I.
Alicorn has recently written Have Mercy, an essay about eugenics, and I have certain confused thoughts about it.
II.
I suppose it’s good to be upfront about such things: my true rejection of eugenics is that eugenics of certain traits I possess make me very very sad.
I would like people to continue to have the genetic difference that leads to borderline personality disorder. This is not precisely the same thing as the continued existence of borderline personality disorder, because BPD is a product of both genetics and environment. I would prefer children not be raised in traumatizing or invalidating environments in general, and protoborderline children be taught emotion regulation skills in specific, which would result in a decrease in BPD diagnoses.
Assuming that the gender system continues to exist, I would prefer that trans people continue to exist.
I would prefer that autism and the broader autism phenotype continue to exist.
I would also prefer that high verbal intelligence continues to exist, but people seem much less likely to do eugenics on that one.
I don’t actually have a good grounding for why other people ought to want those particular traits to exist, and it’s possible those are just mistaken moral intuitions that I need to get rid of. But pretty much all my thoughts on eugenics are exploring why I believe those things.
III.
Alicorn writes:
I don’t think anyone would criticize the Longs for not supplying their firstborn with twenty younger siblings. Nobody, except maybe the Quiverfull types, thinks that people have to have as many kids as they can squeeze out. But once they have decided to have one at all, some people may get very defensive of Lyle’s right to exist, even though they’d never make a peep about Greta Long, Hypothetical Sibling #19, no matter what list of conditions I assigned her. (Whether those conditions began with “cerebral palsy” or “sufficient genius to solve the problems involved in premature silicization when she grows up”. Or both.)
But I don’t think this is necessarily a counterargument to being against eugenics.
I would like trans people to continue to exist. If it turned out that trans people exist because there is fluoride in the water supply, I would like there to continue to be fluoride in the water supply. This does not require me to be against water purification plants, or in favor of putting the maximum possible number of substances in the water supply.
In our world, transness is (plausibly) genetic, so to want trans people to continue existing is to want mothers to give birth to trans people. But that doesn’t commit me to a Quiverfull position, any more than my pro-trans-causing-fluoride position commits me to an anti-water-purification-plant position.
IV.
I am not certain how I feel about statistical cuckooing.
I am (probably) pro-choice both ethically and legally. Even if I weren’t, women can reduce their risk of having a child with Down Syndrome by having children early, and that seems a bit difficult to ban. (“Excuse me, ma’am, you are having children age 25 without a license.”) So we can rule out legal interventions.
On the other hand, both Alicorn and I are in favor of cute PSAs about why you should not abort your child with Down Syndrome and increased supports for parents of disabled children and so on, so that is a point of agreement. Mothers often justify their decision to abort children with Down Syndrome with a combination of concern for the child and desire not to have a disabled child; if we point out to them that their concern for the child is misplaced (children with Down Syndrome have good lives!), more mothers will probably want to have children with Down Syndrome. Even if you fully agree that parents should not have to have children with traits they don’t want, there are many people who would want children with Down Syndrome if it were explained to them properly.
(I count myself in this group. If I had a child with Down Syndrome, I would not abort it.)
But there is this entire squishy middle bit of anti-eugenics: neither the gentle anti-coerciveness of “did you know that your Down Syndrome child can still give you hugs? It is true!” nor the outright use of state violence to prevent eugenics.
For instance: right now, screening for Down Syndrome is opt-out: you will receive screening unless you specifically state you don’t want it. Changing things from opt-out to opt-in can cause major changes in behavior (c.f. opt-out organ donation). People like Alicorn who are very motivated to not have children with Down Syndrome would still not have those children, whereas people who are only somewhat motivated could still do so. I would be broadly in favor of this change. Similarly, right now doctors tend to assume that their patients will want to abort children who have Down Syndrome; if doctors instead defaulted to assuming that parents didn’t want to abort children with Down Syndrome, that might also reduce abortion rates.
There’s also the issue of how many resources should be directed towards prenatal screenings versus… not prenatal screenings. Since it’s April, autism is the fairly obvious example: one of the major critiques of Autism Speaks is that they direct much of their research funding towards finding a prenatal test for autism. ASAN, on the other hand, supports directing research funding towards “communication and assistive technology, best practices in providing services and supports, and educational methodologies.” (Incidentally, that shows how silly critiques that ASAN only cares about high-functioning autistics are. Communication technology is only of interest to autistics who, at least sometimes, can’t speak.) Given that resources are limited, any money spent developing prenatal tests is money spent not doing something else; for what conditions is that a useful way to spend money? I would argue: not autism. (Given that Alicorn is against Autism Speaks, I suspect she would also consider a prenatal test to be a poor way to allocate autism research funding.)
And finally there’s my statement that it is immoral to abort children with Down Syndrome. I think that is the primary difference between Alicorn and me, the major reason she is pro-eugenicist and I am anti-eugenicist. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I am opposed to Alicorn in particular aborting a child with Down Syndrome. I am on the record as considering hypocrisy to be an important part of any ethical system, and have a history of e.g. talking people with eating disorders out of becoming vegan. The most important thing is sustainability, staying alive, not burning out on morality; and if you’d be a shitty parent to a child with Down Syndrome, making both yourself and your child miserable, perhaps it would be best to abort.
But I do not think that this statement is the same thing as statistical cuckooing. My primary method of getting people to obey my ethical beliefs is convincing them to agree with me. If convincing people to agree with oneself is a violation of their Authentic Preferences written in a great book up in the sky, then we have bigger problems; similarly, if stating “this belief is unethical!” is coercive, then we also have bigger problems (including Alicorn’s totally unethical calling my anti-eugenics beliefs unethical).
V.
Many parents would probably not want a child with a high IQ. They want their children to be normal, not a “nerd”; they want their child to have interests that they can relate to. Alicorn’s position requires that one endorse those parents aborting children with above average IQs. Alicorn, to be fair, bites this bullet. But I’m not sure that most of the pro-eugenicists inclined to be sympathetic with an anti-statistical-cuckooing argument would.
VI.
My moral intuitions dislike eliminating all the trans people, but are 100% okay with eliminating all trans people who would prefer to be cis.
The problem here is that “would prefer to be cis” is not necessarily genetically coded for, so that’s a bit difficult to select for eugenically.
However, I notice that a lot of people seem to be broadly against being trans or autistic or deaf or whatever, and then they join the trans, autistic, or Deaf communities, and then they’re proud of being trans/autistic/Deaf and would not choose to be otherwise. This is usually called “unlearning internalized ableism” or “unlearning internalized transphobia” or whatever. This obviously isn’t the only factor involved– one notices the distinct lack of a Proud to Be Tay-Sachs community– but it does seem like one factor involved.
