It's pretty understandable and a default position to advocate for it, but it could be a slippery slope, and will definitely push the politics towards engineered babies over natural ones.
A hypothetical clone (in the popular connotation of the word) of myself is essentially identical to my hypothetical identical twin sibling, the distinction is that the hypothetical clone is born after me, and was 'deliberately conceived.' Declaring one to be 'natural' and one to be 'unnatural' is unkind. And arguably, bigoted. (I'm speaking generally, not accusing you of doing this.)
The hypothetical clone will still be a human being in every sense of the word. I suppose you could call them the 'deliberates', but are they more 'deliberate' than those born of copulation or old fashioned, 20th century artificial insemination?
Would identical twins be considered as a higher caste than the 'deliberates'?
Also, what percentage 'clone' do you have to be to be considered a 'clone'? (After all, each 'normal' person only differs from one another in one nucleotide out of every thousand.) Can we replace our damaged organs from those bio-printed of our own DNA? How will this limit proteomic engineering? If we engineer a protein that confers some immunity or cure to an affliction, would we have to deliver it like we do 'artificial' insulin? Or could we "cut the middleman" and edit in a 'copy' of the engineered gene that yields the engineered protein? Might that put the entire genome over some arbitrary 'clone' threshold? Do we wait until the genetic immunity randomly/selectively occurs in nature? Or do we stay 'organic'?
Genomic engineering and artificial genomic reproduction will certainly be the debate of the 21st century. The two fields might engender the next major civil rights movement.
Do we want to give our children better opportunities? Forget superficial stuff like blond hair and blue eyes, we're talking about the possibility of having guaranteed super-healthy, super-happy, super-smart children.
But that's eugenics, and it's been rejected as immoral by pretty much everyone. A big part of the problem, I think, is that a custom-engineered child is a lot more expensive to create than a natural random-chance child, and therefore eugenics only produces super-humans for the rich and powerful, who will become even more rich and powerful by breeding themselves into master race that enslaves everyone else.
Eugenics can't upgrade all of humanity directly because natural breeding, being cheaper, is also much more common. So the vast majority of inferior humans will always outnumber the eugenics-produced super-humans. That's where the enslavement comes in; the super-humans will have to use their inherited wealth and power to make sure they retain control because they can't out-breed everyone else.
The other possibility, and the only way the super-humans can replace the normals, is to kill off all of the normals either directly or by making them infertile. That's even worse than enslavement.
No matter how you look at it, eugenics has a bad outcome if it's not available to everyone at the same time. And if it was available to everyone, we wouldn't call it eugenics. We'd call it 'medicine', 'vaccination', 'pre- and post-natal care', and 'preventative care'.
Selective sexual reproduction and genetic engineering are actually markedly different. Genetic engineering involves precise splicing, insertion, or rearrangement of an organism's genome (or subset of genes). Selective sexual reproduction is a directed random rearrangement of genetic material over successive generations based (on often poorly understood) "meta-characteristics" or traits.
The critical distinction is that genetic engineering is the deliberate editing of exact genetic information, whereas selective sexual reproduction is a gradual, iterated, locally-random mixing of genetic information with imprecise results.
Furthermore, genetic engineering enables genetic mixing that aren't possible with selective sexual reproduction. For example, the insertion of genetic information into E.coli in order to produce human insulin for diabetics. Or, the modification of a particular cyanobacteria to secrete petroleum after photosynthesis.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/gc/c3gc42...
>> ...eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer...
> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding...
This is incorrect. You may be surprised to learn that those deeply complicated, diverse families of afflictions would not be effectively treated via 'controlled breeding'.
A simple, naive disproof of the assertion that cancer can be eliminated in domesticated or selectively selectively bred animals (via artificial selection): pigs, huskies, and laboratory mice all get cancer at rates that are more or less congruent with wild boar, wolves, and rats.
