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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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To me the vibe was that from the writer's perspective generic modification is so obviously acceptable that it's impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny, and that the racism against the genetically modified was just an idiosyncratic cultural trait of the federation that they would hopefully one day grow out of entirely. And I'd pretty much endorse that take. What risk of genocide could possibly be posed by letting parents give their children the modifications they think will serve them well in life? As the episode said, it's not like augments have Khan lurking within them or anything, they're morally no different from anyone else and no more likely to start a genocide.
The danger of letting parents choose modifications they think will serve their children in life is exactly what Bashir expresses in DS9: it gives parents, and society more generally, the power to determine what's acceptably "normal" and flatten out anything that deviates. Geordi similarly expresses at least twice that he doesn't want normal vision, that his blindness is not a defect that needs fixing and what's utopian about the Federation he lives in is that his difference is accommodated and supported.
I've always really appreciated Star Trek's hardline stance on this, because its a moral problem that I feel we've lost a little bit of sight of and is going to emerge again in the next few decades in real life. I think you could make a case for the Ilyrian environmental adaptation being different, but to do that you would have to explicitly place it against the real arguments against gene editing and work through them, and this episode went in a different direction.
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"
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.