So plausibly I could keep the same kinds of trans experiences, but have a more “trans is awesome!” trans community, and then approximately everyone would be happy to be trans.
This seems like cheating.
Thing of Things 
As I understand it, transness is constituted by physical and/or social dysphoria, which is inherently unpleasant. According to many ethical systems, especially utilitarianism, not having a negative experience is better than having one, so it seems wrong to create a person who’d have a certain negative experience when you can prevent it and have a person without that experience.
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Unless there are compensating positives. Which there seem to be for many trans individuals. Though some trans people just deeply wish the were born cis (of the correct gender).
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What sorts of compensating positives are there that wouldn’t be present for someone who identifies strongly with their birth gender?
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Here is something Veronica Posted – “I like being trans. In fact — and although trans activists sometimes over-romanticize these facts — there have been cultures where trans people were respected for having a special kind of wisdom. Certainly in a gendered society, having a class of people who cross the divide is a fine thing.
Regarding the hardships of being trans, our medical techniques have advanced by enormous leaps, and no doubt they will continue to do so, enough that I would suspect, as a practical matter, by the time we can for certain say a fetus is trans, we should be able to give the resulting child a rich and full life as a trans person. We can nearly do that now.
Certainly the existence of puberty blockers frees a child from a highly dysphoric puberty. Likewise the rise of trans awareness may save many children from a life of confusion — in a society where our tests can say for certain that this fetus is trans, we can tell that child they have the brain features of being trans. Forewarned is forearmed. Exploring a trans gender in a world free from hate would be amazing. It would be a life to envy.
Furthermore, bodily dysphoria exists by degrees. I experience bodily dysphoria, but frankly my HRT has more or less eliminated the pain. I *love* my trans body.
There are a few more changes I might someday make, but they are easily in reach.
In some bright future, were we understand better what makes a trans brain, and where we can bring undeniable science to the debate with bigots, unlike now where we bring speculative science, then there is no reason for a trans life to involve any particular amount of suffering.”
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I don’t know, none of those really look like things that are more likely to be seen in trans people.
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HRT looks a whole lot nicer when it’s in pill form, and when you haven’t already had a cancer scare as a result.
I like my body. I’m glad I’m alive. I even have a certain level of pride in what I bring to the world as a trans person. I will, however, never accept that what I have had to do to my body – and continue doing to it for the rest of my life – is a price that can just be waved aside.
I don’t want to kill all trans people. I don’t even want to eliminate gender variance – that is, the experience of having a gender outside what one is assigned at birth. But physical dysphoria, the kind you couldn’t fix even if every single person and institution in existence smothered you with love? That can go throw itself on the rubbish bin of medical history along with smallpox.
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@ stargirlprincess
How’s that position different from making all babies cis + general gender abolitionism? That is, no one hates their body (but it’s achieved by embryo selection rather than by suppressing puberty + HRT + SRS + whoknowswhat), and they can chose whatever type of expression they want, because there’s no social pressure and early conditioning to adhere to something particular anymore.
Having trans people being born in the era where we have far more advanced medical science, and we’ll finally be able to discover what it actually is – that’s an appealing argument from the position of science. This can really be helpful, since in most of the cases neuroscience advances by observing atypical cases, and we’ll surely learn more even about gender in cis people by studying trans people. However, the position “let’s make such-and-such babies so that we can do science with them” is so incredibly Mengele-ish, that it’s even more Mengele-ish that just eugenics. I’m not saying that it’s wrong because of that, but it doesn’t fit to the standard pro-eugenics / anti-eugenics spectrum, and the author has to defend it as something distinct, and defending it doesn’t really give strength to either of the ends of the spectrum, really. Besides, “let’s do science so that we could say `take that, bigots'” is a terrible reason to do science. Especially morally questionable science.
Finally, basing ethical arguments on speculative science has a very obvious failure mode. What if we discover that gender identity is defined by prenatal development rather than genetics per se, and the whole eugenics thing boils down to “take this cortisol tablet at 12th week to ensure that the baby is cis, or norepinephrine to ensure that they’re tans”? What if we discover that it’s governed by the same mechanism as sexual orientation – so much for the orthogonal axes? What if we discover that there is in fact male and female brain, and a small subset of binary trans people does in fact have brains corresponding to their gender, and for everyone else it’s the result of socialization? Yikes. If we can make ethical arguments that don’t rely on none of these being ever proved true, we’d better to so.
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@ ninecarpals
I agree, and this is usually the position that I share and defend, but to be fair, we cannot know for sure that physical dysphoria wouldn’t go away if every single person and institution in existence have been smothering you with love and gender-neutral upbringing your whole life. If Scott’s argument about brain-body maping is correct, then it would not. However, a lot of cases of body dysmorphic disorder or anorexia are very clearly socially conditioned. It doesn’t make them any easier to treat, and sometimes the best thing to do with BDD is aesthetic surgery, but odd are that if those people weren’t socially conditioned in the first place, they wouldn’t have developed it. Likewise, it’s not unthinkable that sexual physical dysphoria could be caused by social dysphoria combined with an incredibly strong association between sex and gender. And by strong I mean strong. I remember reading a book by a psychiatrist which claimed that toddler have been shown to react alarmed to men (but not women) wearing lipstick at the age of two, before they can talk in sentences. And there are no genderless societies on this planet, so we don’t have any control group to conclusively say that no, even without gender, physical dysphoria is still a thing. I’m not inclined to believe that, and it’s not my working hypothesis, but I cannot rule it out completely either.
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Well, sure. But then, should we abort any baby who has a significant chance (50% or higher) of developing arthritis in the knees at age 25?
I’ll say flatly, *for me*, bodily dysphoria was not a big deal. In fact, I didn’t even realize what it was until it was gone. I mean, it caused me anxiety and distress, but those were the background radiation to my life. Only after I began HRT did I realize, “Oh, I can like how I feel living in this body. I can like my reflection in the mirror. I can like the feel of my own skin.” With HRT, a calmness came, a sense of rightness.
And then there are the sexual changes. Like, “Oh, I can be *present* during sex, instead of dissociated.” This part is really nice.
My problem was not primarily bodily dysphoria, given that medical intervention was plenty to give me an amazing life. My body is awesome.
My main regret: I waited to long. The reason for that: social gender bullshit.
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As an aside, I wonder if being trans is particularly worse than being short or being skinny or any number of physical factors that shape one’s life. Furthermore, I wonder this: do we really want to eliminate all such things? Should every life be a full blank slate?
Queer utopia say yes, at least some version of queer utopia. But to me that sounds implausible, one of those social fantasies that are so distant from “human” that saying “people in queer utopia” is much like saying “square circle.” Yes you can form the words, think the thought, but there is no sufficiently detailed coherent model of the thing.
