[ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2015-11-17 00:30, Tara Maya wrote:
> Taking away an ability that a child would otherwise have is a form of harm and shouldn’t be allowed.
Makes sense. It is a bit more tricky if the parents both have "deaf 
genes"  and choose not to give the child a hearing gene (if it was easy 
enough).

The real question is whether this also hold for superior abilities that 
are conditional on other things. Julian's example is a child who will be 
smart if it gets a certain vitamin but otherwise normal; he argues that 
withholding the vitamin harms the child. But if it is right to give the 
vitamin, then what about giving an enhancer to somebody who would 
otherwise be normal? Or fixing a gene that is holding one back (I am GG 
at rs363050 which might mean my non-verbal IQ is 3 points lower than it 
could be).

> By the same token, if parents wanted to ensure that their child had better than average hearing, I don’t see how that could be wrong on ethical grounds.
The most common ethical argument is that it changes who the child is. 
The unmodified child never comes into being, and an enhanced child does. 
Whether this is bad is rather contested.

A more solid ethical argument (which you bring up below) is whether the 
enhancement is for the child or for the parents. For general purpose 
goods like intelligence, health and happiness this seems unproblematic 
to me, and getting good general species-typical traits like hearing is 
also useful. It is less clear whether getting entirely new senses and 
abilities is a good thing: if hearing is better than being deaf, what 
about seeing UV? We are all UV blind.

> There are many people who claim to make “ethical” arguments against making one’s children’s smarter, or healthier or more athletic or more artistic, but these ethical arguments are always about wrong done to “society” or to those OTHER than the ones receiving the enhancement.
To be fair to them, I think many are making non-scarequote ethical 
arguments. We just disagree on their correctness. ("ethical" arguments 
typically involve claiming something being unethical and then refusing 
to analyse reasons - ethics is the study of moral issues).

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University