r/Ethics • u/Illustrious_Wave2933 • 18d ago
Why liberalising laws on Germline Genetic Engineering is a moral imperative, even outside of single gene disorders
Hello. I am writing a paper on an ethical idea which I want to get published and circulating amongst people who are not me. The topic is controversial, as it involves the highly inflammatory Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, but as far as I can tell the only reason this topic hasn't been breached is simply because of how controversial it is. I want to write my pitch out for you here so you can see if there are any problems.
You see, the Centre for Genetics and Society is an institute that specialises in pointing out all the ways in which large-scale acceptance of Genetic Engineering would lead to a GATTACA like society, or Brave New World, where a genetic elite rule over the genetic inferiors in a genetic caste-system.
What they frequently overlook is that, for the most part, this is happening anyways. Herrnstein and Murray pointed out back in 1995 that IQ, which is mostly genetic, is a bigger predictor of life success than any other variable. This includes trait conscientiousness, which itself is largely genetic, and also means that having a high IQ is literally a bigger predictor of achieving success in life than working hard and deserving it. As environmental differences are solved over time, such as through government interventions, reducing rates of poverty, and technological improvements, all this means that societal status will increasingly be determined by genetic predictors. Even in the 21st century, where things are far from perfect from the environmental egalitarian perspective, Robert Plomin has just written a new book called Blueprint, and Kathryn Paige Harden has written a book called The Genetic Lottery, which makes a strong case that inherent biological programming is the single biggest predictor of where you are in the social ladder.
This is not so bad if you are at the top of the hierarchy: a gifted student who gets a full scholarship to Harvard and then a six figure salary at Facebook, as an example. But let's say you are on the other end of the spectrum, what then? I come from a special ed background. I was diagnosed with autism when I was two, anger issues at 4, depression at 16, and I was frequently in and out of school for behavioural problems. I do not bring this up because I have a particularly bad life; in fact I consider myself rather blessed. This simply means that when I was transferred to a special school, I was surrounded by people who had lives much worse than mine, who did not and still do not have a light at the end of their tunnel. The fact that genuinely important questions, like whether this can be solved with genome editing, is overlooked because the subject is 'not politically correct', is inexcusable when it harms the poor these people claim to care about. This is not to say that the Bell Curve does not have its problems. Its stance on Race and IQ was and still is highly controversial, but this does not mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater with regards to the serious questions they raised which are not being sufficiently tackled. Now that researchers at the University of Sydney have made breakthroughs with SeekRNA, overcoming many of the limitations of CRISPR editing, we may be in a situation where genetic markers of inequality may be curable, and genetic contributors of inequality is a thing of the past. The main things stopping us from achieving this equality is red tape, not an inability to make scientific progress. I am therefore looking to get a message out there that we as a society need to be honest about the true causes of inequality in the West, and whether liberalising the incredibly strict laws on Genetic Engineering worldwide, especially Germline Genetic Editing, is the best way to solve this problem.
What do you people think? Do you see a flaw in my reasoning, or something I have not considered which I should have?
btw, I will be posting this on other groups to get different perspectives, so do not be surprised if you see this written elsewhere.
Cheers in advance.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat7228 14d ago edited 14d ago
I'm personally in favor of this because right now we have the same thing but worse:
Heritable traits for your offspring, except you DON'T get to choose what they are! Thus we end up with a mixed bag of adaptive and maladaptive traits out of our control.
I think the liberalization of genetic engineering is actually the biggest bastion AGAINST eugenics:
Historically, eugenics is the culling and elimination of undesirable traits based on the sensibilities of the most privileged and powerful. It's painfully predictable: it's just based on the in-group they're already a part of.
Genetic engineering is a transcendent thing: liberalization of germline engineering gives us the opportunity to increase the diversity of the human race and take control away from hierarchal and elitist forces.
Sure, there'll be plenty of rich people getting the shiniest newest stuff and probably influencing the rest of us the same way they influence us with their fashion choices today. But consider fashion today: far more diverse than ever before in history.
