Kudos to Tucker Carlson and his team at FoxNews. On his Tuesday, June 22, program Tucker exposed the fact that in 2015, the New York based World Science Festival invited one of leftist technocracy’s darlings to gush about tackling the bogeyman of “Climate Change” by forcibly changing human fetal genetics.
The forum was “Life in Our Image – The Ethics of Altering the Human Genome,” at the annual World Science Festival, presented by the non-profit World Science Foundation, and the participant was Matthew Liao, a philosophy and “bioethics” professor at New York University.
In his FoxNews segment, Carlson revealed the fact that many advocates pushing the “gene therapy” mRNA COVID jabs travel in the same technocratic circles as do a branch of contemporary eugenicists, those being people who seem quite enthusiastic about changing fetal genes in the womb, or altering the genetics of parents such that their offspring will be forced to have certain mandated characteristics.
This is not a joke.
To be as fair to Liao’s statements as possible, I watched video of the entire 2015 event, and it simply made him appear even less ethical and more hypocritical.
At the outset, Liao offers "pop-philosophy" cover, claiming that he has a “robust ethical framework” that allows people to “move forward” to do “this ethically.”
Two very simple assumptions. So, one, is that all human beings are, uh, have the same equal moral status. We’re all equal. Right? So it doesn’t matter if you’re an adult or a child. It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or, you know, like, what your IQ is, it doesn’t matter if you’re disabled, or if you’re unconscious, we all have the same equal moral status.
He then hits his second “simple assumption”, which, as one might expect, is a reversal of Natural Rights. Liao claims that all humans have a “right” TO “what I call the fundamental capacities for pursuing a good life.”
Of course, that leaves the definition of “a good life” and “the “fundamental capacities” up to Liao and anyone running the state who might think like he does.
Then Liao gets fuzzier, telling people that, even if scientists have the capability to deliberately create humans with diseases, “we shouldn’t do that.” And he adds a strange "defense" of the right to life:
Suppose that there’s someone with -- that doesn’t have all the fundamental moral capacity -- that’s already on the way, it already has been created, it’s on the way – what this framework tells us is that you don’t have to, you can sort of continue to bring this child to term. You don’t have to abort it, for example. So, this applies, for example, to Down Syndrome children, etc, etc., And the reason is that all human beings have the same moral status.
Which indicates that Mr. Liao is as confused about ethics as he is about Natural Rights.
Ethics are the outward projection of individual morality. One does not discuss ethics without some consistent cognition of morals, which means that if one believes all human beings have “the same moral status,” and he implies that such a moral status is an equal right to not be killed, then one does not say that people “DON’T HAVE TO abort” a child. One says that a person CANNOT ETHICALLY KILL A CHILD.
This inconsistency is important, and runs in tandem with “philosopher” Liao’s sloppy assumption about people having positive “rights to” things, rather than the axiomatic Natural Law precept that rights are based on “reciprocal hands-off,” meaning that people cannot make claims on the lives or property of others.
This, in turn, has a profound bearing on the landscape Liao next treads: his enthusiastic “we could” phrasing that appears to push for fetal genetic manipulation or manipulation of parental genetics to produce generations of humans who won’t leave “Bigfoot” carbon “footprints.”
But there's actually a lot of opportunities for this to solve big world problems. So, one thing is the… climate change, and, there -- I'll just use, you know, sort of climate change is really a big problem. We don't really know how to solve it, but it turns out that we can use human engineering to help us address climate change.
Which assumes that humans are changing the climate (the fear-mongers used to use their pet term “Global Warming” until folks noticed that, according to satellite data, between 1997 and 2006, where was no statistically significant “warming” of the planet) – an assumption that a participant on a “World Science Festival” panel might want to avoid. It also assumes that “we” can “use human engineering.”
As I have noted for MRCTV, the pronoun “we” is soft rhetoric that hides political force and commands. When used in the context of the polis, it’s not voluntary, it’s mandatory.
Related: 2nd Graders Taught that 'Government Gives Us Rights'
Using it so recklessly is not a good fit for a supposed “ethicist” such as Liao.
What is worse is that he proceeds to talk about “engineering” people, and, any way one looks at the process – be it done to a developing fetus or to parents whose offspring will be different due to the genetic changes made to the parents -- such “engineering” is immoral and unethical.
First, since he appears to be less of an ethicist than he is an “ends justify the means” consequentialist, let’s see what Liao thinks ‘human engineering’ can do to battle the mighty titan of Climate Change.
People eat too much meat, right? And if they were to cut down on their consumption of meat, then they would, uh, it would actually help the planet.
But, since people aren’t “willing to give up meat,” as he says, we could use human engineering to make people intolerant to meat.
So, here's a thought, right? So, it turns out that we know a lot about -- so we have this intolerance to, so I for example, I have milk intolerance and there some people who are intolerant to crayfish.
So possibly, we can use human engineering to make it the case that we're intolerant to certain kinds of meat, to certain kinds of bovine proteins. So, that's something that we can do through human engineering. We can kind of possibly address really big world problems through human engineering.
His enthusiasm for "something that we can do through human engineering" sounds a lot like advocacy for either changing post-womb humans through gene-manipulating injections or changing developing humans in the womb to make them incapable of eating beef, chicken, or pork -- and using government to pay for it, which implies additional force.
Likewise, he appears enthusiastic about being able to “make” smaller humans, so that they’ll not be as heavy, which, in his logic, will see them using less fossil fuel for transportation, and, again, addressing his “big issue” of “Climate Change.”
Think of the lifetime, sort of, greenhouse gas emissions required to… the energy that’s required to transport larger people rather than smaller people. But if we’re smaller, just by fifteen centimeters…
You know where he’s going.
So think of just the, you know, like, lifetime greenhouse gas emissions just if we had smaller children.
So, evidently, Liao doesn’t recommend aborting developing children. He seems enthusiastic about using “human engineering” on children – again, either during their development, or by changing the biology of parents, both of which are incredibly unethical and border on the Hitlerian idea of breeding a “Master Race” -- this time of tiny humans who won’t leave big carbon footprints.
Even if one accepts Liao’s twisted ethics, has it ever occurred to him that bigger, stronger people might be able to do physical tasks more efficiently? One big lumberjack, firefighter, or landscaper often can do the work of two smaller people. But that is beside the point...
Let’s return to the fundamentals.
Even if the parents voluntarily chose to change their genetics to make their own children “differently engineered”, this is tantamount to child abuse and is ethically no different than boxing a child’s feet as he or she develops. The preemptive choice to change how one’s own DNA will create another human being assumes prior knowledge that such changes WILL effect that child contrary to how it normally would have developed.
This is a very dark region of scientific exploration, because it depends on what one sees as a potential drawback for a child.
For example, what if a parent could change his or her biology such that his or her offspring would be free of cancer? Would such “human engineering” be acceptable then?
These questions circle us like vultures. But Liao does not provide any positive input as he advocates for “human engineering” to “fight climate change.”
He provides only a glimpse into the conceited hive-mind of the technocracy, which will skirt basic Natural Rights in its march to achieve its global goals.
There’s no connection to ethics in that hive mind, at all.