A person who grows up among mountains will grow up climbing mountains. A person who grows up among lakes will know how to swim. Our birth circumstances, their full measure, geography, location, parents, and so on, shape the paths we have available. We can lessen this, mitigate against the worst injustice, but I would hesitate to suggest we could eliminate it.
Trans-ness will shape one’s life. There has never been a culture where being trans was *unmarked*. I’m not sure if there could be, unless we entirely get rid of gender, at which point we could more easily get rid of transphobia. That’s a level of transhumanism where “all bet’s are off,” as it is so profoundly different from what we know.
(Plus, don’t be surprised if people reinvent gender. You think you can social hack to the finest degree, but you probably cannot.)
We should speak of trans people in the here and now. We are winning in the war of public opinion. Slowly. But it is happening. The kids today face a level of openness and opportunity unimaginable to my generation. It’s amazing to see. I expect it will get better.
Yes, a backlash exists. But I never wanted a boring life. What does a life of zero conflict look like?
I’m pretty sure we would reinvent conflict, just to keep from being bored.
#####
Keep in mind in this conversation, no one is going to put *you* in charge, so this will play out the way human things play out, with mistakes, missteps, and all the normal social conflict. We will muddle through (or not), but your pristine social perfection is not available. There will be suffering. Entropy will win.
Trans-ness is actually a really cool way to face this battle. I’m glad I exist.
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There seem? to be some people who don’t identify with the gender associated with their birth phenotype who don’t experience body dysphoria. Also, if a problem is “people do stuff that makes other people unhappy”, which is what social dysphoria seems? to be, “stop people from being unhappy about that stuff” is *a* solution but is not the *only* solution.
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The problem is that people treating others as having the gender associated with their body type isn’t something that’s going away unless gender is abolished altogether, and even that much non-malicious misgendering can trigger social dysphoria.
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I think, on net, allowing genetic “tweaking” is going to improve humanity’s collective experience. Even if many people are going to make mistakes. And there is a chance that humanity may lose valuable things we will not get back for a long time, if we ever get them back. It actually seems likely (to me) autism is, on net, deeply valuable to humanity but we might eliminate it with genetic tweaking. However the benefits of genetic testing, gene therapy, etc are huge. So I think genetic interventions should be encouraged even if there will be great costs for humanity to bear.
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Regarding getting autism back: there are people who took the LW survey who claim to be autistic and signed up for cryonics, so even if cryonics doesn’t work out there should be some autistic genetic samples and scannable brains around if people change their minds about wanting autistic people. Also, the AUT10K database could be useful if autism was eradicated.
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However, there is no such thing as humanity; or at least, “humanity-in-general.” Only individual human beings, with real joys and real sufferings. Remember that the replacement of concrete personal experience with abstract, fuzzy notions of “universal progress and emancipation” is the oldest trick in the book.
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Yes the welfare of humanity is an aggregation of the welfare of each individual. However the group’s welfare is not always maximized by maximizing the individual welfare’s of the component individuals. Its possible having trans individuals raises the average welfare quite alot due to the value of their experiences. But that the average welfare of a trans person is lower than the average for a cis person.
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My problem with “look at all these happy, eudaimonic people with X” is that it seems to focus on the possible rather than the probable. That Down Syndrome video used the word “can” quite a bit. I don’t want to know if my child “can” be happy, I want to know how likely they are to be happy, and how much sacrifice that will take. You can invoke the social model to make a point about how people’s struggles are mostly due to the way society is structured, but that won’t make society go away. If my kid is going to be bullied for being left handed, I don’t want him to be born left handed. Similarly, it might be the case that adding more left-handed desks would make things easier, but if I happen to exist in a world with only right-handed desks, then I don’t want to add that extra bit of a struggle.
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I mean, you can make that argument for virtually anything societally disadvantaged. I’m well aware there are people here who would have no problems with the idea of applying the same concepts to race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., but it seems an odd vision of the future, with us all racing to homogenize our future children as fast as possible as we collectively write our social inequality into our genetic code. I’m not convinced that would lead us to a better world.
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When I was still capable of pregnancy, I gave a lot of excuses to inquirers who wanted to know why I didn’t plan on having kids. “I don’t like kids” was the easiest one; when I came out as trans the questions even stopped, because it’s just assumed that as a man I wouldn’t want to be pregnant. But the truth is – and I have never said this aloud before, or typed it, or communicated it in any fashion – that I am deathly afraid of having a severely autistic child, or one with a comparable disability that impairs my ability to communicate with them and their ability to live independently.
I flat-out cannot cope with that. A child with the mental impairments that often come with Down’s would wreck me, too. I know this because, from the time when I was a child onward, I have had extreme difficulties even being in the same space as someone with these disabilities. All the attempts to teach me love and tolerance taught me both, to be clear – I don’t hate anyone, or think that anyone should die or stop being who they are in order to accommodate my neuroticism, or even that my neuroticism is in any way a positive thing. But in the end, I just can’t function around people who communicate differently than I do. (It’s enough of a problem that even non-native English speakers with strong accents throw me off.)
Confessing this feels as taboo as my determination to never date someone with an insufficiently managed mental illness again, but experience has taught me that both situations are very bad for me and for everyone else involved. Perhaps me not having children or dating is an acceptable sacrifice since I’m drawing limits that may be painful for members of the communities I’m excluding, but potential parents who really can’t cope with certain kinds of children need to be factored into eugenics equations, and not just the mealy well-they-don’t-have-the-money way.
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If you have difficulties being in the same space as people with significant disabilities, not having kids strikes me as the right – frankly, the only ethical – way to go. I do hope you get over that though, independent of your potential to have kids. It strikes me as a rather unpleasant way to go through life, if being in the same room or house or other setting with someone with Down Syndrome, TBI or an intellectual disability (or a heavy accent) makes you that uncomfortable. I can’t imagine that it would be pleasant for people around you either, if someone being disabled in public causes you such anxiety. One would hope that as school inclusion becomes more common, future generations will get over those prejudices.
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It’s certainly not fun, no, and like I said, I don’t think it should be extended to other people. However (and this is just for clarification), I don’t know that calling it a prejudice is the best description – while it is, literally, a ‘pre-judgement’, I recognize that it comes from my own social difficulties, and I don’t shift that responsibility onto the people I have trouble being around. I have issues, and my life would be more pleasant if I didn’t have those issues, but that’s not anyone else’s problem, and I’m not about to ask anyone to accommodate me (except perhaps by letting me avoid certain situations that wouldn’t be good for me or them).