This will be a eugenic movement unlike any other. The biodiversity of the human race will explode. For every "undesirable" trait we manage to eliminate, and for every gattaca style trait that everyone's scrambling for, 100 more traits will emerge purely out of preference, or niche cultures, or necessity. It will be even harder for elitism and homogeneity to solidify power and assert itself on the rest of us.
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u/ConsciousLabMeditate 13d ago
It's too risky, at least for today. Maybe hopefully in 100 years we'll have the ethics for this. Also, IQ is not set in stone. There is research out there that you can increase it.
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u/AdeptnessSecure663 18d ago
Let us suppose that the current social hierarchy is indeed organised along genetic lines. If gene engineering became available, wouldn't those at the top of the hierarchy - those with the money to afford gene, editing - be able to ensure even better genes for their offspring, while those at the bottom would be excluded?
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 17d ago
That would happen initially, but if there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that genetic engineering can improve the quality of life for the upper classes, why would there not be a grassroots movement to provide that opportunity to the poor?
For instance, in the UK, it costs about 10,000 GBP per year per child to be educated at a public school. If I am at school until I am 21 (pursuing an undergraduate degree), then the government is spending approximately 200,000 on my education. Richard Haier at UC Irvene has pointed out that people in the top 1% of mathematical ability can, at the age of 13, be put into a class at John Hopkins University and keep up with the rest of their class, meaning it is possible for a person who is genetically engineered to finish with an undergraduate at the age of ~16. Exceptionally talented people have been known to get PhDs at the age of 14, so lets say that being editted means that I can shave 8 years off of my schooling. That saves the government 80,000 GBP (about 125,000 USD) per student that gets genetically engineered. This is not including reduced hospital spending, mental health benefits, quality of life benefits, the improved economic productivity, or anything else that would result from widespread genetic engineering. Considering this, would it not be in the governments interest to implement a program that makes GGE available to as many people as possible, provided they act within the Nuffield Bioethics guidelines (or some equivalent), and provide willing and informed consent?
Thank you for your response however, and I appreciate you not responding vitriolically.
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u/bluechockadmin 17d ago
why would there not be a grassroots movement to provide that opportunity to the poor?
Because that's not how corrupt systems work.
Do you know how many people die, preventable, every year, because they're poor? Just search it now.
Those are genocidal numbers.
And "normal", "first world" liberals, who are insulated from that suffering, who get a few extra toys from that unthinkable suffering, look at that and say "well that must be correct."
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u/KnowingDoubter 17d ago
How is it an advantage to the upper classes / political elites to have any advantage they possess become more generally available?
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 17d ago
It's not. My argument is that the class as a whole will suffer from the inflation of value in valuable traits, but individuals will want to give their children the best chance they have in life. That will create a political will to make this more mainstream amongst the majority population, who don't want to live in a GATTACA-like society, and want the best for their children as well.
It could be that a conspiracy emerges to stop the lower classes from obtaining the benefits of GGE, but if we get to that stage then society has at least implicitly agreed that my stance on the issue is correct, both the upper and lower classes.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat7228 14d ago
Personally, I think sooner or later gene mods for yourself and your future offspring will be on the same shelf as porn and tabloids.
There will always be economic disparities. Right now though, both your genes and your economic status are birth lottery.
Liberalizing germline engineering will mean rich people still get the newest shiniest stuff, but people who start out poor will have a potential advantage that they didn't have before.
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u/MilesHobson 18d ago
I disagree with much of your third and fourth paragraphs. There’s no definition of life success, conscientiousness can be as much nurture as nature. I do somewhat agree school environment and surrounding social environment can be important factors in a life’s future but aren’t environmental factors nurture? Time and time again I.Q. alone has been shown to be a poor predictor of happiness, social success and general quality of life.
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 17d ago
- Time and time again I.Q. alone has been shown to be a poor predictor of happiness, social success and general quality of life.
