If anything in this world demonstrates there is an eternal market for the pompous ass, bioethics is proving the case in spades. Hardly a day passes that some wimp spouting gibberish that would confound a PhD in Feminist Studies is not given a forum in some public media.

If you have been avoiding reading them, you are wise. In case you are curious but don't wish to spend the time here is the bottom line of everyone of their blatherings. Are you ready?

When I was a kid in the 50s and heard that in the Saturday Matinees I kept thinking, why not? It seems some of my contemporaries agreed completely. I remind everyone I can not be held responsible for my contemporaries.

What is the purpose of an ethicist supposed to do? Damned if I know as they invented their own profession when atheism became popular, rather perhaps when wearing the cloth became unpopular. They were called priests and ministers in the good old days although they might have had some special standing in their organized religion.

Their job was to convert old teaching to the modern day. It was to explain that "He who lives the sword shall die by the sword" also applies to those who live by the gun.

Predating Christianity there was paganism. However ethics in paganism meant the same as morals in Christianity save it was less dogmatic and required more thought to decide the proper behavior.

What they both shared was that tradition and experience were the guide to new situations. And in that they also shared being based solely upon experience. They were not guides to totally new situations.

The Luddites have always exploited those issues in holding that new is wrong.

What is the correct position on bioengineering humans?

One of the reasons for human mating, marriage if you will, it the production of better children. Bioengineering is simply a new way of doing an old thing.

One of the reasons for avoiding mating was one of the parties having a physical or moral defect. Bioengineering offers a means of correction.

In both of the points bioengineering is no different that substituting air travel for horse travel.

After there is experience with bioengineering and we learn the goods and bads of it (knowing nothing is 100% either good or bad) then counsel and ethical judgment applies. Does the good outweigh the bad? and the rest of those eternal human questions to which we turn to experts if we can not handle ourselves.

So what are these bioethics types doing? What are their religious equivalents doing? They are saying "don't" in the subtlest possible terms. At least if they are openly religious they have the common decency to say we should not play god, just as in the old Saturday matinee movies.

They pretend to have a knowledge of life, particularly human life. They never quite tell us where they got this knowledge and have certainly never published on the subject. So what can they be but Luddites?

Their conclusions, no matter how many boring thousands of words in which they are coached, are alway in the negative.

The reality is, what is presented as some sort of great moral responsibility, some kind of dirty idea, of producing a perfect child is one hell of a great idea. Speaking for myself after over half a century, if my parents would have done a little genetic engineering on me just for tooth decay I would have to consider it a great moral right. Hell with moral good, a very cost effective thing to have done.

And lets lay that out for every other disease and infirmity. Don't start bringing up problems with a race of blue-eyed blonds until we deal with a race of Hollywood starlets who do not need to pay to for the nose job or to have their teeth capped. The ethicists can start collecting problems with human engineering when they are among the disease free, infirmity free generation that has benefited from it all.

We won't have time to consider improving the human race until we have corrected the obvious problems. And those will be at least two generations of effort. So what if a couple of improvements are snuck in early? That will be the test of real ethicists rather than pseudo-ethicists who are really of the Saturday matinee school of wisdom.

Here is a question for a real ethicist. Is it right to have a fetus with a 190 IQ if the parents are not prepared to raise him? Are the parents ready to be considered fools by their child from about age 7 onwards? Can the child ever love parents whom he has known are fools from that age and whom he knows have never been able to do anything for him other than food, clothing and shelter?

On the other hand, how can they not do the best for their child? But is a high IQ the best?

Change the him to a her. Beauty? Wit? Charm?

With either, has happiness ever been a consequence of intelligence or beauty?

When we get there, ethicists, people who study people's lives who live with those decisions of their parents, will have a job. But then, then next generation will have to study the decisions of those born for exceptional talent or beauty. Will they be as sexist as I in my sex connection with those characteristics?

There are no ethical considerations in bioengineering today as there are no errors as yet. Those who pretend to be ethicists today are arguing nothing should ever be done to cause a mistake and thus that they, as Luddites, will never have a real job. With a little luck, they never will have a real job.

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