Is Selection Of Children Wrong Summary

The Selection of our Future
Danielle Locsin

‘Designer Babies’ and the selection of children is a new and emerging topic. I will be basing my paper on one source, Is Selection of Children Wrong by Dan W. Brock. Brock has divided the topic of selection into two parts: negative and positive selection. I will start by summarizing and analyzing Brock’s work by defining the difference between negative and positive selection and providing the expressive arguments for both. Then I will provide the five objections pertaining to both negative and positive selection: 1) That it is “playing God”; 2) that it would undermine the attitude to children as gifts to be unconditionally accepted and loved; 3) that there is no perfect child; 4) that it is eugenics
This objection implies that negative and positive selection seek to make the perfect child, although we all know there is no such thing as the perfect child. Brock states that there are two mistakes in this objection. First being that as said above, we do not know what the perfect child truly is. One may see a disabled free child to be perfect, and another may believe that a disabled child is perfect. For negative selection, if genetic diseases were not classified under a “genetic disease” from previous negative judgments, Brock believes it would be classified instead as a genetic difference. Same goes for positive selection, all we can believe is that the enhancement is meant to make the persons life better. But, judgments can always be made relative to the situation. For example, increased intelligence or increased physical strength, these may be better judgments yet judgments are still made. Secondly, even though one parent may have their own belief of the perfect child, they do not have the ability to know what a perfect child is for someone else. . As Brock says, “there is no perfect child, not in reality, but also even as an ideal” (Brock, 271). As humans, we all have different views on what a good life will be, so based on our views, each parent will have different interpretations of what is a “perfect child”. Overall, neither negative note positive selection can determine there is only one “best life, nor in turn that
Brock mentions in his article that eugenics has had a negative connotation towards it since the Nazi’s had used it to justify their actions. Eugenics, anytime mentioned, is a “discussion stopper about its ethical character”, but Brock believes that eugenics itself, “the betterment through selection, is not obviously in itself or inherently immoral” (Brock, 274). Even though eugenics was used wrongly to justify the Nazi reign, it was intended to positively affect a population. In this sense, eugenics is used not for the population sense but through the perspective of a parent who is only trying to provide a better life for their child, and therefore misleading to call it eugenics. With eugenics there are four features of eugenics movements that are negative. The first feature being that eugenics is the “belief in the deterioration of the gene pool and a consequent encouragement of the ‘fit’ and discouragement of the ‘unfit’… [and] consider the fit and unfit was deeply influenced by racial, class, ethnic, and national stereotypes and prejudices” , the second feature was an “excessive belief in the hereditability of behavioral traits… that the solution to social problems lay in biology rather than social reforms” , the third feature was “the failure to recognize and acknowledge the pluralism about what is a good person and a good society”, the fourth feature being the “role of the state in reproductive choices,