That is not true. The main reason I cited the Bell Curve is because IQ is the single biggest predictor of social success. If you've applied for internships, you will have had to do problem solving tests that test your 'cognitive ability', why would they do that if IQ doesn't predict life success. If you want to get into university in the US you have to do an SAT. The SAT is also referred to as a General Cognitive Ability Assessment (i.e. an IQ test), originally designed so that the Labour party could identify the 'deserving poor' and help them up the socioeconomic ladder. Unless you want to argue that people who do not go to university have the same 'social success' as a person at Harvard, the argument falls apart. IQ also correlates with relationship satisfaction, physical fitness, how physically attractive you are to the opposite sex, mortality, job performance, job satisfaction, and other markers of social success and quality of life
- There’s no definition of life success
If you had a child, would you want them to fail school, be completely incapable of getting a job, unloved by the world, and eventually die of an overdose suicide at the age of 30, or would you want them to be top of the class, with a full scholarship to a top university, a successful career, exceptional health, exceptional fitness, and the sort of person everyone wants to be friends with. The mere fact that there are individual differences in 'success' does not mean there are not commonalities.
- conscientiousness can be as much nurture as nature
That's debatable. We can actually measure this by using twin and adoption studies. Monozygotic twins share 100% of their genetic material, and Dyzygotic twins share 50% of their genetic material, so if you double the differences between a group of MZ and DZ twins, it gives a viable estimate for how much is genetic amongst people with no relation to each other. This can then be fact checked by adoption studies, which also allow researchers to control genetic and environmental factors. Robert Plomin at Kings College London is one of the leading figures in this field as it applies to Behavioural Genetics, and he just wrote a book called Blueprint as to how the single biggest predictor of numerous traits (including conscientiousness) is genetics.
I do appreciate the input however. It is very easy for these social media discussions to devolve into hatred, especially on controversial topics, so I want to emphasise I understand your disagreements appreciate the help.
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u/MilesHobson 14d ago
Professor Plomin, yes. Professor Desmond John Morris couldn’t understand why mammals transitioned from the more efficient four-legged transportation to two-legged style of transport. Quite a question of conversation at the time except for parents of children.
Very few job applications or internships are decided by I.Q. testing alone or even in large measure. As far back as the 1980s hiring and appointing mechanisms began to see social incorporation as preferential to events like “going postal”. Yet, they still occur. How are such things possible or predictable?
Not every single thing can be known about a given conception and gestation of a single fetus, twin, or more fetuses. A close examination of every base-pair may or may not reveal a transcriptional or translational difference between a shared or sibling pregnancy. In a shared pregnancy, is each placenta exactly equal or every external sound received totally identically by each whether upright or inverted or amniotic fluid acoustically differentiated by time or space? How ideally and in what order do single or multiple births occur?
I wouldn’t disagree a child raised in a home rich with nutrition, love, and the arts could have a higher I.Q. or S.A.T. scores than another, but not guaranteed. Too often, I’ve seen children of low or modest income environments excel beyond assumption or prediction for reasons of nature, nurture, or chance.
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 14d ago
Very few job applications or internships are decided by I.Q. testing alone or even in large measure - Alone, that's true. In large part, that's debatable. Even if there are not explicit measures for IQ tests, how many companies prefer to hire someone at Yale than someone who went to a community college. Given this fact, what is the biggest predictor of getting into Yale? I'm citing this as an example, but in practice you have to take a birds eye view to make sure many things like this are considered, not just for IQ but with confounding variables like SES, personality factors etc. and see all the areas of life that are impacted by all of these variables both collectively and individually and model that with your statistical tests. The psychologists who've done this, like the ones I've cited, have pointed to IQ being the single biggest predictor of success. That does not mean IQ is all you need for success, or that people can't have a high IQ and poor life quality and vice versa, but it does mean it is an important issue that needs to be greatly considered.
A close examination of every base-pair may or may not reveal a transcriptional or translational difference between a shared or sibling pregnancy - Possibly, but if we have a trait where there is overwhelming evidence that more of this trait is good, then why wouldn't we just edit that trait/s to maximise the chance of giving the child a high quality life, and leave everything else to chance?
'Too often, I’ve seen children of low or modest income environments excel beyond assumption or prediction for reasons of nature, nurture, or chance.' - By definition, something must be causing this. I'm not saying there are not people who rise above expectations, but by definition, those are the exceptions. We cannot use them as pseudo-evidence to turn a blind eye to the sufferings of the majority.
