[acadapter]

This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line.

"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"

In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.

With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).

I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?

[energy123]

This mode of banal cruelty is absolutely everywhere in the law, completely invisible to the majority who don't suffer under its boot.

[FridayoLeary]

It's understandable why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god. Some things can be labelled in a different way to make them more palatable. But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. Which is the same reason i don't like assisted suicide.

On the subject of colour blindness, i know many people who are colour blind and it's little more then a minor inconvenience for them. A large portion of the population probably don't even know they are colour blind. It's pretty widespread.

[whimsicalism]

To be a bit blunt, God isn’t real and shouldn’t really be part of the discussion here - and I disagree that a belief otherwise is ‘understandable.’

[inglor_cz]

"It feels too much like playing god."

Everything that is on the leading edge of medical science feels like playing god and some people will loudly protest against it, but the next generation will consider the very same thing absolutely normal and expected.

IVF was once "playing god".

Heart transplants were once "playing god".

Resuscitation was once "playing god".

Surgeries of inner organs were once "playing god".

Vaccination against smallpox was once "playing god".

[xvector]

> But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual.

This is where you have it wrong. The risk is not to society, it is to the individual. One family can take on immense risk to discover something that benefits all of humanity - whether it makes us live better, cure a disease, etc.

Yes, there are society-wide upheavals that a new technology like this might create, which you might be referring to as a "risk" - but upheavals are a fact of life all major technologies throughout human history. We will adapt.

[Barrin92]

>why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god.

This I think is in some ways the most pathetic argument of them all because it reveals a profound moral cowardice. I just saw a chart today, 1 billion children under the age of five have died since 1950, a lot of them to disease. While you're afraid to play, god's racking up quite a score.

What's so astonishing about it is that the suffering doesn't seem to matter. Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally. Every time you play god what people seem to be afraid of is not the suffering, which is omnipresent because life in its natural state is pure carnage, but not having to attach your name to it and taking responsibility. It's okay if some old guy rots away miserably because if I assist in his suicide then I might make a mistake and I had to make a choice. Rather, forward it to god or nature, or what have you. And then in addition this cowardice, thinking that conscious inaction isn't an action, gets rebranded as a humanism.

[mac-mc]

I've tried designing information-dense things for colorblind coworkers, and they seemed a bit disinterested in testing it out with me. Even with tools that simulate it, you can still be off, I've found.

There can be some sensitivity about trying to figure it out with them. I've added little affordances here and there, and ironically, I rely mentally more on color coding things because I am bad at finding things in a visual field than most.

I've also found that colorblind family members and friends just never tell you and they tend to suffer in silence. Even my own half-brother (which I have a 15 year gap with) didn't tell me he was colorblind until recently.

[xvector]

We have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front.

Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely.

Everything we have is thanks to them.

Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans.

No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.

[fruitworks]

There aren't any risks to take. Modern society is approaching a steady-state solution.

Eugenics and artificial selection results in monocultures. In the long run has the opposite effect of what you're describing.

[sapphicsnail]

> Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children.

There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.

[dsign]

I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?

[expedition32]

Because we all know how batshit insane and evil American billionaires are.

[LtWorf]

How did your comment get downvoted?

Ah yes because this site is populated by batshit insane evil wannabe billionaires.

[andriesm]

"for any reason other than to cure a fatal disease" ... what about non-fatal but debilitating ? Sounds like you have a pretty absolutist view here ? What other reasonable exceptions can we imagine outside your rigid criteria ? Why should we not have nuanced discussions of the entire spectrum of reasons ?

Also hard to miss your implication of "agree with me or you are on par with a nazi"

[whimsicalism]

Minimizing what the Nazis did is not cool and the suggestion that providing treatment for debilitating diseases to infants is ‘on par’ with murdering six million jews and millions more is honestly gross to me.

Keep your rhetoric in check before you start minimizing the Holocaust.

[fruitworks]

reality is cruel

[isodev]

> it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these

Imagine women going through this extreme painful thing every month and the best we have is generic painkillers and stupid jokes about “the special day”. Do you know people petition their cities to remove traffic light installations for visually impaired people just because they don’t like the clicking noise?

It’s a cruel world friend. Unless you get a billionaire to care about your problem, it will take many years until there is interest and consensus to improve the situation.

[pessimizer]

> "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"

Nobody requires you to have children. Your problem could just as easily have been infertility. So instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile, or you can dabble in eugenics. My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics. We have lots of children who have already been born who need help. They may never satisfy your desire to see your (admittedly bad) genetics reflected in the world, but maybe they could give a legacy to your intellect and compassion?

Eugenics was once very popular among the middle and upper classes, though, before there were incidents. There's no reason to think that it won't be popular again. I think that society as a whole has to decide how we treat human lives though; your children don't strictly belong to you, they belong to themselves and are protected by the state (even against you.) I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal, or if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be mandatory. I just know where I sit on the issue.

And I also know that the places that eugenics survived was in things like dog and cat breeding, and the preferences of people for dogs and cats did not make them healthy, it made them interesting. Ready for the human version of "Twisty Cats"?

[ctoth]

> instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile ... I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal,

I was born with retinoblastoma.

You want the state to use criminal law to control my reproduction based on my genetics.

You're "totally comfortable" with that. Easy position when it's not your eyes, not your children, not your choice being criminalized.

You invoke eugenics like it's a magic word that wins the argument. But you're the one advocating for state control of reproduction based on genetic fitness. I just want to select among my own embryos.

Your adoption argument only applies to people like me - people whose genetics you call "admittedly bad." Everyone else gets to reproduce freely.

The cruelty is that you get to advocate for my childlessness from perfect safety. You'll never face the choice you want criminalized. You just get to feel righteous about it.

[acadapter]

What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?

The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.

[thaumasiotes]

> My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics.

This is a funny message to attach to "if you have bad genes, you shouldn't reproduce".

[fruitworks]

The fundamental problem with eugenics, besides the immorality, is the misalignment of artifical selection with natural selection. The eugenicists always think they know best, but mother nature always gets the last word in the end

[nlitened]

I am confused with your position. On one hand you seem to think that eugenics is bad and wrong, on the other had you have a preference on what people should and should not have children — but isn’t it literally eugenics?

[nradov]

Eugenics is still extremely popular and widely used in the form of sex selective abortions. This is one of the main reasons why population sex ratios are skewed in some countries.

[Teever]

Eugenics never went away, we just stopped calling it eugenics.

Modern forms of family planning that include access to birth control, genetic testing, abortions, and prenatal screening can empower individuals to make choices that they feel will bring about the healthiest and happiest progeny. That's eugenics.

We as a society should continue to allow individuals to make these kinds of choices rather than leave it up to fate or a central authority.