On "Casual Eugenics"

I'm so opposed to eugenics that I think those who espouse it shouldn't be allowed to reproduce

Recently, I saw a Tweet that was so stupendously wrong it made my head explode and (now headless following the explosion) made me wonder whether Lyman Stone wrote it:

Now, I agree that the widespread societal attitude towards eugenics is “kind of devastating.” But it’s devastating in precisely the opposite way claimed by this person. It’s devastating in that it ludicrously asserts that clearly unobjectionable activity is in some way akin to Nazi forced sterilization. It is devastating in that it treats genetic enhancement as deeply immoral, though enhancement would clearly be a good thing. It’s devastating in that, if we really took seriously the public rhetoric around genetic enhancement, we’d oppose any action to better the future.

Aside from the fact that you can give wanting a child without ADHD a mean label—Eugenics!!!—what is the argument against it? ADHD is bad for the person who has it. I mean, first of all, it’s harder for people with ADHD to concentrate on various important tasks. I have ADHD, and this was one reason school was considerably more difficult than it would otherwise have been. I took ADHD medication all throughout high school, which had the effect of suppressing my appetite. For this reason, I was pretty hungry most of the time.

Those with ADHD commit crimes at much higher rates than people without, which is why medicating people for ADHD drastically reduces crime rates, in both men and women. Over a third of people with ADHD in Sweden have been convicted of a crime. ADHD clearly makes a person’s life much worse than it would otherwise be. So why in the world is it wrong to want one’s child not to have ADHD?

Is it wrong—and eugenic—to feel this way about other diseases? Would it be wrong to prefer a child without a horrifying and terminal illness, resulting in a person’s brain being turned to jelly and them dying at five years old? What could possibly be the principle behind this? Under what conditions is it wrong to want a child without an ailment?

One indication that this is just status quo bias is the following: imagine that someone took a pill that made their child guaranteed to have ADHD. Clearly this would be wrong. But why would this be wrong? If people being born with ADHD is entirely morally neutral, so that it’s morally wrong to want it not to occur, then why in the world would it be wrong to take a pill making your child have ADHD?

Now, maybe the reply would be that it’s generally wrong to try to shape the traits of future people. This would be equally wrong whether you shape so that people have ADHD or so that they don’t have ADHD. But here we can modify the case to get around this worry: perhaps the reason the person takes the pill is because it tastes really good. Making their child have ADHD is just a side-effect. If producing a child with ADHD, rather than one without, is entirely neutral, then why would this be wrong? If the pill is taken because it tastes particularly nice, and the side-effect is neutral, why is it wrong?

But there’s another much bigger problem for this view.