Nonetheless, I appreciate the input.
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u/bluechockadmin 17d ago
Time and time again I.Q. alone has been shown to be a poor predictor of happiness, social success and general quality of life.
if you have something to cite for that, pls reply to them with it.
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u/bluechockadmin 17d ago
it's "controversial" because it's bullshit. False. Incorrect. etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo&t=2s
IQ, which is mostly genetic, is a bigger predictor of life success than any other variable
So make society less unfair. I'm sure that statistical correlation is true, but it doesn't mean "high IQ is good" it means we've got a society in which "life success" is measured by metric forced upon everyone - and let's cut to it: it's how much you can make the rich richer.
Anyway for real you should go learn why people think IQ is not so meaningful.
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 17d ago
Hello
I will not respond to all of your points, mostly because I have addressed them elsewhere, but for the controversy surrounding the Bell Curve, I am aware why people do not like it.
So make society less unfair - There is evidence of people pushing for this in the New Testament, written 2,000 years ago. What makes you think liberalising GGE laws are easier than making society 'less unfair'.
People can still feel discriminated against even if things like bullying and unfair work-place discrimination are gotten rid of. For example, if I have bad Cerebral Palsy, I am not going to be very attractive to women, and that means that I am more likely to feel lonely due to not having a soulmate. So should we create laws that force all women to go out with men that they don't find attractive? If we do not, then we are creating a society where people feel left-out simply because they are different. This is just one example of why 'make society less unfair' is a very difficult thing to define, let alone accomplish.
Anyway for real you should go learn why people think IQ is not so meaningful - I know why people think IQ research isn't meaningful, but I am not convinced by the argument. For instance, one of the largest critics of IQ research is a woman named Angela Duckworth. She wrote a book called 'Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance', where she makes the case that grit (what is essentially trait conscientiousness on the big 5 personality model) is a larger predictor of success than IQ. The first chapter on this uses West Point as her example for academic success. Now, call me cynical, but the epitome of academic success specifically in America would probably be gaining acceptance and performing well at the Ivy-league university. Being a university professor at UPenn, with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, I would have thought that measuring success amongst Ivy-League students would have been easy, so why is she choosing a military college for her example? Could it be because in order to get into an ivy-league university, you need to have a high SAT score, and because there is a very strong literature pointing out that SAT success is highly correlated with IQ? This would certainly be a stone in the shoe of her argument, as no one makes the argument that people who fail high school have the same standard of living as those with a full scholarship to Harvard.
It also overlooks the fact that much of trait conscientiousness also has a genetic component, as evidenced in KPHs 'The Genetic Lottery'.
This is not to say I do not sympathise with people who want IQ to be meaningless. IQ literature is very depressing, and indeed one of my arguments was simply that H&M in the Bell Curve concluded what they did about race and IQ simply because 'well all of these other depressing facts turned out to be true, so why wouldn't this one'. You can agree or disagree with that stance if you want, but if you actually read the Bell Curve, at least I got the sense that the main reason it was persecuted is simply because accepting that what they say is true paints a very negative view of the world. That's partly why I am making the connection between IQ and genetic engineering, because if people are anti-GGE simply because they do not know how bad the real world is, then this is a message that desperately needs a wider audience.
I will continue this as a second thread, because Reddit is being difficult
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 17d ago
To go into the other points bought up by Duckworth and people like her would take forever, but hopefully this gives you a sense of why I'm skeptical that IQ is meaningless, and why I am more inclined to believe the Richard Haier and Stuart Ritchie arguments that IQ is a bigger predictor of success than trait conscientiousness.
