Fire and Knowledge

[Genetically engineered] children will, in effect, be assigned a goal by their programmers: “intelligence,” “even temper,” “athleticism.” (As with chickens, the market will doubtless lean in the direction of efficiency. It may be hard to find genes for, say, dreaminess.)

Now two possibilities arise. Perhaps the programming doesn’t work very well, and your kids spells poorly, or turns moody, or can’t hit the inside fastball. In the present world, you just tell yourself that’s who he is. But in the coming world, he’ll be, in essence, a defective product. Do you still accept him unconditionally? Why? If your new Jetta got thirty miles to the gallon instead of the forty it was designed to get, you’d take it back. If necessary, you’d sue. You’d call it a lemon.

Or what if the engineering worked pretty well, but you decided, too late, that you’d picked the wrong package, hadn’t gotten the best features? Would you feel buyer’s remorse if the kid next door had a better ear, a stronger arm?
Say the gene work went a little awry and left you with a kid who had some serious problems; what kind of guilt would that leave you with? Remember, this is not a child created by the random interaction of your genes with those of your partner—this is a child created with specific intent. Does Consumer Reports start rating the various biotech offerings?
What if you had a second child five years after the first, and by that time the upgrades were undeniably improved: How would you feel about the first kid? How would you feel about his new brother, the latest model?

The other outcome—that the genetic engineering works just as you had hoped—seems at least as bad. Now your child is a product. You can take precisely as much pride in her achievements as you take in your dishwashing detergent. It was designed to produce streak-free glassware, and she was designed to be sweet-tempered, social, and smart. And what can she take pride in? Her good grades? She may have worked hard, but she’ll always know that she was specced for good grades. Her kindness to others? Well, yes, it’s good to be kind—but perhaps it’s not much of an accomplishment once the various genes with some link to sociability have been catalogued and manipulated.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 59-60