Eugenics is the practice of attempting to control human breeding to encourage desirable traits and prevent undesirable traits. But what does this really mean? With genetic engineering, it would be possible to:
- Create model children with the traits most desirable by the parents
- Greatly reduce the amount of diseases and untimely deaths
- Vastly increase the quality of life for many people
- Increase productivity; allowing for leaps and bounds in different fields
Now let us look at each of these points in more detail.
- Create model children with the traits most desirable by the parents
Now think for a moment: It is 50 years after genetic engineering became accessible to the masses as a way to pick and choose traits and dispositions of babies. It is a new age of renaissance, there are few illnesses, vast advances in sciences, and Olympic records shattered with each new games. However with these advances, the rifts in society are broadened, so that those with above average talent and ability are washed in with rest and only the truly great shine. So when you go into the Traits and Dispositions Lab at the hospital with your spouse, are you going to select the traits that you want or the traits that society wants? You want your child to succeed, you want to give them the best shot in life as you can. So when it comes down to it, only the engineered children will succeed. But it is not as simple as that, because a) not everyone will be able to afford or choose to genetically engineer their children and therefore damn them before birth and b) what happens when everyone is engineered "perfectly". If every child is the same, what makes us human? If every child is the same, how do we as a race progress?
- Greatly reduce the amount of diseases and untimely deaths
While at first this may seem great, there are some basic problems with it. First and foremost, the world is already on the verge of crisis about the growing populations. People are meant to die, and what will the quality of life be like if everyone is packed together in slums because there are not enough resources or space even to sustain them all. All because people can't stand to die when it would naturally occur. Also there is no guarantee that genetically engineered people will be immune to the diseases. Especially as more and more people start to become immune, the diseases will adapt, or it will open up the path for a new disease.
- Vastly increase the quality of life for many people
This can apply to people who can't afford to engineer their children as well. I'm sure there are many philanthropists who would love to help poor African children become immune to deadly disease that would otherwise plague their countries. However, as already stated, there is no guarantee that the quality of life would increase for the majority of people. For every person who is granted a better life, there is another who can't get a job because they aren't engineered, who fails at everything they do because they don't have the traits to keep up with others, who is a perfect citizen in a monotonous utopia of perfect citizens with no special abilities because everyone is the same.
- Increase productivity; allowing for leaps and bounds in different fields
Science, athletics, and arts would reach unheard-of levels. That much is for sure. But if everyone is excelling, more people end up being left behind. This has been covered pretty well already.
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