Out of curiosity, does that mean you'd consider adoption?

explicitly

Yes, really. It's only sometimes explicit, the rest of the time it's implicit.

strict moral standards

best I can do in consent based morality, sorry.

The superficiality, vanity and fundamental misunderstandings of the human condition of the West strike again, lol

This isn’t limited to the “west.”

You’re kind of describing one of the main facets of Buddhism, the human tendency to “reach” for things they don’t have.

Decidedly not a western concept.

Great question but here is the thing, life has no one pattern, the divisions between species is far more often a blur than a hard line and not only is eugenics incorrect in committing the age old sin of attributing virtue to strength or purity it frames any kind of takedown of it in a way that traps one from understanding what life actually is. Evolution isn't an engineering process it is the result of what the creatures that get by do, this includes humans tinkering with themselves while shouting into the sky they are now god, evolution still applies to them because it is not any singular thing you can point to.

Our methods of understanding the world, especially the physical one, have understandably focused on cutting things into tinier and tinier pieces to isolate precisely what the fundamental nature of things are, but this leads us to think this is how the universe is structured rather than how we can best interrogate it currently.

Eugenics hands you a hammer and tells you everything is nails if you look closely enough... but not only is that argument wrong, the idea of the nail and the hammer being seperate concepts that you have unconciously accepted is wrong.

Life is a conspiracy of fascimiles, it is always a mess when you look closer that appears to adhere to a unified system when you pull back, and the need to understand humanity through a process of endless division, measurement and categorization is actually violently hostile this property of life.

Life is never a body of perfectly replicating machines that are all finely tuned to the same mechanisms, life is always a conspiracy of fascimiles that only from the outside can be referred to comfortably as a species and if we deny that we also kill it... which is another way of stating the existential need for biodiversity. If you really accept the idea of biodiversity leading to fitness I don't see how you can also truly accept the framing assumptions of eugenics.

This video by Hank Green about the fascinating answer to the silly/genius question "Who has the most genes?" does a good job of expressing the categorical thinking error that eugenics makes quite beautifully in the context of people who are genetic chimeras. How do they even begin to fit into this worldview of eugenics?

My advice is to throw out the entire way of thinking, yes genes exist but they are the residue of something much more complex not the ultimate overlords of centralized authority that determine life and its motive.

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=xm_cWdTgg8k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm_cWdTgg8k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

I prefer a simpler framing, there are a set of genes or traits we can define as bad, and we can try to remove them but no matter what this entire conception will have existential flaws and adhering to it will eventually lead to a collapse of diversity, the map is not the territory and what happens when you try to pretend a map is the territory is that you force a collapse of diversity in that territory....

edit The map is also not the territory because in order for the territory to be alive it must have many different maps that still nonetheless mostly agree in certain aspects.

We can't necessarily know what the good levers are or how much of what we perceive as a good lever includes unrelated negative elements we falsely lumped in and we can't necessarily know the consequences of correcting the bad levers are, especially for the overall genetic diversity of humanity.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, it means this is a precarious territory to navigate.

Another way to say this is to state that there is no definition of intelligence not because we don't have tools fine enough to measure it but because the very idea of capturing any meaningful aspect of intelligence with numbers or rigorously objective quantifications is absurd...

What’s the best baby?

This one!!!

Can't you adopt one? It's not really related to this issue.

I think the point is those other ones won't even be born

When you have a baby, do you know the piece of mind that comes from knowing they are free of generic diseases or defects?

No, but do you know how fucked up that sentence sounds when you begin to unpack it?

I am not trying to be a hardliner about this, but there is a really disturbing line of thinking here that people need to realize this slips into and you can see it in your careless and unreflective choice of the word "defect" as you raise a giant red flag above you.

There is nothing wrong with using genetic editing to make your baby “better” (whatever that means to you). The problems only start when you start applying that to other people’s babies.

What a wild sentence to read.

You know every baby is someone's elses baby even your "own"? They are an individual not a rpg character selection screen?