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Moving beyond the abortion issues, in the hypothetical above there’s a real chance various regimes would do blood work on their living populations and kill or i

by generj 4y ago

Moving beyond the abortion issues, in the hypothetical above there’s a real chance various regimes would do blood work on their living populations and kill or imprison non-out LGBT people (plus whatever straight people get included due to measurement error). Knowing that this outcome is likely, is it ethically responsible to publish?

trashtester 4y ago
With all due respect, I don't buy your premise. There is a handful of places in the world (mostly in the Middle East) that have the death penalty for homosexual practice, as it is seen as a sin. But in the cases I know, it is sin as a sin for being a voluntary act, not because it's in the DNA. The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight. You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?
- generj 4y ago
  At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. And that surveillance would thus catch and punish more people. To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Voluntary acts feel much less voluntary when they are extraordinarily self-actualizing. I’m not informed enough about selective abortion to offer good thoughts. I tend to believe if a metric is not allowed for selection for one direction it shouldn’t be allowed in the other.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    > At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. Ok, now you're becoming reasonable > To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Some of those same countries do exactly that. What do you think happens to a woman in Iran who has sex outside of marriage? Anyway, why should a few crazy countries like that determine what can be published in Nature? If there are low-hanging fruits that they can abuse to persecute people, they will just fund the studies domestically. But honestly, this sounds just like paranoia. The real discussion is about the parent not wanting to give birth to a kid with trait X.

by generj 4y ago

trashtester 4y ago

With all due respect, I don't buy your premise. There is a handful of places in the world (mostly in the Middle East) that have the death penalty for homosexual practice, as it is seen as a sin. But in the cases I know, it is sin as a sin for being a voluntary act, not because it's in the DNA. The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight. You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?

generj 4y ago
At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. And that surveillance would thus catch and punish more people. To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Voluntary acts feel much less voluntary when they are extraordinarily self-actualizing. I’m not informed enough about selective abortion to offer good thoughts. I tend to believe if a metric is not allowed for selection for one direction it shouldn’t be allowed in the other.
- trashtester 4y ago
  > At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. Ok, now you're becoming reasonable > To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Some of those same countries do exactly that. What do you think happens to a woman in Iran who has sex outside of marriage? Anyway, why should a few crazy countries like that determine what can be published in Nature? If there are low-hanging fruits that they can abuse to persecute people, they will just fund the studies domestically. But honestly, this sounds just like paranoia. The real discussion is about the parent not wanting to give birth to a kid with trait X.