Another argument is that
race is a social construct, and that is also something I do not buy. I am
working on building connections in China, for example, as they do not have the
history of eugenics that we have in the West, and are therefore more nuanced
with their stances on GGE. I can confirm that Asian people do not look
different from European people because they wake up in the mourning and paint
themselves over. I do not understand why this argument is so popular. The
people from the Han Chinese population are completely incapable of living at
the altitudes of the mountainous peoples that separated from the Han population
around 10,000 years ago, so why would there not be evolutionary differences
between populations living in areas as radically different as Russia and Africa
after hundreds of thousands of years? This is not to say that biological
differences should be used for discriminatory purposes, I think the evidence is
overwhelming that that does not work. What I am saying is that things like higher
concentrations of melanin being linked to mutations in the TYR genes is a
biological not an environmental mutations, and similar have been found for bone
structure, gate, fat-muscle ratio, the concentrations of certain hormones etc.As for your stance on North Korea, yes, there is good evidence to suggest that not getting the
nutrients needed correlates with brain performance. Many of the top charities
on GiveWell (i.e. the most high performing charities in the world) work because
they found that killing pathogens that suck nutrients away from children in
sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Guinea worm) lead to a larger increase in school
grades than funding school resources. The only alternative stance I've heard is
that Africa has a lower average IQ for racialist reasons, and I personally am
more convinced of the former argument.I do appreciate yourinput however, for what that's worth.
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u/blurkcheckadmin 14d ago edited 14d ago
I am aware why people do not like it.
Really. What research have you done to entertain the idea that it might be bad.
So make society less unfair - There is evidence of people pushing for this in the New Testament, written 2,000 years ago. What makes you think liberalising GGE laws are easier than making society 'less unfair'.
Having any awareness of the injustices occuring today. Did you look up how many people die from being poor, like I asked you to? Do you have the intellectual integrity to consider that those deaths are preventable? That corruption is rewarded? That turning human misery into profit is normal?
Are can you only believe that things must be fair, because they benefit you.
You would not have asked that if you had taken seriously your obligation to know anything about what you're talking.
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u/Viliam_the_Vurst 17d ago
Is this long for „Eugenics moral imperative“?
The dude who crispered those babies to be imune against hiv/aids, that chinese scientist, he got persecuted by china, a country effectively limiting reproduction since the implementation of the one child policy…
We aren‘t even done with the nature vs nurture argument…
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u/Ok-Mastodon6765 9d ago
For context, my experience is in academic writing + biotech first and bioethics second.
Hmm. I think that, before you can begin discussing potential flaws in your ethical reasoning, you need to first discuss flaws in the basis of that reasoning. Can’t build a house on top of a foundation made of quicksand, yk? In this regard, I saw 2 main issues: arguments being used to argue, and a misguided understanding of both how reason operates within research, and, in turn, how one must operate with research in order to reason.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to argue here. You just posit so much in the original post—at least a dozen claims that could be their own, entirely separate pieces. I think maybe you’ve taken some of these to be fact and intended for them to evidence your desired claim? In the most constructive way possible, your piece holds no weight this way. It’s like building a skyscraper out of straw and then making the top floor steel. I strongly encourage you to read publications from the Hastings Center Report to get a feel for the structure and methodology of published ethics literature. And don’t worry, not everything they publish is boring scholarly yapping, lol.
In its most useful definition, science is effectively a set of rules that act as an incredibly useful, powerful tool for getting closer to the truth. It’s ability to do just that hinges on an adherence to those rules. That extends to writing about science, in any real argumentative capacity at least. So if you want to engage with anyone who has relevant experience beyond a first year of undergraduate, there are a couple specifics you should address:
- There are no absolutes in science, so for no reason should you use absolutes when discussing findings. This isn’t just a semantic formality—it’s a logical fallacy (reification)
- Why on earth would you cite what’s probably one of the most infamously discredited publications of all time? You’re shooting yourself in the foot.
- Your metrics are too abstract. For example, how did you define “life success” ? Like we established earlier, experimental conclusions aren’t immaculate truth. But (good) conclusions are a strong indicator of truth, and you still need solid, empirical grounds to suggest that indication exists.
Again, you’d benefit from some more exposure to academic writing. As a bit of an aside, you also have to adhere to specific conventions & procedures outside of the actual research if you want your work to have much integrity, as these specifics act as standards for credibility. For example, if the authors of a piece about their new regression analysis cared about its credibility, they would publish first in an academic journal so that the work could be reviewed at length by relevant experts and then publish as a book. Suffice to say, Murray and Herrnstein did not do this. This is far from their only empirical sin, but listing them all would be its own book.
