Efforts to cure hereditary diseases through genetic engineering are eugenics.
Offhand, that doesn’t seem to be “the true rejection”, as it were, of many people concerned about attempts to cure hereditary diseases. Very few people object, in principle, to a cure for Huntington’s, or Gaucher’s disease. What people are differing over here is which conditions constitute a disease in the first place.
This is a big part of the resistance among, say, autistics to a cure for autism—disagreement over the significance and best responses to the condition that defines much of their life experience. When someone with autism says something like “attempting to cure this is eugenics”, usually what’s behind that utterance is a thought process that can be expressed in the following paragraph:
“Trying to eliminate this condition is trying to make the future not-at-all us-shaped. I wouldn’t be me if you changed this about me, I’d be another person. Also, I feel it likely that if you succeed you’ll create pressure for people like us to submit to invasive, personality-altering procedures for the sake of your own convenience and comfort, or create societal pressure for us to just not reproduce, which is something we already deal with… and if you think that concern is misplaced because it’s not a logical, necessary consequence of the hypothetical scenario, then we suspect you don’t know much about how things go for people with little social power or acceptance, and experience has taught us it’s a bad idea to trust people with that much power and that little understanding of our perspectives to have our interest in mind when making decisions that affect us.”
Offhand, that doesn’t seem to be “the true rejection”, as it were, of many people concerned about attempts to cure hereditary diseases. Very few people object, in principle, to a cure for Huntington’s, or Gaucher’s disease. What people are differing over here is which conditions constitute a disease in the first place.
This is a big part of the resistance among, say, autistics to a cure for autism—disagreement over the significance and best responses to the condition that defines much of their life experience. When someone with autism says something like “attempting to cure this is eugenics”, usually what’s behind that utterance is a thought process that can be expressed in the following paragraph:
“Trying to eliminate this condition is trying to make the future not-at-all us-shaped. I wouldn’t be me if you changed this about me, I’d be another person. Also, I feel it likely that if you succeed you’ll create pressure for people like us to submit to invasive, personality-altering procedures for the sake of your own convenience and comfort, or create societal pressure for us to just not reproduce, which is something we already deal with… and if you think that concern is misplaced because it’s not a logical, necessary consequence of the hypothetical scenario, then we suspect you don’t know much about how things go for people with little social power or acceptance, and experience has taught us it’s a bad idea to trust people with that much power and that little understanding of our perspectives to have our interest in mind when making decisions that affect us.”