This Associated Press piece on “designer babies” highlights how — for some — the ability to do something is sufficient grounds for its rightness:
But Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said she’s not troubled by the work. She said the idea of successfully modifying babies by inserting genes remains a technically daunting challenge.
“We’re not even close to having that technology in hand to be able to do it right,” she said, and it would be ethically unacceptable to try it when it’s unsafe.
Does Hudson mean that if we did have the technology in hand, it would be OK to proceed? What does she mean by “unsafe?” Indeed, how would one know if a procedure is safe, unless it is tested (as a potentially unsafe modification) on a living human being?
Please, let us not make the most helpless among us into guinea pigs for so-called advancement.