But in other cases it’s not actually clear which disease is worse or how to think about tradeoffs between them. How exactly do parents deal with this? In practice, there are a couple of methods.
On one hand, embryo selection is going to do a vast amount of good for humanity. Children who would’ve had deadly or crippling diseases won’t. Everyone gets a bit smarter and more capable.
On the other hand, it feels viscerally horrifying to be a parent that has to make these tradeoff choices. I can imagine choosing between some combination of IQ/strength/aesthetics benefits that would provide an expected two units of quality of life and a reduced schizophrenia risk that would provide an expected one unit of quality of life. If I pick the former and the die roll goes badly, I know I’m directly responsible for that, for the rest of my life. If I pick the latter, then, every single time my kid misses the game-winning catch by a hair, or gets waitlisted to his dream school, I think about my paranoia being the reason his life is worse.
Humans didn’t evolve to live with that kind of damning empirical guilt. I wonder if there’s an opening for a startup where you tell them what your priorities are and they pick an embryo for you, such that you never find out which tradeoffs you made.
This doesn’t help directly, but I just wanted to note that, as stronger reprogenetics in general is developed, most tradeoffs will go away. (Cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html#strong-gv-and-why-it-matters )
Many / most of the traits of interest (disease traits, cognitive capacities) are uncorrelated / weakly correlated with each other, and most of the weak correlations are in the non-antagonistic direction (e.g. low disease risk usually correlates slightly positively between different diseases). That means you can just get very low disease risk across the board, and whatever cognitive capacities can be upregulated, all at the same time.
There would still be some tradeoffs:
It might be very hard to know all of the important effects of genes. There might therefore be some downside risk to affecting too many genes (hence moving outside of the envelope of natural human genomes). If you push some trait around, you could be causing some weird bad effect that wasn’t measured or that only shows up when you’re pushing fairly far.
Some traits are intrinsically pleiotropic for life outcomes. E.g. if you increase a future child’s likely degree of interest in math, you’re kinda necessarily slightly relatively decreasing their interest in other things.
If I pick the former and the die roll goes badly, I know I’m directly responsible for that, for the rest of my life. If I pick the latter, then, every single time my kid misses the game-winning catch by a hair, or gets waitlisted to his dream school, I think about my paranoia being the reason his life is worse.
I don’t think this is really that much different from parents who blame themselves for their child not performing well on an exam because they didn’t sign them up for a private tutor. Embryo selection allows parents to influence the outcomes to some degree, but there’s still chance involved both from the remaining genetics we don’t understand and from the environment.
Humans didn’t evolve to live with that kind of damning empirical guilt.
I think humans evolved to deal with far worse than this. Think about how many children literally died from diseases, predation, and other horrible causes in the past. I think that stuff was way worse than seeing your child miss the game-winning field goal or even seeing them develop some mental disorder. And yet humans survived it.
I don’t think this is really that much different from parents who blame themselves for their child not performing well on an exam because they didn’t sign them up for a private tutor.
I feel like there’s a fundamental emotional difference when it comes to genetic limitations, just because of how much more unfair they feel. As you point out, it’s not logical—picking the traits that you want for your kid increases their expected happiness in life and is definitely a morally good action.
One way to think about it is comparing to the alternative of not choosing. There are tradeoffs, but it’s a net improvement over the alternative of a random genome. By going through substantial inconvenience in order to make some genomic choices on behalf of your future child, you’re giving them that gift. Maybe it’s not the optimal gift, but it’s still a supererogatory gift.
If I pick the former and the die roll goes badly, I know I’m directly responsible for that, for the rest of my life. If I pick the latter, then, every single time my kid misses the game-winning catch by a hair, or gets waitlisted to his dream school, I think about my paranoia being the reason his life is worse.
Are you making sure to also account (both in reasoning and in intuition / emotion) for the upsides in both cases? If not, then you’re applying a sort of Copenhagen ethics, where you’re automatically punished for taking responsibility, compared to leaving it up to random chance.
I think a lot of people do apply Copenhagen ethics, and I sometimes do too, so it’s not crazy. But my experience has been that sometimes it becomes just totally untenable to have no one taking responsibility, so you have to do it yourself. And then you have a bunch of difficult fast-paced choices where any option can be criticized. I think this situation is probably basically necessary as parent (though I’m not a parent)? Like, there’s just a ton of choices (what food? what water filter? what books? where live? what about phone / screens? school? rules? enforcement? etc. etc.), and you have to make some choice, and they all have flaws, but it’s ok, you’re doing your best—that’s the standard, not “was I totally blameless for all bad outcomes”.
being the reason his life is worse.
