38% of Americans still oppose using gene editing technologies to reduce risks of cancer or inherited, life-threatening disorders. The figure rises to 50% once you ask people if they’d use gene editing technologies to reduce their baby’s risk of cancer. The majority of the population seems to be very confused when it comes to the gene-editing debate—most of them simply assume that a gene-editing industry won’t even take basic precautions to regulate the technology.
This article dismantles common objections to gene editing in general (most of which suck).
1. Just because something is “eugenics” doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Many people on the left immediately throw out the word “eugenics” when hearing about gene-editing tech, without realizing they’re straying from why eugenics has been so historically bad in the first place. Practicing eugenics is simply an attempt to improve the genetic quality of the population—natural selection and the inheritance of positive traits make it so evolution accurately selects for higher genetic quality when it comes to surviving in a certain environment.
In fact, morally acceptable instances of “modern eugenics” occur all the time! When selecting IVF embryos, it makes sense that couples are going to select the embryo with the highest intelligence or attractiveness and the lowest cancer risk—these are desirable traits that directly impact the future person’s quality of life. People who possess higher degrees of certain positive traits are also more likely to mate with people who share those positive traits, passing those desirable traits to their offspring.
Eugenics, having fraudulently justified multiple ethnic cleansings, mass killings, and historical atrocities, doesn’t mean that anything labeled eugenics is automatically bad; it just means that those justifications were rooted in pseudoscientific nonsense and held no water. Historical attempts at eugenics used bad science to justify a bunch of racist things that reinforced commonly held views at the time; people used them as justifications for atrocities, but we now know those things to be blatantly false.
Sure, race-science eugenicists will jump on board the gene editing train, but what implications does that have? If liberals implemented a highly efficient welfare policy that increases the quality of life for millions of people, socialists will endorse it because it aligns with their values—does that imply you’re a socialist for endorsing a single view that socialists tend to hold? The answer is no.
2. Gene editing causes arms racing; it does nothing to counteract quality-of-life benefits.
The utility that certain traits serve is completely relative to the presence of that trait within a population—traits like height, intelligence, and attractiveness have their value to some extent acquired from comparison relative to the rest of society. If everyone were modified to be 6’4 and able to bench 250 pounds, those attributes wouldn’t be extremely sought-after anymore. Instead, it descends into a gene-editing arms race where everybody accepts huge risks and expends tons of resources for gains that are completely nullified by competition.
This argument is extremely stupid. Imagine if there was a button that would give all 8 billion people on Earth a university-level understanding of different relevant majors (e.g. engineering, biotech, astrophysics) when pressed. Claiming that “higher education is just useful relative to the rest of society, so this has no benefits because everybody just competes” is not a valid objection against it—even if you don’t even want to find any of the new jobs that are created, knowing relevant skills and information is a quality-of-life improvement.
Being 6 ‘4 and able to bench 250 isn’t good simply because most other people aren’t 6’4 and can’t bench 250; its relative significance and value is still derived from the fact that being healthy and in shape is a massive quality-of-life improvement. Being cognitively efficient helps you make better decisions that help you live a more enjoyable life. Humans don’t arbitrarily ground desirable traits based on what they feel like is rare relative to the rest of society; all desirable traits serve some form of societal utility.
Even then, using gene editing to reduce the risk of chronic illnesses and inherited disabilities that can ruin someone’s life is an obvious upside! There are risks and attributes in genes that are purely negative and defective. Giving higher resistance to diseases, enhanced cognitive function, and better physical abilities to everyone only improves everybody’s quality of life.
Proponents of arguments like these seem to be unable to apply their logic to real-world cases of arms racing and competition—if they did, it would be obvious that these arguments fail. All competition is still grounded in evolutionarily beneficial value, as humans don’t have preferences based on something’s relative rank in society.
3. Embryos can’t consent, but you’re harming them by not gene editing.
Suppose you choose a certain IVF embryo over another because it’s gene-edited to have more traits that you desire. If the future child has no consent over what traits they’re born with, that seems unethical! Modifications like a certain education or diet are things that a child can oppose, but editing genes before the child is born forces them to be stuck with those genes for the rest of their lives.
You can’t ignore the fact that everybody has genetic preferences when it comes to marrying others and having kids. If person A is intelligent but has lower physical fitness and seeks to have children with other intelligent people, it’s not unethical to do so because the resulting child might complain about not being born to parents who are more physically fit.
