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Although eugenics of
this type is more of the stuff of science fiction than any likely
reality, a question to be raised is at what point would we pass
from a genuine somatic gene therapy
into cosmetic
improvement? An ethical limit has been suggested by the analogy
of the distinction between feeding growth hormone (which is not
a gene therapy) to a child who is abnormally short, compared with
feeding it to another child of normal height in order to get them
into a basketball team.
A more fundamental
question is what sense could we conceive of improving human beings?
Logically is it a contradiction in terms to speak of improve ourselves?
What constitutes an improvement, how would we recognise it as
such, and who would decide it and control it? There is something
profoundly noble about man but also something profoundly lost,
ignoble, perverse. However many medical advances we make, however
much genetic engineering we might imagine doing, that intrinsic
faultline is still there. The biblical testimony is that we are
not evolving better and better, and the evidence of history would
seem to agree. Moreover, even the best repair is only temporary.
Our ideas
of what we mean by improvement are transient, as for example different
cultures' conceptions in history of the "ideal" shape for a woman!
Rick
Weiss
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