"if you failed hard enough to endorse coercive eugenics"
This might be found a bit too controversial, but I was tempted to come up with not-so-revolting coercive eugenics system. Of course it's not needed, if there is technology for correcting genes, but let's say we only have circa 1900 technology. It has nothing to do with the point of Elizer's note, it's ust my musing.
Coervie eugenics isn't strictly immoral itself. It is a way of protecting people not yet born from genetical flaws - possible diseases, etc. But even giving them less then optimal features - intelligence, strength, looks - is quite equivalent to making them stupidier, weaker, uglier. If you could give your child healthy and pleasent life, yet decide to strip him from that, you are hurting him - it's not like his well-being is your property. But can you have YOUR child, while eugenics prevent you from breeding? Not in genetic sense, but it seems deeply flawed to base parent-child relation simply on genetic code. It's upbringing that matters. Adopted child is in any meaningful way YOUR child. But there are two problems - you can't really use "good genes" people for producing babies for "bad gene" people and "bad gene" mothers may have problem caring newborns without hormonal effect of birth. Way to make eugenics weaker, but overcome these problems, is to limit only mens' breading. When a couple with "good gene man" wants children - let them. If couple with "bad gene man" wants children, then future mother is impregnated by some (possible hired) "good gene man". Normally the couple have protected sex.
It is by no means perfect. But the price for relative well-being of future people is only for a woman to have sex with not her husband, and for husband to be "cheated on". While it seems quite unsettling, it's mainly our cultural norm. While this might be unpleasant for both, it isn't considerably worse then not being able to drink and smoke for woman through pregnancy. Therefore, such coercive eugenics would gradually improve gene pool, while not being considerable more evil then forbidding pregnant woman to smoke cigarettes.
I don't mean to say that such a system would be a good choice. But simply that it would be trading the rights of alive for the rights of not yet born.
I apologize, if above was inappropriate.
"But can you have YOUR child, while eugenics prevent you from breeding? Not in genetic sense, but it seems deeply flawed to base parent-child relation simply on genetic code. It's upbringing that matters. Adopted child is in any meaningful way YOUR child."
Treating people not genetically your children as if they were is a big minus in our evolutionary game these days. It also helps bad behaviour (making children and letting others raise them), so i´d say that it manages to be bad both for yourself and population, though the second part depends on ...
Like any educated denizen of the 21st century, you may have heard of World War II. You may remember that Hitler and the Nazis planned to carry forward a romanticized process of evolution, to breed a new master race, supermen, stronger and smarter than anything that had existed before.
Actually this is a common misconception. Hitler believed that the Aryan superman had previously existed—the Nordic stereotype, the blond blue-eyed beast of prey—but had been polluted by mingling with impure races. There had been a racial Fall from Grace.
It says something about the degree to which the concept of progress permeates Western civilization, that the one is told about Nazi eugenics and hears "They tried to breed a superhuman." You, dear reader—if you failed hard enough to endorse coercive eugenics, you would try to create a superhuman. Because you locate your ideals in your future, not in your past. Because you are creative. The thought of breeding back to some Nordic archetype from a thousand years earlier would not even occur to you as a possibility—what, just the Vikings? That's all? If you failed hard enough to kill, you would damn well try to reach heights never before reached, or what a waste it would all be, eh? Well, that's one reason you're not a Nazi, dear reader.
It says something about how difficult it is for the relatively healthy to envision themselves in the shoes of the relatively sick, that we are told of the Nazis, and distort the tale to make them defective transhumanists.
It's the Communists who were the defective transhumanists. "New Soviet Man" and all that. The Nazis were quite definitely the bioconservatives of the tale.