My sense is that objections to gene editing on the basis that it constitutes eugenics mostly do not represent people's deepest sentiments and commitments. There's a much more complex bundle of fears here, and eugenics is just a good grab bag term to express a fear at a kind of dystopian ick.
You start to get a sense after a while online that sometimes the issues people choose to bang the war drums about don't represent their real and deepest commitments, just trenches and hills they think are nicely defensible in terms of the Twitter culture war. The real ideas are below the surface, and often only implicitly mentally articulated.
Why does it matter? Because I think as genetic engineering starts to become a reality, the vague concerns about eugenics will melt away and we'll see much more specific discussions- e.g. about:
1. The rich poor gap expanding as the rich increase their human capital.
2. The possibility of value lock-in through gene choice- e.g. making our kids good little capitalists so they can compete in capitalism and inadvertently shaping the future- potentially in harmful ways.
3. The dangers of people choosing genes to enable their children to compete rather than genes for the common good, or even genes for their children's happiness. The genes that make your kid look at marketing statistics all day or optimise algorithmic trading may not be the genes that increase society's flourishing- or even their own.
4. People exercising far more control over their children through the deliberate shaping of their genetic endowment. This could manifest as people trying to 'copy' their values exactly through their offspring, or people deliberately creating cowed, obedient children through genetics.
5. The value of neurodiversity, diversity in general, and how genetic engineering could reduce or erase that.
6. The lock in of totalitarian regimes, e.g. through obedience engineering.
It seems to me that it's largely a moot point, because the singularity will overtake us before genetic modification can become a big issue.
Hm! Until the end I was all ready to comment something along the lines of 'god, I appreciate you, philosophy bear', because once again you have come into a very muddled area and spoke clearly and insightfully.
I didn't know you were a singularity-doomer! I'm surprised, bc I first came across you thru your writing on AI and the left.
Do you have a piece / pieces where you put forth your thoughts on the concept and likelihood of the singularity? I've always found it kind of specious.
I wouldn't say that I'm a doomer, I just think, personally, that over any time frame across which genetic modification on a socially and economically significant scale is plausible, super intelligent AI and its consequences would have largely made the point moot, for a number of reasons but most especially because the economy won't depend on humans anymore).
That doesn't have to look disastrous, and it doesn't necessarily involve anyone dying. It doesn't even have to be that soon- I seriously doubt genetic engineering could do all that much in <40 years, given reasonable allowance for medical, political and bureaucratic barriers, plus the time it takes for the genetically engineered child to grow up. I don't see humans as being an economically significant factor in forty years, at the current trajectory. I suspect there will be machines that can do everything a human can do, but better well before 40 years. Hopefully of course, the economy will still be run in human interests.
I just linked and commented in the Facebook chat for the Reasonable Vegan circle. I expect that some of us will be able to talk about this topic there pretty soon.
"The actions of nature are amoral, therefore the actions of people are moral" seems to me to be a summary of your argument. It is not a good argument; in fact you youself then go on to describe ways that evolution has made people what you consider to be immoral.
It seems clear that people (motivated by what evolution to this point has made them, competitive and lacking care for people far away) would use gene editing to make their own offspring more intelligent, more capable, and so forth than those of other people, not to improve the happiness of human beings as a whole.
You confuse the power to do gene editing with the evolutionary process itself. Gene editing allows people to influence evolution, but that is no the same thing as control over the evolutionary process itself (or the logic of the evolutionary process). (Being able to do gene editing doesn't take away the fact that people who control resources have power over others: the groups who use gene editing to make their offspring more aggressive and competitive will win over the ones who use it to make their offspring "good").
(Warning: pedanticism) In the last paragraph, you mean "turned over the reins" not "reigns".
This is very much not what I'm arguing! I'm arguing that because evolution has selected for traits in ways that are amoral, we ought to select for traits that are moral--which would be better than the ones selected for by evolution.
I thought you were making an argument in favor of gene editing. But maybe you are not. Maybe all you are claiming is "Gene editing is good if it is used to make people more moral". But that is not much of an argument in favor of gene editing, because you aren't giving any reason to believe people using gene editing would lead to that conclusion (which I thought you were, I thought that was the point of the discussion of evolution.)
