In this paper I will argue why genetic engineering of humans is morally required. I will try to address the most common objections and specifically try to address liberal eugenics. I will also be assuming that abortion up until birth is morally permissible. Knowing full well that this begs the question I choose to do this for the sake of simplicity because the purpose of this paper is not to address abortion but genetic engineering in humans. I will also shortly address abortion as it relates to cases of fetuses with genetic conditions. A common mistake made by many people taking about human genetic engineering is that they try and clump it in with other forms of technology and science. Jonathan Glover tries to argue that genetic engineering …show more content…
A problem among those that support genetic engineering is the distinction between positive and negative engineering. Negative engineering is the idea that we should only remove traits that are deemed negative. Positive engineering is the idea that we should not just remove traits, but that we should be actively improving humans. This would include things such as making "healthy" humans smarter and stronger. A lot of proponents of genetic engineering will argue for only negative engineering. This is usually do to the mad-scientist image that comes to mind when one thinks of Positive engineering(Glover,1984,p.589-590). Some genetic conditions seem to pose little to no problem. For example color blindness or astigmatism. It seems like removing those would be negative engineering. Yet both these conditions affect a person's life so little that fixing them seems to cross into positive engineering. Why stop at making somebody's vision 20/20 instead of 30/20. There are people who naturally have 30/20 vision. Should we consider that a deviation from the "norm" of the human genome and bring them down to 20/20. I think examples like this show the problem with the positive-negative distinction which is there isn't a clear one. We can have one, but it will be completely subjective and arbitrary in the end. Why should color-blindness be considered a negative trait worthy of improvement while having an IQ of 80(20 points below average) not be. There isn't a good reason. So either one has to be completely against genetic engineering or completely for