I’m not convinced that me not having kids is the only ethical solution here, though. I’m sure many parents would draw a different line somewhere, and which ones they’d be okay with would depend more on their own preferences than a consistent ethical principle. Personally, I would like to have children in my life at some point, and “tweaking” would allow me to do that. (So would adoption, to be fair, which is the more likely path, since it doesn’t involve a significant amount of medical progress.)
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@ninecarpals I’m not sure I follow your argument that it’s not a prejudice. You don’t want to be around people with significant disabilities – and while I take you at your word that you acknowledge that that’s not a rational or valid preference and that it would be unjust to ask anyone else to modify their behavior by not inviting disabled people to events or allowing for full participation, it’s still a prejudice. It just isn’t one that you act on. I’m glad you don’t. But lots of people have prejudices that they acknowledge as irrational and endeavor to avoid leading to conscious acts of discrimination – they’re still prejudices. I’m not sure I understand the distinction between ‘prejudice’ and ‘pre-judgement’ you’re trying to make.
What if the child you adopt/genetically tweak acquires a disability later in life? Or has one that medical science doesn’t detect? “Surprise, you have a disabled kid!” is a possibility that any parent should be ready for. What are you going to do – take them back?
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@Lion
I’m only drawing a distinction between my issues and prejudice because of the connotations prejudice carries around who the prejudiced person believes is to blame. While that may not be denotationally true, I still don’t think it’s the optimal word to use here. That’s not a hill I want to die on by any means – if you think the word prejudiced fits what I’m trying to communicate, then I’m fine with that.
To give a related example, my GM for a roleplaying game I’m in is unwilling to play out sexually intimate gay relationships, even though he’ll go further with straight ones. He apologized to me about it profusely before we started playing, assuring me that it was his mental block, he has no problems with gay people, he’ll write gay romances, etc.
I think he expected me to be angry with him, since I’m bisexual and play mostly gay and bi characters, but I just gave the chat version of a shrug and told him that we’ve all got our limits, and as long as we recognize that they’re our own problems, I don’t see any point in getting upset about it. He meant every word of what he said, and I can compromise.
Personally, I wouldn’t call him prejudiced against gay people, again because of what the word connotes.
Regarding future disabilities, I know there’s nothing I can do to control that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to minimize the chances of a child having a particular disability. Moreover, if you’ve seen any of my posts here on disability before, you’ll find that the possibility of me (or my child, or anyone else) developing a disability later in life is one of the reasons I’m so vehemently pro-cure/treatment research.
Still, there’s a level of risk I would be willing to take. Most children do not end up brain damaged after birth; eliminating the prenatal conditions that are likely to cause me distress in a child is good enough for me to feel safe having a kid.
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I actually think there’s a pretty strong argument to be made for having a conception of prejudice that includes prejudices that are neither conscious nor exactly blame-worthy. They’re certainly people’s responsibility to try and change and to prevent from causing harm to others, but given the role that society plays in reinforcing all kinds of unconscious bias, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to conceptualize prejudice as something that only encompasses intentional acts. This article seems enlightening in that regard: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice
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This post read as quite creepy to me. Or at least shows a disturbing lack of sympathy for people like nine.
“One would hope that as school inclusion becomes more common, future generations will get over those prejudices.”
This sounds to me like: People like you (nine), who already tried quite hard to get over these problems, will be subjected to more experiences that hurt you. In the hope that you will “get over” these problems.
Not everybody can “get over” everything. It seems pretty plausible that nine’s brain has trouble dealing with people he cannot communicate with. This is obviously sub-optimal but everybody is sub-optimal in some ways.
*Also school inclusion for people with down’s syndrome has gigantic costs. And it is going to create a ton of tension between people with down’s and those without. Alot of people are going to blame the down’s community for ruining their children’s education.
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I’m reasonably certain that we don’t try to include children with disabilities in school so that we can hurt people who are uncomfortable being around people with disabilities. We do it because, you know, disabled kids should have the same chance to go to school as non-disabled kids.
Nine seems to be well aware that their difficulty being in the same room as disabled people isn’t a legitimate preference that should be accommodated by others. I respect their recognition that that’s their problem to deal with. Yes, people should try and get over their irrational prejudices against other human beings. If they can’t do it – which is often the case – they should take steps to mitigate the degree those prejudices cause harm to others. That seems straightforward to me. People being creeped out by disabled kids being in their neighborhood school isn’t a good reason not to have disabled kids at their neighborhood schools.
We see similar conversations at every effort around integration, disability focused and otherwise. That was certainly a common complaint about de-institutionalization for example (“I don’t want to live next to those people”). In terms of the actual quality of education, yes, a lot of people will blame the disability community for ‘ruining their children’s education’. They do that now – there are plenty of parents who go to school boards and talk about how students with disabilities being in the same classroom or districts spending money on special education is an unreasonable burden on students without disabilities*.
The claim, however, doesn’t make it accurate. Properly designed inclusive education tends to lead to better outcomes for both students with and without disabilities. A classroom that has a better teacher student ratio or that communicates content through multiple modalities (a la Universal Design for Learning) in order to facilitate the inclusion of a child with a disability is a classroom that has improved learning for all students. There’s a role for individualization, and some students (with and without disabilities) are going to benefit from pullout instructions for a portion of the day to focus on a topic they have particular challenges with or particular skill with. But using inclusion as the starting point makes it more likely that the diverse needs of all students will be acknowledged.
*This is a particularly common thing in the Gifted Education parent community, which seems to have developed a subculture of parents who loathe special education and are jealous of funding allocated to it as well as a different subculture of parents who have children who are both gifted and disabled and look for opportunities for both systems to learn from each other. I find the contrast in approaches fascinating.
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I think we should separate the issue of not wanting to be even in the same room as people with certain disabilities vs. not wanting to have your own children have certain disabilities.
The former is a prejudice, the latter I think is reasonable. The fact is, if a relatively neurotypical person had a child with extreme autism, or severe intellectual disabilities, as examples, there is a high probability that they as a parent are on the hook for caring for that person for the rest of their life. Even just focusing on the childhood years, the demands will be higher than on a parent of an NT child. Not only that, but they will even have difficulty communicating with and relating to their own child (and the child to them). These difficulties seem to me to be inherent: they would be present even in an idealized society.
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Side discussion:
If I could tweak, I would make my kid bisexual, no questions asked, because it seems like the optimal choice to me. Why would you restrict their sexuality based on gender? You’re just denying them options!
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A society in which everyone is bisexual is strictly better than one in which only some people are, but it’s not obvious that being bisexual in current society is necessarily better (though it sometimes is). A bisexual is more likely to experience unrequited attraction than a heterosexual is, and more likely to suffer from homophobia.
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The unrequited love thing really sucks for me :(. Or it has in the past, the current person I love alot loves me too!
