The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.
Who benefits from those “advances” in technology in that case?
To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place. Sure, nuclear weapons would likely have been theoretically discovered anyways, but did they need to be actually built? Did we need to execute on actually building and using nuclear weapons to understand practical use cases for nuclear energy?
Because I am certain that powers today in an arms race with each other could and would, by this logic, discover and unleash entirely new man-made horrors upon this world that make nuclear weapons look elementary, if this is the path we’re going to go down.
Just because some people choose to study eugenics does not mean we all have to (or should).
Your argument only works if you consider eugenics to be inherently unethical, which isn't necessarily true.
Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.
The benefits from ethical eugenic research would be to the whole society. You'd get less genetic illnesses, improved metabolisms, better eyesight etc. In theory it's basically just improving the odds of rolling good genetics for everyone.
It's certainly not going to be easy however, and to be frank: I doubt any of us will be alive by the time the research would bear fruits.
> Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.
IMO it really depends on how you're doing the extermination. Killing adults/children with the relevant genes is of course hilariously unethical. Killing fetuses with the same genes is very debatably unethical - as in, a lot of people will very strongly say it's unethical, but other societies will do so at >90% rates (see Down's in Iceland as an example).
I find it hard to think of a way in which editing an individual embryo to change the relevant genes is unethical besides the "changing anything is evil eugenics" objection.
> The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.
I think the Cold War stayed cold because the potential downside of using weapons outweighed the potential benefits—-the use of a single nuke could only bring marginal benefits, but at the risk of Armageddon.
> To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place.
What was the alternative? To bury our heads in the sand and hope that the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were too scrupulous to pursue a strategic advantage? C’mon.
Unilateral disarmament isn’t moral. It’s naive and dangerous.
Which is exactly why it should be studied, especially in a society where we still ostensibly have some semblance of respect for the individual.