In this case, there is no psychological continuity between the embryo and the resulting child, as the embryo isn’t a moral actor that can be “wronged”. A certain embryo doesn’t have a right to a future without forcefully modified genes because the embryo isn’t going to be the one experiencing the future—it’ll be the child that is only biologically continuous with the embryo.
It’s also outlandish to speculate about children who, when born, will complain about their parents subjecting them to a life of higher intelligence and lower cancer risk. Many constituents of the anti-gene editing camp seem to forget that there are modifications that result in only slight improvements to a child’s quality of life. Rejecting person-affecting responses entirely unlocks an even more compelling response to this argument.
Assume that you can wrong a potential human by picking traits that they do not desire, completely limiting them for the rest of their life from reaching their potential. Now, wouldn’t picking the option not to gene-edit for quality-of-life improvements be picking certain negative traits that the future child wouldn’t desire? A future child would heavily desire to be granted protection against deadly pathogens or higher attractiveness. If you have the option to edit for traits that increase the utility of a potential human being and reject it in favor of an embryo that has inferior traits, you’re doing something morally wrong!
4. Engineering doesn’t remove obligations to the disadvantaged.
Does gene editing remove any moral justification to assist the disabled, poor, or oppressed? If editing genes is a strategic investment that’s completely skill-based, shouldn’t people show no gratitude towards those who simply didn’t edit because they weren’t victims of any misfortune? This seems to imply that disabled people who were not genetically edited don’t deserve any compensation, nor do society’s most disadvantaged individuals.
Evolution usually means selected traits are random, but gene editing—they’re not! The traits any specific child has are viewed as random because of Rawls’ veil of ignorance, which applies to gene-edited children as well. Any random person could’ve existed as the child of any random set of parents, who have easily identifiable and measurable genes. Under gene-editing, it’s still by chance that some children were born from enhanced or positively modified embryos.
Currently, some children are born into rich and affluent families, while some are born into extreme poverty; the amount of wealth is a fixed amount, and it’s created through past strategic investments, but we currently have an obligation to those who are born into extreme poverty nonetheless. This can be applied to gene editing as well—couple A could’ve rejected an overwhelmingly positive modification while couple B accepted the modification, but that doesn’t imply couple A’s child hasn’t been the victim of severe misfortune.
It isn’t hard to understand that the children aren’t the ones selectively picking which genes to have, so they had no say in decisions that affect their livelihoods. Even if people could somehow edit their genome into adulthood, people who refused positive modifications, made negative modifications, or just made modifications they negatively looked back on deserve to be compensated. So long as they didn’t have completely comprehensive information on the results of their modification and irrationally rejected the change, their mishap can be attributed to a lack of understanding.
People who could edit their genome into adulthood but refused accessible benefits likely did so because they don’t trust gene-editing tech—if the technology works well, then it’s unlucky that those people weren’t aware that their concerns were misplaced.
If you’re a good utilitarian, the notion of equality is always good, since giving a certain amount of resources to a well-off individual has diminishing marginal utility, while giving that amount to a not-so-well-off individual increases their utility by a greater amount.
5. Editing doesn’t mean hidden trade-offs.
Diversity in the gene pool is good for population-level resilience, and removing certain “defects” can remove hidden advantages and protections. If sickle-cell traits protect against malaria, who knows what other benefits are rescinded when everybody rushes to edit genes!
For inherited disorders and traits that cause certain conditions, those conditions might protect against some unknown existential threat that can potentially wipe out humanity. The chance of negative conditions having any secret powers that are also necessary for human survival is quite low, and can be easily sidestepped with a better understanding of the human genome.
Many desirable, scalar traits like intelligence that aren’t the cause of specific disorders can be enhanced with very low risk, since all it does is improve baseline cognitive function.
It’s doubtful that any competent government developing gene editing technology wouldn’t impose regulations that necessitate healthy levels of gene diversity when removing disorders that are known to have positive protective effects.
Based
Of course I agree with your ethical stance here and have no objection to gene editing in principle but I wanted to point out that embryo screening in IVF as practiced by Herasight is more promising than gene editing. Most things we care about (intelligence, risks for diseases other than monogenic “genetic diseases”) are highly polygenic. So editing is very inefficient and could have lots of side effects because we don’t know what each gene does. Screening is way safer and more practical.