I slightly agree that the term and concept “superbabies” has some affinity with eugenical thinking, and is kinda bad (see my other comments on this post).
Ranking embryos?
Note that it is, and very much should be, parents who are ranking the embryos. Clinics provide predictions broken out by each specific condition or trait; parents make choices based on that, however they see fit.
It feels like market-driven eugenic thinking.
I’m not totally sure what you’re saying here, and would be curious for you to unpack it. A guess I’d make is that you’re thinking something like: “Social/economic incentives about traits/types of people will push parents to make genomic choices for their future children that respond to those incentives; in particular, whatever the strongest incentives are, though incentives would induce all parents to make the same genomic choices in response. In effect, this is some single force (the aggregate of the main economic incentives) making a decision about what sort of person should exist that gets applied uniformly across all of society. That’s basically eugenics.” Is that close? How would you correct this?
If that’s roughly what you’re thinking: I almost agree that this is a kind of eugenics, but I don’t quite agree. Eugenics was a highly varied ideology so it’s hard to analyze, but my attempt is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yH9FtLgPJxbimamKg/genomic-emancipation-contra-eugenics#The_Eugenical_Maxim_as_the_shared_moral_core_of_eugenics_
My hypothesis there is basically that eugenics largely boils down to “There are Good and Bad traits (a single universal concept); they’re important; so we should push for all children to have Good traits.”. So, the uniformity is important, but at least according to me, truly eugenical thinking is about justifying a universal application of one standard of Good traits based on conceiving of a single universal notion of Good traits. Responding to incentives could (if extremely pervasive) be a uniform/universal application of one standard, but it’s not necessarily being justified that way. This matters because the justification is where much of the really bad stuff comes from. If you put a lot of stock in your single universal notion of Good traits, then you can justify imposing that notion on other people, even using force.
That said, a free market could result in that universal notion of Good traits being justified as such—in other words, people could start blaming children for being economically unproductive / burdensome because they weren’t sufficiently genomically optimized. That would start to shade into “soft eugenics”, which is still less bad than coercive eugenics, but is bad, and could then shade into coercive eugenics. For example, people could say “why should we provide you healthcare, when your disease is genetically preventable and your parents refused to prevent it for no good reason”. (In an absolute sense, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this is that much of a problem; there’s really a ton of latitude (legal and social) in our society to take a huge variety of approaches toward life and child-rearing, though things seem like they’ve gotten significantly worse in the past decades—but as long as there is this store of liberty, I think the consequences aren’t that bad. I’m also skeptical that how much healthcare our society provides is all that linked to which options specific parents would have had to avert sickness.)
Now, even if you agree with my analysis about eugenics and eugenical thinking, you might still be concerned simply about any sort of pressure that applies some human-judgement standard to the genomes of future children. E.g. you might think that are notions of “intelligence” are so deeply flawed that a kid selected to have a higher IQ in expectation would also tend to have some bad quality in expectation. Or you might be concerned about negative consequences of uniformity, regardless of the attendant social attitudes (eugenical or not). E.g. you might think that selecting for IQ would make kids who all have “the same kind of intelligence”, and that would be bad. Are these your concern?
I slightly agree that the term and concept “superbabies” has some affinity with eugenical thinking, and is kinda bad (see my other comments on this post).
Note that it is, and very much should be, parents who are ranking the embryos. Clinics provide predictions broken out by each specific condition or trait; parents make choices based on that, however they see fit.
I’m not totally sure what you’re saying here, and would be curious for you to unpack it. A guess I’d make is that you’re thinking something like: “Social/economic incentives about traits/types of people will push parents to make genomic choices for their future children that respond to those incentives; in particular, whatever the strongest incentives are, though incentives would induce all parents to make the same genomic choices in response. In effect, this is some single force (the aggregate of the main economic incentives) making a decision about what sort of person should exist that gets applied uniformly across all of society. That’s basically eugenics.” Is that close? How would you correct this?
If that’s roughly what you’re thinking: I almost agree that this is a kind of eugenics, but I don’t quite agree. Eugenics was a highly varied ideology so it’s hard to analyze, but my attempt is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yH9FtLgPJxbimamKg/genomic-emancipation-contra-eugenics#The_Eugenical_Maxim_as_the_shared_moral_core_of_eugenics_ My hypothesis there is basically that eugenics largely boils down to “There are Good and Bad traits (a single universal concept); they’re important; so we should push for all children to have Good traits.”. So, the uniformity is important, but at least according to me, truly eugenical thinking is about justifying a universal application of one standard of Good traits based on conceiving of a single universal notion of Good traits. Responding to incentives could (if extremely pervasive) be a uniform/universal application of one standard, but it’s not necessarily being justified that way. This matters because the justification is where much of the really bad stuff comes from. If you put a lot of stock in your single universal notion of Good traits, then you can justify imposing that notion on other people, even using force.
That said, a free market could result in that universal notion of Good traits being justified as such—in other words, people could start blaming children for being economically unproductive / burdensome because they weren’t sufficiently genomically optimized. That would start to shade into “soft eugenics”, which is still less bad than coercive eugenics, but is bad, and could then shade into coercive eugenics. For example, people could say “why should we provide you healthcare, when your disease is genetically preventable and your parents refused to prevent it for no good reason”. (In an absolute sense, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this is that much of a problem; there’s really a ton of latitude (legal and social) in our society to take a huge variety of approaches toward life and child-rearing, though things seem like they’ve gotten significantly worse in the past decades—but as long as there is this store of liberty, I think the consequences aren’t that bad. I’m also skeptical that how much healthcare our society provides is all that linked to which options specific parents would have had to avert sickness.)
Now, even if you agree with my analysis about eugenics and eugenical thinking, you might still be concerned simply about any sort of pressure that applies some human-judgement standard to the genomes of future children. E.g. you might think that are notions of “intelligence” are so deeply flawed that a kid selected to have a higher IQ in expectation would also tend to have some bad quality in expectation. Or you might be concerned about negative consequences of uniformity, regardless of the attendant social attitudes (eugenical or not). E.g. you might think that selecting for IQ would make kids who all have “the same kind of intelligence”, and that would be bad. Are these your concern?