Human beings doing gene editing doesn't get rid of the need for reproduction, because whatever beings you make have to reproduce to survive more than one generation (unless they are made in factories - but that is just another kind of reproduction).
More generally, gene editing doesn't remove the mechanism of natural selection. Natural selection would still apply, and if you believe it has worked up to now in favor of aggression, competitiveness and violence (murdering and taking people's stuff), it would still apply in that way amongst the groups of gene edited people. (And those would still be useful traits to have in the world.)
Yes evolutionary pressures would still be working but gene editing is a way of countering it. I think very few people would want their kids to be aggressive or schizophrenic even though evolution decided these traits are useful and should be kept.
The timescales are different too... evolution takes thousands of years to shift human populations, whereas with gene editing we can shift things quite rapidly (at least in theory -- if the technology is widely disseminated and utilized, as it should be).
What are moral traits and why are they moral? From the "bad" traits you list it seems you would prefer docility, low libido, and desire to be managed...presumably by whoever oversees the pseudo-democratic, ideologically selected managers staffing the Bureau of Reproduction.
That’s one of the many reasons I reject evolution. The biggest reason I reject evolution is because it demands that we believe in processes that are only possible with miracles.
When you say "reject", do you mean ethically ("evolution is morally evil"), or epistemically ("evolution does not occur")? Your second sentence would suggest the former, but I don't see how evolutionary processes being unpleasant means they must not be real.
Hi! Thanks for your question! By “reject” I mean to say that evolution did not occur. I reject evolution primarily on scientific grounds. There is ample evidence that mutations do not coordinate to produce new systems in organisms. Evolution needs many miracles. I happen to believe in miracles, so I have no problem with accepting miracles. But I don’t believe God produced miracles for evolution because-as mentioned in this post- it would mean that God desired suffering, violent competition, and death as the mechanism for development. That doesn’t fit with my conception of God.
I see, thanks for the clarification. I must admit I strongly disagree with this position (it is certainly true that mutations do not coordinate to produce new systems, but this is not required by evolution), but this may not necessarily be the best place or time for such a discussion.
Hi Concavenator! If not via mutation, how do you propose evolution progresses? Natural selection can only select what is already available in the genes, so without mutation, there is no progression. You are right that this isn't the best place for a discussion. I'd love to have a conversation with you about it on another platform if you are interested. If you are not a blind slave to authority, I'm confident that I can show you the various ways evolution has been falsified. You can contact me at rrdavis786 at gmail (I'm not writing the proper email format to avoid bots taking my email address). Thanks!
As a utilitarian what are your thoughts on coercive eugenics, both given various political constraints and a hypothetical where your have free rein as a dictator, so to speak. What also are your thoughts on the various utilitarian arguments in favour of concealing your true beliefs on such issues?
I'm against coercive eugenics. I think supporters of coercive eugenics fundamentally underestimate the value of general liberalism, and generally support things that would be a bad idea on account of reducing the number of generally happy people (e.g. banning disabled people from having kids).
So let's say the Nazis had somehow won and eliminated anyone not an Ubermensch from the gene pool. a few hundred years from now after the ideology had fallen and progress towards liberalism had resumed wouldn't the world be healthier than a counterfactual alternate in which noncoercive eugenics was never practiced?
I don’t think so. Especially when you take into account the enormous suffering caused by eugenicist policies and the fact that it’s good when most people exist, so we never want to ban having kids (with perhaps rare hypothetical exceptions).
The Nazis also had pronatalist policies for their own people. So even if there was a temporary drop in world population, we would expect the earth to be at carrying capacity in the 300 year time span stipulated.
A couple quick questions to clarify some stuff, how much of an issue do you think population decline is from a utilitarian perspective? and do you like Chappell think that incentives are an effective solution (that is taxing people who choose not to have kids to subsidise those who want kids). What about hypotheticals where instead of preventing people from having kids, you only allow them to use certain gametes?, Given your views on factory farming and such how does the marginal utility of a fetus who is expected to be a vegan and one that is expected to eat a lot of Big Macs compare?, How does the suffering of forceful pregnancy compare to the utility derived from the marginal baby (assume state parenting factories if you want etc), and finally how much of a bigger more util rich future do you think a couple billion very happy von Neumanns would create compared to our present situation.
