I spend a lot of time doing thought experiments about different moral questions and where I stand on them, and something that comes to mind from time to time is the idea selective breeding and eugenics.

Now I want to make it clear here that I believe that eugenics as practiced and enforced by excluding and disallowing certain people to reproduce is a major violation of the individual's autonomy. I absolutely believe it's nothing the state should get involved in.

With the disclaimer out of the way, I was considering the possibility that a community could voluntarily selectively breed with the goal not being the removal of inferior genes from the pool, but the introduction of better genes into it. If done on a voluntary basis, would it be immoral to fund dating and testing services aimed towards such a crowd? It seems to me that most of the stigma is, and rightly so, centered on intervention into the citizen's private life. I could however see someone arguing that any kind of social or biological engineering in people is against a natural order, which a lot of people value.

In the current hands our world is in, we may possibly see people who can afford to have doctors design a perfect baby for them, right down to the DNA. Added together with AI capabilities that can precisely edit genetic code to create supreme intelligence and physical capability, will ultimately lead to a ruling class of wealthy superhumans. While a lot of people might see that as an Avengers situation, I can assure you it would be a lot closer to Brave New World than I would like.

Maybe, however, if we were shifted to a system that didn't glorify greed, and these capabilities were extended to the general public like vaccines to make every human in the next generation immensely more intelligent, I would be down for it. But, there's only one way that can play out in this hierarchical society, and once the elite gain supreme control over our species, it's gonna look a lot closer to Brave New World than I prefer.

I agree with Frank Zappa on this. It is immoral and fundamentally a bad idea to perfect DNA, whether it is through selective breeding or gene editing technology. However, should we find a way to substantially boost human intelligence by the mass, humanity could progress in ways we could never imagine today. 100 years ago, we didn't even have commercial airplanes. 50 years ago, we completely exited Earth's atmosphere and landed humans on the moon. Our rate of progress is growing exponentially because we can build on past knowledge so efficiently. We could have gone even further in those 50 years if we had created super-intelligence through gene editing or other means.

But where is the ceiling to our rate of progress? Would creating a super-intelligent society really make much difference?

But in the end, who is the arbiter of the morality of mankind? God, or another deity? World leaders? Humanity as a whole? Who has the right to prevent us from controlling standard human capabilities?

The problem with bringing this up is that it reeks of what the Nazi's and other racist groups have wanted for a long time but have done it in a crazy kind of way. As ways to "purify" the race or whatever. This doesn't actually work.

If you look at animals - if you breed too purely you generally get breeds that have serious physical issues that start cropping up. You are more likely to get good genetics if you let people mix up more naturally. This lets the best genetics survive more often.

I'm not against this in the sense that I would like people with higher than average intelligence breeding more often than not as well as discouraging people with serious genetic defects from reproducing and passing that on to future generations.

However, like so many other things in life I can't actually side with anyone wanting to force this on anyone. If people were educated in order to make this choice I would be on board but I wouldn't want anyone to have that choice removed from them.

I feel like what I'm about to say is more opinion and conjecture but I feel for the current line of questioning I have a feeling of alacrity. The way life itself is made is to continue improving. I feel like speeding up the process through genetic engineering is somewhat disrespectful of the gift we've been given of consciousness and free will. Let me ask this. Is there really so much wrong with life progressing naturally? Whenever anyone tries to do something too fast without really exploring it what usually happens?