Eugenics
Genetic Enhancement and Eugenics
The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. He intended it to denote the "science" of improving the human stock by giving "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable." Since Galton's day, "eugenics" has become a word of ugly connotations -- and deservedly. Eugenic aims merged with misinterpretations of the new science of genetics to help produce cruelly oppressive and in the era of the Nazis barbarous social results. Nonetheless, eugenics continues to figure in social discourse in some proposals for human genetic engineering.[footnoteRef:-1] [-1: Daniel Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, p. xiii.]
Philip Kitcher, in The Lives to Come, describes laissez faire eugenics as the eugenics yet to come in this era of prenatal testing and genetic counseling. It is a form of planning populations. According to Kitcher, when we know how to shape future generations, the character of our descendents will reflect our decisions and the values that those decisions embody. [footnoteRef:0] Laissez faire eugenics implies attempts to honor individual reproductive freedoms in picking traits that we would like to passed onto our children. Kitcher asks if this attempt is successful and if the resources of prenatal testing in affluent societies are equally open to all members of the population. Does laissez faire eugenics help people make reproductive decisions that are genuinely their own? [0: Philip Kitcher, The Lives to Come, p. 197.]
There are many dangers associated with laissez faire eugenics, namely, discrimination and coercion. If prenatal testing for genetic diseases is often used by members of more privileged strata of society and far more rarely by the underprivileged, then the genetic conditions the affluent are concerned to avoid will be far more common among the poor -- they will become lower class diseases, other people's problems. Interest in finding methods of treatments or for providing supportive environments for those born with the diseases may well wane. Furthermore, individual choices are not made in a social vacuum, and unless changes in social attitudes keep pace with the proliferation of...
Genetic screening will generate more prejudice against the invalid, the disabled, and the poor and a permanent genetic as well as social and economic class will be created. This will fundamentally change the relationship between parents and children, as children will feel responsible for their creation as entire selves from their parents. The parents of children will not simply be the alpha, the beginnings of their children, but also the
Perfection Genetic engineering is neither good nor bad, but the outcome could be judged as one or the other (Dawkins, 1998). We, as a species, have been manipulating nature's gene pool since before recorded history, intentionally selecting for specific traits in food crops, flowers, trees, race horses, pets, our romantic partners, and for many of us, our friends. This human-mediated selection process represents a mechanism of evolution, one with significant
Future: Prediction's in Huxley's Brave New World Aldus Huxley's famous dystopian novel, Brave New World, was written over 75 years ago, yet is because it's some of it's predictions about future society are seen to be amazingly prophetic. This is certainly one of the reason's the novel is considered a modern classic, since as Huxley writes in his 1958 introduction to the novel "a book about the future can interest
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