In fact, even if you could choose the entire genome of a child (for example, by cloning), you would not have complete control over the child's traits. Of course genes play a role in the traits we have, but what we are actually like is the result of multiple genes interacting with each other, and all of them interacting with the environment. If this is the objection, it embodies the “fallacy of genetic determinism”, the view that our genes determine who we are and what we are like. Genetic interventions, it may be thought, enable more control over what our children will be like than other modes of shaping children. Perhaps the objection is not to exerting control over traits, but rather to completely determining in advance what traits one's children will or will not have.
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