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Will it make you feel any better about it if eugenics will also drive allistics extinct?
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To be clear, I’m not talking about the extinction of humanity; I’m talking about the possibility that the dominant phenotype in the future will bear little resemblance to either autistics or allistics in the variables that distinguish the two.
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So, If a world without autistic, trans, Down’s, etc. people should not be intervened in to produce a world without aforementioned, does that imply that a world without such people should be intervened in to produce one that is? (Extension for those willing to bite bullet: what are the neurodivergences missing in this world that need adding?)
Hypothesis: ‘xyz-Pride’ is, really, to a certain extent, a codeword for ‘xyz-solidarity’ + lack of ‘xyz-shame’.
[/really bloody confused and equally curious]
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Hypothesis: ‘xyz-Pride’ is, really, to a certain extent, a codeword for ‘xyz-solidarity’ + lack of ‘xyz-shame’.
Sometimes. Compare “black pride” and “white pride.” Sometimes pride means “we are no less worthy than others,” and sometimes pride means “we are more worthy than others.”
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I think a lot of it is “we are worthy enough to live together under *this named identity*, which the white pride assholes share with their more virtuous repressed-group-pride bretheren. Most white people are fairly deracinated, yet must suffer the (somewhat deserved) naming and abuse of their race by the people their fathers wronged.
Of course, there are *also* the supremacists.
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Of course I think that various neurodivergences should be made to exist. I’m a bloody transhumanist. I can’t begin to understand the wideness of mindspace and I’m excited that we’re going to begin exploring it.
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Arguments about aborting Down syndrome fetuses are complicated by Down syndrome causing a lot of non-mental health problems. Someone might be against eliminating intellectual disability, but in favor of eliminating Down syndrome because of that.
My intuitions about this sort of thing are weird because I don’t assign positive value to creating any person (well, beyond any benefits their existence provides to others). I’m conflicted over going full anti-natalist and saying having children is always bad unless instrumentally justified by effects on others.
I think having autistic people around is probably good and has minimal costs in accommodation. And frankly the world would be a better place with more “high functioning” autistic people around (who would probably be taken out along with the “low functioning” people in a a eugenics campaign). But the idea of no more autistic people being created does not seem to bother me the way it does a lot of other autistic people*. My biggest concerns with Autism Speaks is a) depersonalization** of autistic people, b) promoting traumatic treatment and c), most disturbingly, that they could develop a “cure” for existing people. Which I view as in many cases equivalent to killing the person (I’ve decided that that is an appropriate comparison even for young children- Ampersand, children do seem to have some set personality traits from early on and besides, just because someone doesn’t have long to live doesn’t mean it’s OK to kill them).
I do agree in general with the “diversity is fun” objection to free-market eugenics.
*If it wasn’t clear, I am autistic.
**Can’t go around using human as a synonym for mattering when if things go as hoped/planned you will be an upload in the distant future (am no longer “copying is not immortality” person. I think)
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I’m autistic, I want a cure, and I don’t see it as overwriting myself.
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That’s OK. I should have been more clear- my specific concern is that a “cure” will be found and that parents will force it on their children.
I’m generally in favor of letting people do what they want to themselves, provided they understand the results and it is a permanent desire rather than a temporary lapse
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I think what divides opinions about autism “cures” is what traits people consider to be “part” of autism. For instance, I usually think of my intellectualism and emotional self-sufficiency as “part” of my autism, and worry that a cure would get rid of those valuable traits. But if you only considered the unpleasant, egodystonic traits (i.e. sensory issues, difficulty reading people) you have to be “parts” of autism, you’d obviously want a “cure.”
If this is the case we don’t disagree about anything important. We just disagree about which of our traits are “autism” and which aren’t.
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Yes. Similarly, whether I want a cure for borderline personality disorder depends a lot on whether, by “borderline personality disorder”, you mean strong, dramatic emotions, or the impulse to attempt suicide every time I break a glass.
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I actually find this a little bit *creepy*, honestly.
Am not going to be the asshole who is like “you’re being PROUD about being WEAK”, that’s ridiculous and disrespectful in the extreme. But I feel like… people who do this… It seems to me like they kind of got used. Partly by themselves. If you screw up your pride and worthiness against being forced to alter something in a way that doesn’t meet your preferences, and then make a community that reinforces that with the nationalistic instinct, I think that the instinct can steal away your ability to act in your interest?
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I think that your objections make a lot of sense, if we lived in a world where people could alter the parts of themselves that they don’t like. I kinda agree that whatever communities and unlearning whateverphobia isn’t the perfect solution for forever, but it might be in the top 10% of solutions for the time we currently live in.
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I think communities and unlearning whaterverphobia are great.
I just think that the *particular form* of the communities in late-democratic, identity-politics world starts to clash.
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I don’t know if I’m “proud” to be trans. I mean, not exactly that. However, I suspect that I am feeling the same thing that people who say that do.
This stuff is hard to talk about. We don’t have a lot of good words for it, so we kinda have to muddle through. Also keep in mind that not everyone is verbally adept.
I would say I am proud of who I am, what I have achieved, and that my trans-ness is a big part of that. It is a core part of me. Non-trans veronica is no veronica at all, whereas I can imagine a veronica who was a bit thinner or a veronica who joined the Navy when she was young.
(I do well on standardized tests. The military wanted me *bad*, to which I said no. And thank goodness. Being trans in the military seems pretty hellish.)
Anyway, we can look at trans-ness as the journey I took. A person can be proud to have climbed a mountain. They can value greatly the perspective it has given them. They can feel fortunate that the challenge was there, that it gave them opportunities that not everyone gets. Or they might simply say, “The path I took was a good path, and I am proud to have walked it, to have made the choices I made. I am admirable.”
My path was a trans path. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
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I like this and completely agree with it.
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To think more clearly about the issue of eugenics, we should divide the kinds of traits we are considering “tweaking” into “ability” traits and “preference” traits. Ability traits affect your ability to do things, preference traits affect the things you want to do.
Many people seem to disagree with me, but I think it is morally unproblematic to use genetic engineering to tweak “ability” traits so that people are born with the ability to do more things. Doing things you want is good, the more the better!
By contrast, I think tweaking “preference” traits is much more morally problematic. It seems like I assign value to there being a diverse variety of people, both because of the enjoyment diversity brings people, and in some sort of abstract, impersonal sense.
The value of living in a society where people have lots of different preferences and life-goals seems obvious to me. It creates interesting diversity, and allows us to enjoy our differences. But it seems extremely perverse to me to consider “ability” traits to be a valuable part of diversity. You’re essentially saying “Look at all these people who want to do things, but can’t. They provide a nice contrast to all the people who can do stuff. It’s diversity! Let’s enjoy our differences in our abilities to achieve our life-goals.”
