Редактирование: Transhumanist FAQ Version 3 (раздел)

===Do transhumanists advocate eugenics?===

Eugenics in the narrow sense refers to the pre-WWII movement in Europe and the United States to involuntarily sterilize the “genetically unfit” and encourage breeding of the genetically advantaged. These ideas are entirely contrary to the tolerant humanistic and scientific tenets of transhumanism. In addition to condemning the coercion involved in such policies, transhumanists strongly reject the racialist and classist assumptions on which they were based, along with the notion that eugenic improvements could be accomplished in a practically meaningful timeframe through selective human breeding.

Transhumanists uphold the principles of bodily autonomy and procreative liberty. Parents must be allowed to choose for themselves whether to reproduce, how to reproduce, and what technological methods they use in their reproduction. The use of genetic medicine or embryonic screening to increase the probability of a healthy, happy, and multiply talented child is a responsible and justifiable application of parental reproductive freedom.

Beyond this, one can argue that parents have a moral responsibility to make use of these methods, assuming they are safe and effective. Just as it would be wrong for parents to fail in their duty to procure the best available medical care for their sick child, it would be wrong not to take reasonable precautions to ensure that a child-to-be will be as healthy as possible. This, however, is a moral judgment that is best left to individual conscience rather than imposed by law. Only in extreme and unusual cases might state infringement of procreative liberty be justified. If, for example, a would-be parent wished to undertake a genetic modification that would be clearly harmful to the child or would drastically curtail its options in life, then this prospective parent should be prevented by law from doing so. This case is analogous to the state taking custody of a child in situations of gross parental neglect or child abuse.

This defense of procreative liberty is compatible with the view that states and charities can subsidize public health, prenatal care, genetic counseling, contraception, abortion, and genetic therapies so that parents can make free and informed reproductive decisions that result in fewer disabilities in the next generation. Some disability activists would call these policies eugenic, but society may have a legitimate interest in whether children are born healthy or disabled, leading it to subsidize the birth of healthy children, without actually outlawing or imposing particular genetic modifications.

When discussing the morality of genetic enhancements, it is useful to be aware of the distinction between enhancements that are intrinsically beneficial to the child or society on the one hand, and, on the other, enhancements that provide a merely positional advantage to the child. For example, health, cognitive abilities, and emotional well-being are valued by most people for their own sake. It is simply nice to be healthy, happy and to be able to think well, quite independently of any other advantages that come from possessing these attributes. By contrast, traits such as attractiveness, athletic prowess, height, and assertiveness seem to confer benefits that are mostly positional, i.e. they benefit a person by making her more competitive (e.g. in sports or as a potential mate), at the expense of those with whom she will compete, who suffer a corresponding disadvantage from her enhancement. Enhancements that have only positional advantages ought to be de-emphasized, while enhancements that create net benefits ought to be encouraged.

It is sometimes claimed that the use of germinal choice technologies would lead to an undesirable uniformity of the population. Some degree of uniformity is desirable and expected if we are able to make everyone congenitally healthy, strong, intelligent, and attractive. Few would argue that we should preserve cystic fibrosis because of its contribution to diversity. But other kinds of diversity are sure to flourish in a society with germinal choice, especially once adults are able to adapt their own bodies according to their own aesthetic tastes. Presumably most Asian parents will still choose to have children with Asian features, and if some parents choose genes that encourage athleticism, others may choose genes that correlate with musical ability.

It is unlikely that germ-line genetic enhancements will ever have a large impact on the world. It will take a minimum of forty or fifty years for the requisite technologies to be developed, tested, and widely applied and for a significant number of enhanced individuals to be born and reach adulthood. Before this happens, more powerful and direct methods for individuals to enhance themselves will probably be available, based on nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, uploading, or somatic gene therapy. (Traditional eugenics, based on selecting who is allowed to reproduce, would have even less prospect of avoiding preemptive obsolescence, as it would take many generations to deliver its purported improvements.)