here than it can bear. Choices are made under social conditions, and where a trait is stigmatised, costly to live with, or poorly supported by public services, a parental decision can be free in form while heavily constrained in substance. Aggregate outcomes also do not inherit the innocence of individual ones: many separate free choices can produce a population-level effect that nobody chose. [Rejecting P3] The safeguards cited are of uneven force. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration rather than an enforceable instrument, and a national bioethics commission is advisory and can be reconstituted or disbanded. Neither reaches clinics in other jurisdictions, which is where contested procedures have generally been sought — and the counter's objection about enhancement and unequal access is precisely what the existing framework does not settle.