Another way to think about it, is making your best guess at what he would want. Of course, this doesn’t really answer any concrete question, but it’s maybe a slightly different stance. If you could, you should give him control over his own genome; but that doesn’t make sense because he doesn’t exist yet. ( https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation.html#appendix-the-origins-of-souls ) One way to try to compute what he’d want, is to ask what you’d wish your parents would have done for you.
On one hand, embryo selection is going to do a vast amount of good for humanity. Children who would’ve had deadly or crippling diseases won’t. Everyone gets a bit smarter and more capable.
On the other hand, it feels viscerally horrifying to be a parent that has to make these tradeoff choices. I can imagine choosing between some combination of IQ/strength/aesthetics benefits that would provide an expected two units of quality of life and a reduced schizophrenia risk that would provide an expected one unit of quality of life. If I pick the former and the die roll goes badly, I know I’m directly responsible for that, for the rest of my life. If I pick the latter, then, every single time my kid misses the game-winning catch by a hair, or gets waitlisted to his dream school, I think about my paranoia being the reason his life is worse.
Humans didn’t evolve to live with that kind of damning empirical guilt. I wonder if there’s an opening for a startup where you tell them what your priorities are and they pick an embryo for you, such that you never find out which tradeoffs you made.
This doesn’t help directly, but I just wanted to note that, as stronger reprogenetics in general is developed, most tradeoffs will go away. (Cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html#strong-gv-and-why-it-matters ) Many / most of the traits of interest (disease traits, cognitive capacities) are uncorrelated / weakly correlated with each other, and most of the weak correlations are in the non-antagonistic direction (e.g. low disease risk usually correlates slightly positively between different diseases). That means you can just get very low disease risk across the board, and whatever cognitive capacities can be upregulated, all at the same time.
There would still be some tradeoffs:
It might be very hard to know all of the important effects of genes. There might therefore be some downside risk to affecting too many genes (hence moving outside of the envelope of natural human genomes). If you push some trait around, you could be causing some weird bad effect that wasn’t measured or that only shows up when you’re pushing fairly far.
Some traits are intrinsically pleiotropic for life outcomes. E.g. if you increase a future child’s likely degree of interest in math, you’re kinda necessarily slightly relatively decreasing their interest in other things.
I don’t think this is really that much different from parents who blame themselves for their child not performing well on an exam because they didn’t sign them up for a private tutor. Embryo selection allows parents to influence the outcomes to some degree, but there’s still chance involved both from the remaining genetics we don’t understand and from the environment.
I think humans evolved to deal with far worse than this. Think about how many children literally died from diseases, predation, and other horrible causes in the past. I think that stuff was way worse than seeing your child miss the game-winning field goal or even seeing them develop some mental disorder. And yet humans survived it.
Humans are strong!
I feel like there’s a fundamental emotional difference when it comes to genetic limitations, just because of how much more unfair they feel. As you point out, it’s not logical—picking the traits that you want for your kid increases their expected happiness in life and is definitely a morally good action.
One way to think about it is comparing to the alternative of not choosing. There are tradeoffs, but it’s a net improvement over the alternative of a random genome. By going through substantial inconvenience in order to make some genomic choices on behalf of your future child, you’re giving them that gift. Maybe it’s not the optimal gift, but it’s still a supererogatory gift.
Are you making sure to also account (both in reasoning and in intuition / emotion) for the upsides in both cases? If not, then you’re applying a sort of Copenhagen ethics, where you’re automatically punished for taking responsibility, compared to leaving it up to random chance.
I think a lot of people do apply Copenhagen ethics, and I sometimes do too, so it’s not crazy. But my experience has been that sometimes it becomes just totally untenable to have no one taking responsibility, so you have to do it yourself. And then you have a bunch of difficult fast-paced choices where any option can be criticized. I think this situation is probably basically necessary as parent (though I’m not a parent)? Like, there’s just a ton of choices (what food? what water filter? what books? where live? what about phone / screens? school? rules? enforcement? etc. etc.), and you have to make some choice, and they all have flaws, but it’s ok, you’re doing your best—that’s the standard, not “was I totally blameless for all bad outcomes”.
Another way to think about it, is making your best guess at what he would want. Of course, this doesn’t really answer any concrete question, but it’s maybe a slightly different stance. If you could, you should give him control over his own genome; but that doesn’t make sense because he doesn’t exist yet. ( https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation.html#appendix-the-origins-of-souls ) One way to try to compute what he’d want, is to ask what you’d wish your parents would have done for you.