Genetically Engineering Babies a Moral Obligation, Says Ethicist

Uh-oh.  And this one's in your court, you nasty mad-scientist commie unethical Brits, you!

Except, Savulescu doesn't sound like a british name...

I don't remember anything suggesting that ethics are determined by genetics.

*Ahem* "Oxford Professor Julian Savulescu...."

He's British enough now!  Nice work pickin' the professors to educate yer young 'uns, there....

You know what would make this world really interesting and functional? If everyone were exactly the same and had exactly the same skills and interests.

I see what you did there.  Clever!

A little sarcasm there, but I honestly don't see genetically engineered babies going anywhere else.

Of course not.  Human emotionally driven reasoning isn't nearly so random as genetic mutation, is it?

(Of course that's always the point of "engineering" of any sort, to eliminate randomness and chaos.)

I'm totally against any type of engineering of the human genes as I feel they are playing God and messing with things Man isn't suppose to mess with....

That isn't the right line of defense.  Allow me to interpolate and extrapolate your reasoning:

• We're not supposed to play God and mess with the natural flow of rivers by building bridges and dams.
  
• We're not supposed to play God and graft parts of one plant onto another one.
  
• We're not supposed to play God and create chemical compounds not found in nature.
  
• We're not supposed to play God and suck water and oil out of the ground that took thousands and millions of years to accumulate there.
  
• We're not supposed to play God and tinker with microclimates by building concrete jungles.

Any decent parent will tell you that they wouldn't want anything other than the child they ended up with (barring extreme circumstances, like the child can't survive without life support). How many of them do you think could have said the same thing before their child was born?

One could argue that different people would want different things in their children, but culture will always play a part in what constitutes "the perfect person". It's a really good way of ending up with a bunch of "cookie cutter" people.

Besides, we already know that most genes control more than one trait. How do we know that changing one gene wouldn't create some really undesirable traits, including things that could cause some real problems.

... or unintentionally remove a few very exceptional ones?

Exactly.

I think it could result in a new explosion of diversity.  Of course, if we don't take the threat of eugenics seriously, that possibility could be destroyed.  But genetic engineering will come, and we can choose to be ready for it, or not.

Didn't Kurt Vonnegut write about this like five decades ago?

"better than chance" my arse