There are certainly plenty of people who are excited about the prospects that most of us think would lead to a ghastly sci-fi dystopia. I think a more powerful influence than they will be simple consumerism--people extending that attitude toward having children.

Never thought about the use of scientifically-certified genetic predisposition as a mitigating circumstance in criminal cases, but now that you point it out I have no doubt it would be.

I can't imagine this leading to any kind of stable social situation, so in that sense I don't really fear the dystopia, but I can imagine serious harm being done in the effort.

Good point. I'd overlooked the power of consumerism, that comfort and convenience provide great incentives to ethical apathy. People already often treat children as a lifestyle choice to a certain degree - using abortion to reduce twins or triplets to a single baby because more would be too much of a hassle, for instance.

In that case I'm not sure our esteemed professor would get his desired world anyway - people would increasingly have their offspring reëngineered for their own convenience, which might not give the same results as his high-minded ethical objectives - imagine if it turns out to be possible to identify genetic markers for e.g. how likely a baby is to scream at 120 decibels in the supermarket.

"I'm not sure our esteemed professor would get his desired world anyway..."

Right. We can already see how that's going to go, with sex-selection abortions. Or maybe creating the baby with the desired sex in the first place:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/9506234/No-one-should-be-able-to-choose-their-babys-sex.html

"When someone spends £30,000 flying to New York to select the sex of their next child, they aren’t choosing life. They are choosing a lifestyle."

In this country, and maybe in Europe as well, freedom of choice pretty much trumps everything else, at least on the emotional/instinctual level, for an awful lot of people.

A certain type of "professor" has a way of playing sorcerer's apprentice to these unsavory developments, then being shocked by the results.

It's a characteristic failing of intellectuals when they start thinking about politics and such to grossly overestimate the feasibility and effectiveness of imposing an abstract rationalist order on human societies. It's amusing in a way, because although they think of themselves as disinterested they're doing the same thing everybody else does: thinking "if the world were run by people who think like me, it would be a much better place."

Yes, it happens. See “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/the-two-minus-one-pregnancy.html?_r=1):

“Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn’t had children already or if we were more financially secure,” she said later. “If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

Cross-posted with Marianne.

I used to work someplace where one of our customers was the nicest lady. She had been a school teacher for many, many years and everyone loved her. When her 30+ year old daughter got pregnant with twins, she told me how relieved she was to find out that if only one of the babies had Downs Syndrome, they could do a selective abortion and keep the other. I can't imagine what my face must have looked like after she said that or how I managed to wait on the other customers that night. I never could look her in the face again.

Thank goodness, they were both okay. They were named Beth and Amy. It was like Little Women in Dystopia.

AMDG

I think that explains the beliefs of at least half our our parliamentarians here.

Going back to godescalc's comment: that's a very good point about libertarian types missing the unintended consequences of wealth. Though I think attention to unintended consequences is more a conservative than a libertarian characteristic, the point stands. Even if wealth and the desire for it doesn't make one fall deeply into avarice as such, it can have the effect of enabling other sins, especially when working in conjunction with its brother, power.

Peter Singer is the worst of the lot, I guess. Why the insistence on "applied" ethics? A way of emphasizing that they're not going to be bothered with a lot of lofty abstractions?

I heard an "ethicist" (aka philosophy prof) who teaches at a Catholic college speak some years ago, and it was remarkable (well, not really) how little weight he gave to Catholic teaching (zero). He seemed to assume that *he* was the most relevant authority, evaluating competing points of view from an Olympian/pontifical position. By virtue of his having named himself an ethicist.

What really kills me (heh) is the deference journalists tend to pay to these guys. "Well, he's a professional ethicist, so he must be right."

A worthy one.

Funny time to be eating breakfast.:-)

For some reason I am confounded by the U.S.-Far East time difference. I don't have any problem with the 6-to-8 hour difference with Europe, but I can't keep the difference between here and Australia/NZ/Phillipines straight at all.

Right--it's the fact that we're in a completely different day. It's like they (in the East) are in the future. Once I caught myself, talking to antiaphrodite who lives in the Phillipines, thinking that she would already know the outcome of a football game that had yet to start.

Glad the conference was so good.

You know, it's been a relatively short amount time that people have been able to jump around from one day to the other (unless they lived on the dateline). It reminds me that in Dr. Who there was a rift in the wall that divides us from another universe and people and cybermen and daleks, I think, had traveled back and forth and that had to be stopped because if it kept up, it would have ripped the entire universe apart. So, I'm wondering if all this going backward and forward in time might invoke the law of unforeseen consequences. We better watch out.

People who live on the dateline probably have some innate ability to be able to time-jump frequently.

AMDG

Oh Grumphy! I hope you enjoyed the Antipodean conference. What was it?

I should know, b/c I'm a donor to Campion College, since it's the only Catholic liberal arts college in Oz. If you ever plan to attend another one, let me know! I've often wanted to attend such an event and may well have a chance one year or another.

How many were there?

I really need to check in here more often!

If I ever get the time, I will dash off a best-selling novel called "Little Women in Dystopia." Janet, you will receive royalties for the title.

There were between 50 and 70 people there. It was really fun.

Sounds good Grumphy! What did you think of Sydney? And what was the conference about?

Maclin, my brother gave me a Jane Austen With Zombies book - I really can't being myself to read it!

Not I.

AMDG