Some historians argue that the Atlantic slave trade helped catalyse the industrial revolution, others that the Mongol empire was a key development in the creation of the modern world. Assuming those theories are true, from the perspective of someone in the 21st century I think you have to concede that it was preferable those events took place, despite how brutal they were at the time. Otherwise we'd still be living in pre-industrial poverty.
There clearly are major conflicts of interest between people across historical periods. Maybe we should think that at some point after the event, actions with short term costs but long-term benefits start off as immoral but become retroactively justified. So maybe coercive eugenics might have been wrong at the time but moral now, in the sufficiently distant future.
Doubtful -- even glossing over the enormous evil of their means (which as Bentham's Bulldog points out should still be counted among the consequences of their policy, so it taints them even from a strict consequentialist perspective), Nazi "eugenic" policies were rather irrational. Persecuting Jews, for example, robbed them of some of the most intelligent and productive people and social networks of their time. They also sterilized and killed people with Down's syndrome on ostensibly eugenic ground despite the fact that Down's syndrome is not hereditary (it's due to chromosomal mis-arrangement, not a genetic mutation).
Great article - lots of thought-provoking stuff in here. The main problem I can see is that initially at least, the technology would only be available to the very wealthy. As a result, economic inequality would become biologically entrenched. What if rich parents can not only send their children to the most elite schools, but also modify their genes to make them more intelligent, more endurant, more resilient? Gene editing is a cool concept in theory, but we must tread VERY carefully when introducing it.
Good article! Maybe most attempts at eugenics at the hands of humans hasn't gone well, but those attempts are minuscule compared to the millions of years of selective pressure the "blind idiot god" put living creatures through, and the results of the latter have been way more abysmal (Tremendous natural suffering). We should try it in the hands of humans once again.
My sense is that objections to gene editing on the basis that it constitutes eugenics mostly do not represent people's deepest sentiments and commitments. There's a much more complex bundle of fears here, and eugenics is just a good grab bag term to express a fear at a kind of dystopian ick.
You start to get a sense after a while online that sometimes the issues people choose to bang the war drums about don't represent their real and deepest commitments, just trenches and hills they think are nicely defensible in terms of the Twitter culture war. The real ideas are below the surface, and often only implicitly mentally articulated.
Why does it matter? Because I think as genetic engineering starts to become a reality, the vague concerns about eugenics will melt away and we'll see much more specific discussions- e.g. about:
1. The rich poor gap expanding as the rich increase their human capital.
2. The possibility of value lock-in through gene choice- e.g. making our kids good little capitalists so they can compete in capitalism and inadvertently shaping the future- potentially in harmful ways.
3. The dangers of people choosing genes to enable their children to compete rather than genes for the common good, or even genes for their children's happiness. The genes that make your kid look at marketing statistics all day or optimise algorithmic trading may not be the genes that increase society's flourishing- or even their own.
4. People exercising far more control over their children through the deliberate shaping of their genetic endowment. This could manifest as people trying to 'copy' their values exactly through their offspring, or people deliberately creating cowed, obedient children through genetics.
5. The value of neurodiversity, diversity in general, and how genetic engineering could reduce or erase that.
6. The lock in of totalitarian regimes, e.g. through obedience engineering.
It seems to me that it's largely a moot point, because the singularity will overtake us before genetic modification can become a big issue.
Hm! Until the end I was all ready to comment something along the lines of 'god, I appreciate you, philosophy bear', because once again you have come into a very muddled area and spoke clearly and insightfully.
I didn't know you were a singularity-doomer! I'm surprised, bc I first came across you thru your writing on AI and the left.
Do you have a piece / pieces where you put forth your thoughts on the concept and likelihood of the singularity? I've always found it kind of specious.
I wouldn't say that I'm a doomer, I just think, personally, that over any time frame across which genetic modification on a socially and economically significant scale is plausible, super intelligent AI and its consequences would have largely made the point moot, for a number of reasons but most especially because the economy won't depend on humans anymore).
