Hard Culture Opposition to Polygenic Risk Score Screening
Once the supervirus extinguishes those upon whom it preys, we will only need to justify our transhumanism to those from hard cultures. Those cultures are much more difficult to win over, as rather than poorly-thought-through aesthetic arguments, they present logically consistent and morally motivated reasons to oppose what we are doing.
Many hard cultures will argue that with existing technology, we only “improve” our kids by not choosing some of our fertilized eggs. We are very sympathetic to this argument and believe it comes from a genuine and logical place. From some hard cultural perspectives (which hold that life begins at conception), people are unnecessarily dying because of what we are doing, but from the perspective of our culture, people would unnecessarily die from preventable diseases if we didn’t screen our embryos. When you live in a multicultural ecosystem, you have to decide where to split the difference on questions like this.
Someone with a life-begins-at-conception perspective might argue: “Yes, but if you are right, all you risk losing by not following the path your ethics dictate is a few kids’ lives and the chance to uplift our species. If we are right, you are extinguishing thousands of lives equal in value to the lives of adult humans. Shouldn’t we as a society err in favor of the moral perspective that would prevent more needless death and outlaw your action?”
If we are playing that game, then we have to consider the perspectives of all cultures. A huge chunk of the world population believes that killing many mammals has the same moral weight as killing a human. Now what? Are you going to have the government ban burgers? Of course not. You don’t want to live in a one-party theocracy any more than we do because both you and we know that the group running that theocracy would be an arm of the cultural supervirus and not one of us. We live at a point in history at which easy, aesthetically pleasing ways of seeing the world will always outnumber logically consistent perspectives.
You might wonder if we can really argue animals have the same rights as human embryos because each human embryo can become a human if brought to term. Again, this is a case of cultural framing. Our view of how time works means we are morally responsible for every human we could have created that didn’t come to exist, not just fertilized eggs that aren’t brought to term. Some cultures hold you responsible for every child not created when sperm is wasted through masturbation or when an egg is left unfertilized. We just take this reasoning one step further: Every child you could have created but don’t represents a life for which you are responsible.
Nobody we’re aware of is arguing that a fertilized egg feels pain when it is terminated. So why does that embryo matter? Why do so many cultures believe it to be a sin for males to masturbate? It’s the potential to be human that gives those things moral weight. But shouldn’t all potential human life be judged equally instead of drawing arbitrary lines at the third trimester, conception, or the emission of the sperm? We would argue that it’s the psychological trick of loss aversion that makes some cultures value a human life more after some arbitrary line has been crossed.[[115]](#_ftn115) To us, anyone who prevents a human from existing is performing an ethically identical act.
With current technology, this is a distinction all pronatalist cultures need to make. It is not mere hair splitting or sophistry. This technology greatly expands the female fertility window (meaning that not using it erases potential human lives), however expanding that fertility window requires the creation of extra fertilized eggs that may not be used once frozen (meaning those using this technology are preventing fertilized eggs from becoming humans). In our view, bans on this technology erase human lives, while from others’ perspectives, this technology needlessly creates and destroys lives.
There are multiple logically consistent views like these that stand in direct conflict. At the end of the day, Simone can’t even have kids without IVF and it is likely that many of our kids won’t be able to either. There are still probably ways we could have kids without crossing others’ moral lines, like single embryo transfers at every attempt, but that approach would be cost prohibitive. So it’s not just that we use this technology to improve ourselves; we personally need it—or at least the part many hard cultures morally object to—in order to survive as a cultural unit. Living in a multicultural ecosystem means making alliances with cultures with which you disagree but respect. Is your cultivar able to disagree with another while working with them toward a common goal?
We hesitate to address arguments that this technology involves “playing God” and that doing so is somehow wrong. Such arguments are fairly insulting to the concept of God and we don’t think the sorts of people to make them would get this far in the book. If basic medical technology allows one to “play God,” then God is pretty weak. We can’t imagine such a God[[116]](#_ftn116) intending for a kid to die via some debilitating genetic disease without realizing we might have the technology to reduce their odds of developing it. If God wants a kid to suffer or die, then He will have ways to make that happen. If a car rolls over on one of our kids, our assumption is God wants us to do everything in our power to lift that car—if, however, a meteorite fatally strikes one of our kids, then we will entertain the thought that God wanted that child dead.
Consider the parable of the drowning man (which even has a Wikipedia page—neat)[[117]](#_ftn117) in which a man gets to heaven and asks God why He did nothing to save him while he drowned and God replies, “Um … that’s what the two boats and the helicopter were for.” Immediately prior to his death, the man had turned these away, insisting God would save him and therefore using a man-made solution would be “playing God.” We are not the types to turn our nose up at one of God’s miracles because it was not flashy enough or because it required some effort on our part. We can’t even imagine how a person could declare a medical technology that has the potential to dramatically lower a child’s chance of severe suffering or death and improve their lives as definitively not a miracle.