All Tomorrow’s Political Controversies

Last week we were discussing what current practices would be condemned by future generations. I’m sort of more interested in the question of what practices will be accepted in the future that we would condemn as disgusting today. Adam Serwer’s fascinating article on the ACLU’s efforts to ponder science fiction legal dilemmas raises some of this:

Stanley’s 2002 paper tries to do just that. In it, he carefully imagines what could happen when human reproductive cloning is perfected — “what enforcement action would be taken when, say, a sixth-grader is discovered to be an unauthorized clone of Jennifer Lopez?” Could genetic enhancement inspire a kind of neo-eugenicist society where social classes are determined by access to the kind of wealth one needs to take advantage of such technologies? If humans succeeded in splicing their own DNA with that of animals, where would the line of “personhood” be drawn? Citing a scenario out of the 1997 movie Gattaca, Stanley expresses concern that the growing ability to remove genetic defects prior to childbirth might lead to employers collecting hair or skin cells from prospective employees.

Obviously, there are issues in this domain that extend far beyond the realm of civil liberties. But you can easily imagine a series of further developments in the realm of genetic manipulation really scrambling our current political configuration. If the top one percent start using expensive genetic engineering techniques to turn their children into an explicit biological meritocracy, will egalitarians make common cause with Bob Jones University and the Conference of Bishops to try to put a stop to it? And if we don’t breed a new race of augments here at home, that’s not going to stop the Chinese. Maybe better us than them?

In unrelated news, the inventor of in-vitro fertilization won a Nobel Prize today.