That doesn't have to look disastrous, and it doesn't necessarily involve anyone dying. It doesn't even have to be that soon- I seriously doubt genetic engineering could do all that much in <40 years, given reasonable allowance for medical, political and bureaucratic barriers, plus the time it takes for the genetically engineered child to grow up. I don't see humans as being an economically significant factor in forty years, at the current trajectory. I suspect there will be machines that can do everything a human can do, but better well before 40 years. Hopefully of course, the economy will still be run in human interests.
Unfortunately governments in Europe, the US, UK, and elsewhere have effectively banned germline gene editing. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/take-no-for-an-answer-on-genetic-engineering
That’s like the most impressive yet still pretty obvious to anyone who thought about it thing I’ve read in the past few months
Huge applause
That's a super nice thing to say! Thank you!
I just linked and commented in the Facebook chat for the Reasonable Vegan circle. I expect that some of us will be able to talk about this topic there pretty soon.
Absolutely correct post! Thanks Matt.
"The actions of nature are amoral, therefore the actions of people are moral" seems to me to be a summary of your argument. It is not a good argument; in fact you youself then go on to describe ways that evolution has made people what you consider to be immoral.
It seems clear that people (motivated by what evolution to this point has made them, competitive and lacking care for people far away) would use gene editing to make their own offspring more intelligent, more capable, and so forth than those of other people, not to improve the happiness of human beings as a whole.
You confuse the power to do gene editing with the evolutionary process itself. Gene editing allows people to influence evolution, but that is no the same thing as control over the evolutionary process itself (or the logic of the evolutionary process). (Being able to do gene editing doesn't take away the fact that people who control resources have power over others: the groups who use gene editing to make their offspring more aggressive and competitive will win over the ones who use it to make their offspring "good").
(Warning: pedanticism) In the last paragraph, you mean "turned over the reins" not "reigns".
This is very much not what I'm arguing! I'm arguing that because evolution has selected for traits in ways that are amoral, we ought to select for traits that are moral--which would be better than the ones selected for by evolution.
I thought you were making an argument in favor of gene editing. But maybe you are not. Maybe all you are claiming is "Gene editing is good if it is used to make people more moral". But that is not much of an argument in favor of gene editing, because you aren't giving any reason to believe people using gene editing would lead to that conclusion (which I thought you were, I thought that was the point of the discussion of evolution.)
Human beings doing gene editing doesn't get rid of the need for reproduction, because whatever beings you make have to reproduce to survive more than one generation (unless they are made in factories - but that is just another kind of reproduction).
More generally, gene editing doesn't remove the mechanism of natural selection. Natural selection would still apply, and if you believe it has worked up to now in favor of aggression, competitiveness and violence (murdering and taking people's stuff), it would still apply in that way amongst the groups of gene edited people. (And those would still be useful traits to have in the world.)
Yes evolutionary pressures would still be working but gene editing is a way of countering it. I think very few people would want their kids to be aggressive or schizophrenic even though evolution decided these traits are useful and should be kept.
The timescales are different too... evolution takes thousands of years to shift human populations, whereas with gene editing we can shift things quite rapidly (at least in theory -- if the technology is widely disseminated and utilized, as it should be).
What are moral traits and why are they moral? From the "bad" traits you list it seems you would prefer docility, low libido, and desire to be managed...presumably by whoever oversees the pseudo-democratic, ideologically selected managers staffing the Bureau of Reproduction.
That’s one of the many reasons I reject evolution. The biggest reason I reject evolution is because it demands that we believe in processes that are only possible with miracles.
When you say "reject", do you mean ethically ("evolution is morally evil"), or epistemically ("evolution does not occur")? Your second sentence would suggest the former, but I don't see how evolutionary processes being unpleasant means they must not be real.
Hi! Thanks for your question! By “reject” I mean to say that evolution did not occur. I reject evolution primarily on scientific grounds. There is ample evidence that mutations do not coordinate to produce new systems in organisms. Evolution needs many miracles. I happen to believe in miracles, so I have no problem with accepting miracles. But I don’t believe God produced miracles for evolution because-as mentioned in this post- it would mean that God desired suffering, violent competition, and death as the mechanism for development. That doesn’t fit with my conception of God.