Where it really becomes complicated is when certain ability and preference traits are “package deals,” where it is not possible with current technology to get a certain type of preference set without an accompanying set of disabilities. It seems like Ozy believes BPD and autism to be examples of these “package deals.” If they are right, then there may be some justification to their fears that eugenics might decrease diversity.
For the issue of “package deals and diversity,” it seems like a fairly straight consequentialist calculation. Does the diversity the “package deal” person provides outweigh the negative externalities their disabilities inflict on their parents and society (plus any disvalue you might assign to creating an less happy person than it is possible to)?
———–
Other issues:
1. Is transgenderism an “ability” trait, a “preference” trait, or a “package deal.” My current understanding is that in most cases it is an “ability” trait. Transgender people want to have a body that matches their internal map of it, and they want society to recognize them as a certain gender. Both of these could easily be solved by using eugenics to make sure that every new baby brain that is created gets a baby body that matches the body it wants to have and the gender it wants to be seen as.
Imagine we live in a world where baby brains and bodies grow separately, and multiple bodies are grown for each brain. When the time comes to merge the brain an bodies, somebody says “This brain will probably have boobs and a vagina on its internal map, but I’m gonna stick it in a body with a penis. That way we can have more diversity!” That person sounds like a huge jerk to me.
However, it has come to my attention that there are some transgender people who want to have a body/gender that does not exist naturally (I think Ozy is one of these people). For these people transgenderism is a “package deal,” rather than an “ability” trait, at least until eugenics gets advanced enough to whip up some really awesome bodies.
2. In regards to Part V, I think most people assign moral value to creating a more well-off child over a less well-off one, all other things being equal. Choosing to create a less-well off child is considered a similar sin to making an existing child less well-off. I generally hold this view when diversity is held equal (in other words, both possible children would have similar preferences), but am less sure under circumstances where it isn’t (i.e. the potential children have very different possible preferences).
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It seems like that the general position of anti-ableism community is that all (dis)abilities, short of untreatable chronic pain, are package deals, even when the disability is acquired. That strikes me as both sour grapes and status quo biases, but here is the thing – if they really manage to alter one’s preferences, are they biases at all?
There’s also an argument for ability diversity from total vs average utilitarianism perspective. A lot of disabilities can be either innate or acquired, and the very fact that you need to do eugenics means that there’s no easy, cheap, and perfectly efficient treatment for it once it’s there. Eugenics won’t be 100% efficient, and some people will acquire the disability over the course of their life. Thus, there’s gonna be people like that anyway. Typical cases are always better accommodated for than atypical cases. You may apply a lot of effort working against the natural direction of economic and societal forces, and improve that hugely (seriously hugely – every single US city I’ve been to is orders of magnitude more wheelchair-friendly than Moscow), but that won’t be perfect. And whether something is a disability/disadvantage or not really depends on the baseline. If it was expected from every child to own and be able to pilot a drone, then kids in a park would maybe be playing quidditch instead of soccer, and those who can pilot a drone would feel wronged. On the other hand, wheelchair users would blend right in, since piloting a drone is orthogonal to walking ability, which is not the case for playing football. Thus, if you’re optimizing for average utility, and you know that you’re gonna have a certain group of atypical people anyway, you may want there to be more of them, so that even though their quality of life isn’t as high as that of the others, it won’t be as bad as it would have been if they were a smaller minority.
>Choosing to create a less-well off child is considered a similar sin to making an existing child less well-off.
Actually, that doesn’t seem to the case. This isn’t terribly rational, but most people would say that there’s a huge difference between the following:
1. Refusing to do embryo selection / genetic screening for hearing ability.
2. Refusing to give a deaf newborn a CI.
3. Doing embryo selection / genetic screening for deafness.
4. Imposing permanent hearing damage on a hearing newborn (even if it’s painless).
My mental model of the average Joe says that:
1 is perfectly normal, what’s so strange about it?
2 is “well, you should have done otherwise, that’s not good good for the kid, although you’re the parent, so you decide.”
3 is “those damn SJWs are nuts, this world is damned, we really should mandate tests and licenses for having kids, so that people like that wouldn’t procreate.”
4 is ‘GO TO JAIL FOREVER YOU MONSTER I HOPE YOU’RE BEATEN UP BY OTHER PRISONERS EVERY DAY OMG OMG WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!”
This is regardless of the fact that from consequentialist perspective, 2, 3, and 4 are equivalent.
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>There’s also an argument for ability diversity from total vs average utilitarianism perspective.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that a large disabled population might be better than a small one because it would result in increased demand for accommodations. This means that instead of a small disabled population with awful lives (because of lack of accommodations) we instead would have a large population with okay lives (because accommodations exist). I have no objections to this argument in principle, though I don’t know if the utilitarian calculations would always add up on practice.
>Actually, that doesn’t seem to the case.
There are a few other famous philosophy cases indicating that many people seem to hold this belief, even if they apply it inconsistently. The classic example is Parfit’s thought experiment where a sick woman has a choice between conceiving a baby now, and have her illness injure it in utero, or waiting until she recovers to conceive a baby. Most people think she should wait, even though this means the baby she conceives will be a totally different person than the one she chose to forgo.
Also, most people use the increased odds of conceiving a disabled baby as an argument against the morality of incest. It’s possible that this is just a rationalization, and their true rejection is that incest squicks them out. But the fact that this is the rationalization that keeps popping up indicates most people take some stock in it.
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> I have no objections to this argument in principle, though I don’t know if the utilitarian calculations would always add up on practice.
I see this argument being made, though I don’t necessarily endorse it. I suppose, for it to be made efficiently, one has to place a very strong weight on the value of equality per se. It seems to be the case, judging by people’s reaction to the Utility Monsters and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (though I haven’t asked hardcore Republicans about their thoughts on that matter), that at least implicitly most people value equality to some extent, regardless of its impact on the total utility. Whether or not I do, I don’t know. There’s a very strong internalized social pressure for me to signal that I value equality, which is why I don’t trust myself on predicting whether I will actually adhere to it when doing so is irrelevant to signaling. I suppose though that I don’t, which is why I’m generally pro-eugenics and trying to offset for its drawbacks rather than not doing it at all.