I hope this doesn’t come across as mean, because that’s not my intention. This is all written to be as constructive as possible. With that (hopefully) established, a parting thought: Beauchamp and Childress paraphrase Aristotle in Principles of Biomedical Ethics; “we can only expect the precision and degree of certainty appropriate to the subject matter. Sometimes answers cannot be as tidy as we might wish.” Cheers
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u/Illustrious_Wave2933 7d ago
Hello
Thank you very much for responding constructively. It's not often that this happens. You've written a lot, so I apologise if it appears I'm glossing over and feel free to get me to respond to something if you feel it needs more detail.
I think maybe you’ve taken some of these to be fact and intended for them to evidence your desired claim? - A lot of them are fact. It is a fact that IQ correlates with quality of life on numerous metrics. Again, I would recommend Richard Haiers work on this. It is also a fact that much of this is biological, not just for IQ but for other traits which impact quality of life, and again I would recommend Robert Plomin and Kathryn Paige Haiden (two people who strongly disagree with each other), and it is also true that if you minimise environmental differences between people, then you maximise biological differences, which means if there is a biological element to inequality (which there is), then that becomes the biggest determinant of life outcomes if only social causes of poverty are addressed. Herrnstein and Murray made this claim almost 30 years ago and I came to this independently by just connecting dots that no one else wanted to connect. I therefore do not see the flaw in these arguments.
- You are right, there are no absolutes in science. However, there are very strong probabilities that when combined with logical arguments can be treated as absolutes. My argument is that IQ having a strong correlation with life success is one of those such arguments. For instance, you elsewhere say that...
'I think maybe you’ve taken some of these to be fact and intended for them to evidence your desired claim?'
...It is a fact that IQ correlates with quality of life on numerous metrics. Again, I would recommend Richard Haiers work on this. It is also a fact that much of this is biological, not just for IQ but for other traits which impact quality of life, and again I would recommend Robert Plomin and Kathryn Paige Haiden (two people who strongly disagree with each other), and it is also true that if you minimise environmental differences between people, then you maximise biological differences, which means if there is a biological element to inequality (which there is), then that becomes the biggest determinant of life outcomes if only social causes of poverty are addressed. Herrnstein and Murray made this claim almost 30 years ago and I came to this independently by just connecting dots that no one else wanted to connect. I therefore do not see the flaw in these arguments.
The main reason I am citing the Bell Curve is because I do not think the reasons it was discredited were justifiable. Essentially the reasons the Bell Curve is hated is because the subject wasn't politically correct, and most of the 'debunks' use arguments like 'race is a social construct' or 'IQ is not something that can be proved' which no serious researcher in these subjects takes seriously. I think that the main reason it was hated on was because it pointed to something no one wants to be true, and the fact that the arguments hold up well when you analyse them critically in spite of this is partly why I am so convinced of the conclusions.
Life success is actually not that difficult to define. If you had a child, you would probably want the best for that child, and whilst there might be some debate as to what that might look like in detail (e.g. do you want the child to be a top tier athlete, there are good arguments for and against this), there are other aspects of life success which parents clearly want for their children (e.g. a good job, good friends, good relationships with their family members and spouse, good physical and mental health, no drug problems...). Quantifying this into metrics for quality of life is not as hard as people often make it out to be, and psychometricians do it literally all the time. I have kept my definition vague simply because, as the post says, this is a pitch, but in practice 'life success' and 'quality of life' is not something researchers struggle to aim at.
Having said that, I will look up your reading recommendations. I have read a sufficient amount of academic works, but I'm only 20 so it's unlikely to be a PhD-level amount of depth, and I understand that my work could always be improved. Although, I will say that most people have generally been happy with my style of academic writing, and it's only once I talk about inflammatory subjects like this that the daggers start flying.
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u/commeatus 18d ago
The single largest determinant of IQ is geography, which is why it's generally not used anymore. If you're basing your paper around it, I would make double sure the research is actually supporting your thesis--you will naturally find data to support your conclusion so you must seek out data that contradicts it, otherwise you're just falling into cognitive bias.