Just to wade in with my own ad-hoc "reckon":
(Very good, by the way, I enjoyed reading that)
I think the sticky point with "designer babies" is more of an emotional one than anything ethical. Amberl raises a good point about the extreme cases, but even in more moderate cases, presumably most people would go as far as tweaking the genes so that their child could be tall, intelligent and good-looking. Apart from starting to sound a bit eugenic, this also has the implication that the child grows up knowing that they were tailored to their parents' desires, when surely it's healthier for the parents to love the random* phenotype they ended up with, and for the child to know that it is loved by its parents no matter what.

As for the bit about your parents' genes and the relationship you have with them - isn't there an increasing body of evidence that some personality traits can be inherited? Obviously this is going to pale in comparison to the environmental influences on our personalities, but it suggests you can't entirely rule out genetic influence**. Not that swapping somebody's mitochondria is likely to have much effect on this either way, which I suppose is your point.

*_{Well, pseudo-random, I suppose...
**See also Dawkins' Selfish Gene argument, which - if I read it correctly - suggests that animals are naturally more altruistic towards individuals to whom they are closely related due to some instinct arising from the genome's drive to preserve and replicate itself.}
(LongJohnBaldry, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 14:32, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

Well, I don't see anything wrong with eugenics per se.
Forced eugenics is a bad idea; forced sterilisation is a bad idea. But it's the force that carries the moral weight here.

As for choosing desired characteristics - well, I suppose that a child could equally well think it a good thing that its parents put some thought into how it'd turn out rather than as the result of a drunken accident. Better that than to discover that they could have prevented a terrible illness but didn't. More likely, I suspect most kids simply wouldn't care. Why should they?

The worries you articulate have more to do with bad parenting than reproductive technology, I'd've thought; but since you can be naturally a bad parent, the technology doesn't seem to count for much.

As for inherited personality traits: well, there's all kinds of epigenetic oddness possible. But you'd get that either way, so why worry?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 15:14, Reply)

I fail to see the problem with drunken accidents.

( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 16:11, Reply)

There isn't one, as far as I can see.
Though I do know people who think that there's an obligation to conceive by IVF and screen to ensure the best possible child by some standard.

The point is that, if you're going to argue that a child might resent having been designed, you could equally well argue in exactly the other direction.

You don't have to endorse either view to make the argument and endorse its formal validity.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 16:29, Reply)

^ I read the subject line and when I got to "The point is" I skipped the rest

( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 16:53, Reply)

I'm trying to think of any logical reason for not choosing desired characteristics
But I think the closest I can come up with as that, when it comes to choosing superficial characteristics, people will be trying to give their child an advantage but their well-meaning choices will be subject to whatever fashions are dictating to be 'attractive.' And if we start homogenising our phenotypes further, we start to take a bite out of the wonderful natural variability of the species. Now of course I realise that there are far more important genes which would be overlooked in such a process, but one of our best defences against a sudden change in circumstances is that, due to how naturally varied we are, at least a few of us would serendipitously be kitted out to survive it. I'm really clutching at straws here, I'm just trying to somehow extend the same idea with which I would discourage mothers from sterilising their baby's environment lest it contain any bacteria - i.e., there's a perfectly good natural system in place already for dealing with it. But maybe I'm just trying to find reasons to rail against the idea of engineering your sprog to be tall, blonde and gorgeous when really I just think it would encourage us to be even more shallow than we already are.

And of course, if you're picking the genes for less shallow reasons, then I can't argue with the idea of editing out hereditary disease - it's surely better for all concerned from a human point of view. Similarly your point about people being naturally bad parents* is perfectly right - in some ways it's a shame we don't have the technology to amend that.

*_{"Parenting" was always a horrible but recently-accepted verb that I always disliked. Oh well, too late for this qotw now...}
(LongJohnBaldry, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 16:17, Reply)

I don't buy that people have such a homogeneous set of desires, though.
Even if everyone chose blond, blue-eyed kids - and why is it always that? - there'd still be a metric fuckton of variation between them.

I do accept that being that picky might be a sign of distinctly iffy parenting skills, but - again - that shifts the emphasis to being a better or worse parent. And since the picky parents would still be better than some, and since even bad parents tend, on balance, to be (just about) good enough, it's not obvious that the danger's great.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 15 Apr 2010, 16:33, Reply)