>a sick woman has a choice between conceiving a baby now, and have her illness injure it in utero, or waiting until she recovers to conceive a baby. Most people think she should wait
But that only proves that most people believe conceiving a healthy child is better than conceiving an injured child – nothing about conceiving an injured child vs injuring a healthy newborn. There’s a huge loss aversion effect regarding people’s lives and health. Not taking it into account commits you to a position even stronger than Quiverfull – at any given moment, failing to strive to conceive a child at all costs is just as bad as infanticide. Oh, and failing to do it via IVF to increase the change of having twins is just as bad as giving birth to twins, and then killing one of them. Most people’s moral intuitions don’t work like that at all. Potential lives are fungible, while actual lives are not. For different people, the transition from a potential life to the actual life, and the subsequent loss aversion kicking in occurs at different times though. Most people are OK with taking pre-conception actions to prevent a birth of any child or a particular type of child (e.g. having children at young age to decrease the chance of Down Syndrome). For pro-lifers, obviously, aborting a fetus is just as bad as infanticide. Many pro-choice people, though, also regard abortion based on genetic screening to be as bad as infanticide based on diagnosis, but that seems to indicate that they don’t really internalize the position that fetuses aren’t people in ethical sense, rather than anything else.
> It’s possible that this is just a rationalization, and their true rejection is that incest squicks them out.
I’d say it’s almost certain that it’s a rationalization, since it pops up even when the couple displays no intent to have children. If the inability (merely a decreased probability, actually) to have (healthy) child is a good enough reason to condone relationships, homosexual and infertile heterosexual couples should be condoned too. Yet it’s by no mean uncommon to see people, who are supportive of homosexual relationships, but condone incest. It’s also possible that this argument is inherited from the time when the only acceptable form of relationship was marriage for the purpose of procreating, when, given the constraints, the argument at least made sense (and when there was no social services and accommodation for the disabled, and old people were universally dependent on their children, which provided a huge incentive to only have strong able-bodied children).
But then again, that only proves that people conceive healthier children, not that this preference is as strong as the preference to not injure newborns.
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As someone who is genderfluid, I think that I would prefer being cisgendered in today’s society to being genderfluid in today’s society a small amount. However, I would prefer to be genderfluid in a very pro-trans society orders of magnitude more than I would prefer to be cisgendered.
If this is true for the average transgender/genderqueer person (note the typical mind fallacy), than the only reason it would be better for us to figure out how to identify transness in the womb and selectively abort those fetuses is if it is orders of magnitude easier to do that than to make our society pro-trans.
I’d assign 98% probability that figuring out how to do trans eugenics (with some level of success) is not an order of magnitude easier than changing society to be more trans positive (with an equal amount of success).
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Couple of thoughts.
1. When you cay you wish neurodivergent people to continue to exist, do you mean over the course of your life (at least pre-cryonics, if you believe it can work) so that you have someone to empathize with, you wouldn’t feel alone, and you wouldn’t feel last of a kind, or actually indefinitely into the future? If it’s the former, then the wish is already granted. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll figure all the genetics of all atypical brains even in 50 years, and highly unlikely that short of FAI FOOM we’ll have the entire world population start going eugenics based on that even in 100 years. And even if do discover it tomorrow, there’s already babies born like this who are younger than you, so in any scenario you’re nearly guaranteed to not be the last one. If it’s the latter, I frankly don’t expect any kind of currently existing humans, typical or not, persist long past singularity. No matter what kind of nanomachinery we’ll have, a single piece of wetware is never gonna be as secure as a distributed cloud storage (citation: HJPEV (1991)). Thus, at some point, most humans, if not all, will very likely get uploaded, thus also getting the capability of arbitrary self-modification. At this point any conditions related to one’s body stop making sense (including being trans: when the only body you really have is an avatar or a remotely controlled (bio-)robotic thing, which can be switched or altered at any time, being trans or cis is literally no different from choosing a male of female character in an MMORPG), and neurodivergence only makes sense to the extent to which one refuses to modify their own (simulated) brain. And when one can get themselves a house-sized brain, and have the infinity of years to decide whether to try it, almost certainly everyone will. Does your values of what kinds of brains you’d like to see existing protract to such situation, or are they so much post-human that it doesn’t matter?
2. How would you feel about the eugenics that increase the prevalence of BPD and GID? It seems unlikely that random factors resulted in exactly the perfect prevalence of either of them (whatever this number is, anywhere from 0 to 100%). If you don’t feel like having less of them, do you feel like having more of them?
3. It seems like “having fluorine in water if that’s the cause of GID” is an analog of compulsory or at least very hardly opt-out eugenics (it’s not quite easy to get rid of fluorine intake when it’s everywhere). A better analog of voluntary eugenics “GID is caused by quinoa intake during pregnancy.” In this case there’s no central regulating body that decides what to do with it, but if you release this information, many women will cut down quinoa during pregnancy, to ensure that they don’t have trans kids. To prevent that from happening, you have to either withhold this discovery from public (= ban eugenics) or persuade women that it’s unethical to cut down quinoa during pregnancy (= PSAs against eugenics).
4. Regarding (VI), anecdotally, I’ve seen comments on reddit (i.e. they could well be trolling, and I have to way to check) by deaf people who personally felt bad about being deaf (for reasons including the inability to enjoy music and generally pleasant auditory experiences), tried joining deaf communities, and felt ostracized for not believing that the lack of hearing is just an alternative human experience, rather than something intrinsically unpleasant and worth fixing. Likewise on reddit, I’ve seen strong advocates for the position that being a wheelchair user is a perfectly normal human experience, and there’s no reason to want to regain mobility, who then admitted that this position is conditional on the fact that rehabilitation is a long, tedious, uncomfortable, and expensive process, which by no means guarantees success, rather than a wand movement, and saying a spell, after which they can stand up and walk. That makes me suspect that while anti-ableism community makes a lot of valid and important points about fighting discrimination, changing attitudes, raising awareness, and it correctly points out that usually happiness converges to the baseline no matter what, they also introduce a bit of sour grapes bias in saying that there’s no problem with disabilities at all. And now there’s a problem. For most people alive today, quite likely, there’s not gonna be a magic spell (e.g. medical nanorobots) that instantly fixes everything they’d like to fix with their body. Thus, if we don’t want people unnecessarily feel despair (and we don’t), we should be totally fine with that. On the other hand, if there’s an action that we can take right now to have less suffering and more happiness in the world of future (e.g. fund eugenics research), we’d have to accurately evaluate whether this action actually improves anything, or is completely useless. Thus, we need to figure out whether under the conditions of perfect accommodations but also with the possibility to change the condition with the ease of casting a magic spell, most autistic/trans people or those with disabilities would like to remain as such. To do so, we need to investigate as many first-hand accounts as possible, but this alone is not enough, since all humans are notoriously bad at predicting their own mental states, and are susceptible to all sorts of biases. This makes me suspect that “the only problem with being autistic/trans or having disabilities is internalized ableism/transphobia and the lack of accommodations” does not necessarily follow from “a lot people join trans/autism/disabilities communities and suddenly feel good about their condition.” After all, if I believe that feeling good about the biggest disability of all time – aging and being mortal – is almost if not entirely due to sour grapes bias, I should, in intellectual honesty, suspect that it could potentially apply to others too.
