I certainly concede that the argument about counterfactual populations has a lot more force.
Personally I would solve this with increased support for eg. polygenic screening and other reproductive technologies and less regulation about what they can select for, and hope that people do their weird people thing and choose diversity. I worry that regulation will always result in more standardization.
And I for sure don’t think punishing people for making reproductive choices is a good move, even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
so anyway, this is why I started out saying a mere rename doesn’t cut it, you need to actually change policy. epilogenics is still eugenics, even if it’s not mass murder. parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist. offspring are not property.
also, I actually do agree with conservatives that loss of any genetic information is kinda sad, I just don’t think any non-selective loss has the problems I care about, and anyway people have the right to simply not have kids; what I don’t think they have the right to do is spy on their kids’ futures by reading their genome in order to decide whether to have kids. humanity is used to our genomes being randomized by parental choice, so it is part of us; humanity is not used to genomes being steered by parental choice and that’s a big enough change to warrant real conflict.
okay, sure, that might move the boundaries of the concept that I haven’t pinned down, but I have a pinned point it doesn’t move: parents shouldn’t be able to select children by personality traits in ways new to society. This is a capability we should not add to humanity; it is against transhumanism.
parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist
but again here you are switching back from the population level to the individual level. Those offspring do not exist by default, there are no ‘offspring’ that the parents have ‘denied the right to exist’. There are only counterfactual offspring, who already don’t exist.
spy on their kids’ futures by reading their genome
this, on the other hand, may be more valid—because the parents will ‘spy on’ both actual and counterfactual childrens genomes (and select the former over the latter). But you still seem to be taking the rights of those children as significantly more important than the rights of the parents. But this (‘whose rights, parents or children’) seems like the fundamental crux that we are unlikely to shift one another on here.
Edit: and, reading through your other comments, there seems to be a question about the social impact of these technologies. This is then an impact on the rights of everyone—the parent, the child, and the rest of society. Also interesting, and I think it would be helpful to seperate out objections on the individual (parent/child) level, and on the society level, and I feel like they are getting muddled a lot here.
Ah I see.
I certainly concede that the argument about counterfactual populations has a lot more force.
Personally I would solve this with increased support for eg. polygenic screening and other reproductive technologies and less regulation about what they can select for, and hope that people do their weird people thing and choose diversity. I worry that regulation will always result in more standardization.
And I for sure don’t think punishing people for making reproductive choices is a good move, even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
so anyway, this is why I started out saying a mere rename doesn’t cut it, you need to actually change policy. epilogenics is still eugenics, even if it’s not mass murder. parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist. offspring are not property.
also, I actually do agree with conservatives that loss of any genetic information is kinda sad, I just don’t think any non-selective loss has the problems I care about, and anyway people have the right to simply not have kids; what I don’t think they have the right to do is spy on their kids’ futures by reading their genome in order to decide whether to have kids. humanity is used to our genomes being randomized by parental choice, so it is part of us; humanity is not used to genomes being steered by parental choice and that’s a big enough change to warrant real conflict.
Choosing a sexual partner IS an example of genomes being steered by parental choice.
okay, sure, that might move the boundaries of the concept that I haven’t pinned down, but I have a pinned point it doesn’t move: parents shouldn’t be able to select children by personality traits in ways new to society. This is a capability we should not add to humanity; it is against transhumanism.
Parents already do, they can abort children with known abnormalities in the womb.
but again here you are switching back from the population level to the individual level. Those offspring do not exist by default, there are no ‘offspring’ that the parents have ‘denied the right to exist’. There are only counterfactual offspring, who already don’t exist.
this, on the other hand, may be more valid—because the parents will ‘spy on’ both actual and counterfactual childrens genomes (and select the former over the latter). But you still seem to be taking the rights of those children as significantly more important than the rights of the parents. But this (‘whose rights, parents or children’) seems like the fundamental crux that we are unlikely to shift one another on here.
Edit: and, reading through your other comments, there seems to be a question about the social impact of these technologies. This is then an impact on the rights of everyone—the parent, the child, and the rest of society. Also interesting, and I think it would be helpful to seperate out objections on the individual (parent/child) level, and on the society level, and I feel like they are getting muddled a lot here.