Ethical Dilemma Of Eugenics

The concept of genetically modifying human beings is one that is hotly debated in several spheres of thought. Likewise, there are many ways people look at it, and many conclusions people come to. As our technological advances makes modification of human babies more and more feasible, the ethics of the process comes under more and more scrutiny. The obvious benefits of manipulating the genome of a future baby is that parents with genetic disorders have a way to ensure that the child is healthy. If there is a significant probability of the child inheriting a debilitating or fatal genetic disease that would significantly impact the child’s quality of life, the problem could be avoided. The natural, if optimistic, conclusion to that line of thought
At what point do we go beyond trying to ensure a better life for the child, and venture into what some might consider “playing god”? It is fair to say that a traditionally beautiful person has a higher chance of a “better life” in that they are treated more favorably overall, so would aesthetic phenotypes classify as “ensuring a better life for the child” or go too far down into the ethical rabbit hole and lead to, essentially, justifying and perpetuating racism, sexism, and other bigotry? Should the ten percent of people who would screen for a tall stature in the child (Scientific American) be allowed to do so, or would that lead to a society in which people are discriminated against for their
Most likely, it would end up more like dogs, with a large amount of extreme phenotypic variation between people, but let us first examine the crop possibility. If we selectively breed out everything we consider undesirable, we’d effectively reduce our species’ genetic diversity. Like seedless bananas, we would end up uniform. As almost if not exact clones of each other. Even with advances in medicine, this could have the same problem that our crops have. Notably, when a disease appears that can infect one person, we all are susceptible to it and the culling of our population it could cause could reach an astronomical severity. In the dog example, the problem, since we would be screening for genetic diseases, would most likely come from physical features. A “squashed” muzzle which leads to breathing problems, for example. People have and do mutilate themselves for aesthetics anyway, binding of the feet, for example, but should a development ideally meant to improve a child’s quality of life be used to inflict health problems on them? If tiny feet became popular again, and people selected for that trait, that portion of the population would be hobbled despite them no longer needing to bind their feet to achieve