alt Hacker NewsIf I told you I put a chemical into the water supply that gave people brown hair you’d probably think I am weird and stupid but not evil.
If I told you the chemical gave people down syndrome you’d probably think I am evil.
Whenever these topics come up there’s always people saying things like “but what if people like it?” And I can’t help but wonder, really? Are we really having this conversation? The answers are obvious so why pretend they’re not?
I don’t believe anybody actually thinks this way.
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I think it's a valid argument to say that people with down syndrome are much happier than those without. Most of them need a society (or at least multiple other people) without that trait to survive, though.
If you force something major and permanent on somebody without their consent for no good reason, of course it would be evil. It would be evil to force somebody gay to be straight and it would be evil to force somebody straight to be gay, that has nothing to do with the goodness or badness of being straight or gay. Hair dye is temporary.
Kind of a strange example, because yeah I do think it’s evil to inflict your aesthetic preference on everyone’s bodies without consent.
The answers are not obvious. Arguably, putting anything into the water supply is seriously ethically questionable, whether it changes only your hair color or lowers your IQ or raises it, for that matter. People have the right to accept or deny medical treatment. For treatment which occurs before birth clearly they cannot do that, but if you were meditating upon whether to apply a procedure or not, and you had adults who could understand the question and to whom the procedure would have been applied, taking their opinions into consideration on the subject is entirely valid.
You think of a person with Downs' as less than a person without it, clearly. But why should your opinion matter? If we accept treating Downs' in utero, should we accept genetic treatments to lower criminality? What about independent thinking? What about other "inconvenient" personality traits. Like why not allow some "authority" to eliminate any "negative" trait they wish from the population?
Obviously these are extremes and your position that considering the question with respect to Downs' leads to a straightforward conclusion: on balance, it make sense, but I think we should approach any question about modifying people with serious consideration.
>I don’t believe anybody actually thinks this way.
Oh, there are far too many people that do. I mostly call them the "Hell for you, heaven for me" bunch, the doublethink/cognitive dissonance in so many is very very strong.
https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-...
“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion” is a common example of this behavior.