I see, thanks for the clarification. I must admit I strongly disagree with this position (it is certainly true that mutations do not coordinate to produce new systems, but this is not required by evolution), but this may not necessarily be the best place or time for such a discussion.
Hi Concavenator! If not via mutation, how do you propose evolution progresses? Natural selection can only select what is already available in the genes, so without mutation, there is no progression. You are right that this isn't the best place for a discussion. I'd love to have a conversation with you about it on another platform if you are interested. If you are not a blind slave to authority, I'm confident that I can show you the various ways evolution has been falsified. You can contact me at rrdavis786 at gmail (I'm not writing the proper email format to avoid bots taking my email address). Thanks!
As a utilitarian what are your thoughts on coercive eugenics, both given various political constraints and a hypothetical where your have free rein as a dictator, so to speak. What also are your thoughts on the various utilitarian arguments in favour of concealing your true beliefs on such issues?
I'm against coercive eugenics. I think supporters of coercive eugenics fundamentally underestimate the value of general liberalism, and generally support things that would be a bad idea on account of reducing the number of generally happy people (e.g. banning disabled people from having kids).
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-and-abortion
So let's say the Nazis had somehow won and eliminated anyone not an Ubermensch from the gene pool. a few hundred years from now after the ideology had fallen and progress towards liberalism had resumed wouldn't the world be healthier than a counterfactual alternate in which noncoercive eugenics was never practiced?
I don’t think so. Especially when you take into account the enormous suffering caused by eugenicist policies and the fact that it’s good when most people exist, so we never want to ban having kids (with perhaps rare hypothetical exceptions).
The Nazis also had pronatalist policies for their own people. So even if there was a temporary drop in world population, we would expect the earth to be at carrying capacity in the 300 year time span stipulated.
A couple quick questions to clarify some stuff, how much of an issue do you think population decline is from a utilitarian perspective? and do you like Chappell think that incentives are an effective solution (that is taxing people who choose not to have kids to subsidise those who want kids). What about hypotheticals where instead of preventing people from having kids, you only allow them to use certain gametes?, Given your views on factory farming and such how does the marginal utility of a fetus who is expected to be a vegan and one that is expected to eat a lot of Big Macs compare?, How does the suffering of forceful pregnancy compare to the utility derived from the marginal baby (assume state parenting factories if you want etc), and finally how much of a bigger more util rich future do you think a couple billion very happy von Neumanns would create compared to our present situation.
Some historians argue that the Atlantic slave trade helped catalyse the industrial revolution, others that the Mongol empire was a key development in the creation of the modern world. Assuming those theories are true, from the perspective of someone in the 21st century I think you have to concede that it was preferable those events took place, despite how brutal they were at the time. Otherwise we'd still be living in pre-industrial poverty.
There clearly are major conflicts of interest between people across historical periods. Maybe we should think that at some point after the event, actions with short term costs but long-term benefits start off as immoral but become retroactively justified. So maybe coercive eugenics might have been wrong at the time but moral now, in the sufficiently distant future.
Doubtful -- even glossing over the enormous evil of their means (which as Bentham's Bulldog points out should still be counted among the consequences of their policy, so it taints them even from a strict consequentialist perspective), Nazi "eugenic" policies were rather irrational. Persecuting Jews, for example, robbed them of some of the most intelligent and productive people and social networks of their time. They also sterilized and killed people with Down's syndrome on ostensibly eugenic ground despite the fact that Down's syndrome is not hereditary (it's due to chromosomal mis-arrangement, not a genetic mutation).
Great article - lots of thought-provoking stuff in here. The main problem I can see is that initially at least, the technology would only be available to the very wealthy. As a result, economic inequality would become biologically entrenched. What if rich parents can not only send their children to the most elite schools, but also modify their genes to make them more intelligent, more endurant, more resilient? Gene editing is a cool concept in theory, but we must tread VERY carefully when introducing it.
Good article! Maybe most attempts at eugenics at the hands of humans hasn't gone well, but those attempts are minuscule compared to the millions of years of selective pressure the "blind idiot god" put living creatures through, and the results of the latter have been way more abysmal (Tremendous natural suffering). We should try it in the hands of humans once again.