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The claim about opt-in vs opt-out organ donation is basically false. There is a difference on average, but it is small and probably not causal.
First, time series show that other factors are much more important than opt-in (top) vs opt-out (bottom). Italy and Spain made changes over the course of ten years that are about the size of the whole range of all other countries.
Second, virtually all countries really leave it up to next of kin, neither really opt-in nor opt-out. Opt-in has the advantage that if the person acted, the relatives are more likely to believe it is the real wish. It’s true that Austria and Belgium, the only only countries that really don’t let the next of kin choose, are at the top of the charts, just next to opt-in Ireland and America. But you shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from two countries.
Graph from Kieran Healy who says more.
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Dear fellow reader of Thing of Things,
Although Ozy’s post provides enough food for thought / discussion material on its own, I think you will also enjoy the essay Ozy is responding to and/or the short story it mentions.
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There is an argument for eugenics that you missed, but then made against it by coincidence, too.
You write that money spent on pre-natally testing kids for autism costs money that could be better spent elsewhere, but we could make the same argument for not allowing people with Down syndrome, severe schizophrenia, or heavy autism to live: if the net cost of a severe autist is higher than the benefit she brings to society, let alone when compared to a healthy person, we could say that pre-natal testing amd abortion is morally sound: all money spent on the severely disabled is then money not spent on feeding puppies or making babies smile.
FWIW, I’m a high-functioning autist myself. I just think that your argument of ‘we should spend money efficiently’ cuts both ways.
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One of my concerns (not a very original one) is that as our medical technology improves, we are able to compensate for more and more “defects” in humans, and therefore we have more and more humans with “defects”. This is a problem because it makes an increasing part of our resources are spent on healthcare, and because it makes us more fragile to “loss of medical technology”, either from kinds of societal collapse or at the individual level, becoming poor.
And the ideal compromise between “mankind on life support” and “bloody culling by natural selection” seems to be to maximize accommodation of current human defects, while at the same time trying to minimize future ones. I’m much more comfortable with a big chunk of my tax money supporting handicapped people if at the same time we are working to have less handicapped people in the future.
Figuring out which cases are “worth preventing” is not easy, and leaving it up to the parents to figure it out seems like a pretty reasonable way to solve that – if parents want to avoid having kids with Downs syndrome but don’t mind having left-handed children, then that’s the way it will be.
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Do you feel any reason to consider yourself anti-eugenicist other than being against elimination of Down’s, autism etc.? it seems that is less opposition to eugenics than opposition to most people’s defenition of good genes.
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But there’s always the preference reversal: should more people be trans (or, y’know, the other things)? If no, it’s highly suspicious that the status quo is the optimal level.
My opinion on that depends on some empiricism, technology and more, and I have a justification that I might end up posting on LessWrong eventually.
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I think it is a dynamic, non-convex fitness landscape, with intractable second-order (and higher) effects. In a sense, each person who enters a social space changes the contours of that space and changes what trans-ness should mean there. Plus being trans is in many ways value neutral. At least on its own. It’s values depends on the sex/gender matrix, which can be oppressive for cis people as well as trans, and thus is unstable. Furthermore, when making decisions regarding an unborn child, really you probably will never be able to say for sure if they will trans or not, nor how that trans-ness will play out in their life. At best you can estimate. So in addition to being non-convex and dynamic, this is stochastic optimization.
You might be able to make some broad estimate. For example, you might reach a good-faith conclusion that “more gender variance would be good, with 20% confidence” or “more trans men would be good, but not more non-binary people. The number of trans women is roughly within in order of magnitude correct. Confidence 15%.”
I doubt you’ll do much better than that. Show your work.
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I agree. What I meant is that I have a general justification for ‘diversity is good’ that you *might* be able to coax some quantitative numbers out of, at least in theory.
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Ozy hello!
Thank you for another thought-provoking post.
I have to admit that I feel very uncomfortable with your suggestion that aborting children with Down syndrome is unethical. As a father of a 5 year old, I feel that raising a single healthy child is by far hard enough. For me, the idea of raising a child with Down syndrome is outright *terrifying*. My wife Yulia and I are planning to have another child, and if the screening shows a Down syndrome I’m sure both of us will opt for abortion.
More generally, I think people should have the right to choose which kind of children they want to raise. I understand the value in diversity, but
1. Forcing people to raise children they don’t want is likely to make everyone miserable.
2. When you say something is “unethical” it sounds qualitatively different from say “suboptimal” (as in deontology vs. consequentialism). It sounds like something which you either want to ban by law or at least have a strong cultural norm against. Which in this case seems to strongly collide with the value of personal freedom. Also, would you say that the choice to not have any children at all is unethical?
Regarding transsexuality, I might be completely confused but don’t most trans people prefer to have been born cis of the opposite gender? I thought the whole “X in a Y body” rhetoric is exactly about that. Are people who prefer to be trans the exception or the rule?
The case of non-binary people seems more complicated and I understand it even less (which means hardly at all). I might be completely off track, but is it possible that most non-binary people would prefer to have been born with some kind of body which is neither male nor female? If so, this is a preference that can be satisfied using genetic engineering in the future.
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Honestly, the thing we need to do for this to be a good idea is to make there be a *lot* more funding and support for parents raising disabled children, before we try the anti-statistical-eugenics PSAs. Currently a lot of parents, on realizing their kid is, say, autistic, have to fight tooth and nail with agencies that are supposed to be helping them before they get even the bare minimum of services.
Similarly, I’ve heard of kids held back in kindergarten for being “socially slow”, despite being the correct age and intellectually capable of first grade, rather than, I dunno, being evaluated in case something’s at issue with their social development. (My preferred way of structuring/arranging school, which is also a solution to this and gifted kids having asynchronous development, is mixed-age mixed-ability Montessori-type classrooms. Or possibly unschooling, with the Montessori materials readily available and placed attractively.)
That time when Nebraska’s safe haven law briefly let parents drop off kids up to the age of 18, and a lot of kids with mental illnesses their parents simply couldn’t pay for or cope with were dropped off, is indicative of a huge gap here: I would be willing to bet that most of those parents were quite willing to raise their kids if the money, time, and effort required of them was not quite so massive. (I also think that at least some of those parents would become abusive instead if they weren’t able to support their disabled kids. I think that’s what happened in my childhood: my parents simply couldn’t cope with two out of three of their kids being autistic and thus eventually gave up on trying to do the positive parenting thing and fell back on terrorizing the kids because it was easier for them.)
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Reblogged this on The Ratliff Notepad.
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