yes, i’ll take the embryo on the left, please…

Since yesterday I was on Skeptically Speaking, talking about the practical side of transhumanism with George Dvorsky (which was apparently such a fun show, we’re being invited back), I thought it would be fitting to take on a topic currently being covered on George’s blog and straight of Bill McKibben’s darkest fears; creating a custom baby through the latest and greatest technology that biologists and doctors can offer. Now, while you will probably never design your own custom child from the organs up and setting his ratios of IQ vs. social skills and athleticism vs. dedication to academic pursuits because this is simply not scientifically plausible to begin with, the decisions parents can already make today and would almost certainly continue making in the future could have a major impact on their children and their lives. And us our technology keeps advancing and we could make more and more of a drastic impact on a future child, the consequences will become more dire and the stakes will constantly rise, especially if the parents are behaving unreasonably, or even dangerously…

Of course just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should, and any ability to alter a developing embryo should be wielded wisely and with long term planning in mind. Humans are sill evolving, contrary to the popular pseudoscience we often hear, and when we decide to try and take evolution’s reins in an unpredictable world, we’re essentially betting that our choice for the future is the right one. And there’s a rather disturbing, but very real possibility of abuse in the future. Eugenicists didn’t just disappear after the end of the Nazis. They’re still out there, and their last major attempt to engineer “better humans” ended in 1999, an uncomfortably recent time period. What’s to say that more throwbacks to the 19th century pseudoscience that was cooked up by Francis Galton to justify racism and snobbism of the British upper class of the time, won’t decide to use the technology in question to try again? And in trying to somehow improve ourselves according to varying and often superficial standards could very well reduce our genetic diversity and make us vulnerable to new diseases, environmental changes, and even place us at a greater risk for extinction. We’re not in total control of the world around us and betting against the world is not something many would recommend.

Bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the subject, thinks that these concerns are legitimate but not enough to necessarily forbid any particular method of customizing future children. He even goes to bat for a couple who decided they wanted their child to be born deaf because they have the same disability, doing everything possible to make it happen. And what he offers in their defense is a leap of mental gymnastics that is very difficult to follow and raises more question that Wilkinson seems willing to answer…

The strongest argument [McCullough and Duchesneau] would have to face would in all likelihood have to do with the welfare of the child created thereby: that deafness is welfare-reducing, and that it is wrong deliberately to created a child with lower welfare than it might otherwise have enjoyed. Yet, says Wilkinson, even this claim is weak. Partly this has to do with a skepticism about whether choosing for a disability is necessarily the same as choosing for a lower quality of life; partly it has to do with a claim that, even if disabled, people overwhelmingly have a life worth living… partly it is because the ‘Same Number Quality Claim’ does not reliably tell us that all examples of selecting for disability are wrong, and so, even at its strongest, will not tell us that this particular instance of choosing disability is de facto wrong.

So with the same logic we could say that if both parents are blind, they should be able to make a blind child at their pleasure and that we can’t possibly tell them otherwise since any life is better than no life at all. This not only has a strong tinge of anti-choice activists’ problematic arguments, but seems to reject the simple fact that if McCullough and Duchesneau deafened their child after he was born, they would’ve swiftly went to prison for child abuse. Quality of life claims do reliably tell us that we should choose to make sure people can enjoy life to the fullest and dictate that we should make whatever accommodations or inventions the disabled will need to do as many of the things the able-bodied do on a daily basis as possible. And when you go out of your way to make sure the future child will not even have a chance to grow up with the benefits the able-bodied take for granted because you want him or her to have the same disabilities as you, you’re being both selfish and cruel. It’s one thing to decide to give a child you know will have Down Syndrome a chance at life and prepare for this difficult task financially and mentally, but it’s completely another to seek those affected by this genetic disorder to ensure that the child will be born with the syndrome. The former is selflessness, the latter is cruelty.

Quite honestly, I’m surprised that an ethicist would actually defend a form of child abuse through technology a skilled doctor could use to fix potential health problems, arguing that we should allow people to do whatever they want to their progeny, and that quality of life is a vacuous notion, although it’s anything but that. If all life is so great, even a life of pain, misery, and frustration, there would be no concept of euthanasia, which allows an incredibly sick or debilitated person on the verge of death to pass on with dignity and end his suffering. I’m all for the transhumanists’ desire to improve the human condition through science and technology, and when we consider their platform, I seriously doubt that any transhumanist would actually support abusing technology to ensure that someone is born deaf, or blind, or mute, or with a certain ailment at the parents’ whim. Society will not allow parents to injure their children after they’re born. Why would it ever allow intentional embryonic abuse to satisfy selfish desires? And why would any ethicist argue against the qualify of life postulate?