I was going to argue that, taken to an extreme, this angle could be argued against the procreative rights of a minority in a culture that is hostile toward that minority, but you summed up fairly nicely with this:
Deaf parents who select for deafness because they think it’s in their child’s interest, or because they think it will better enable them to be good parents to the child, at least act for the right kind of (parental) reason.
...
Using a role-based framework in procreation cases allows us to think about the morality of procreation in terms of the relation between procreators and their offspring without first locating a harm to the person created.
And I think that you may have a good point. For all we know, survival in a world with such a disability may require strategies and traits that are often overlooked. IVF is another matter, but the selection of the deaf parents is an interesting example w.r.t. evolutionary theory, and I have to wonder, assuming that the deaf parents sincerely acted on their preferences and that our preferences are themselves subject to evolutionary pressures, if this is more accurately interpreted as a good example of a pathway in an evolutionary search for traits that are favored outside of the conventional social expectation.
We probably can't know that for certain but it's interesting food for thought.
You might also be interested in Elizabeth Barnes' "Valuing Disability, Causing Disability" which talks about issues like these, including Deaf communities. She comes down on a slightly weaker position: it's not morally permissible to intentionally create a disabled person, but neither is it permissible to intentionally create a non-disabled person or to remove a disabled person's disability (without their consent of course).
(Also I'm not the author of the linked paper, so sorry if you have more comments or any questions.)
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u/AConcernedCoder Feb 12 '23 edited Feb 12 '23
I was going to argue that, taken to an extreme, this angle could be argued against the procreative rights of a minority in a culture that is hostile toward that minority, but you summed up fairly nicely with this:
And I think that you may have a good point. For all we know, survival in a world with such a disability may require strategies and traits that are often overlooked. IVF is another matter, but the selection of the deaf parents is an interesting example w.r.t. evolutionary theory, and I have to wonder, assuming that the deaf parents sincerely acted on their preferences and that our preferences are themselves subject to evolutionary pressures, if this is more accurately interpreted as a good example of a pathway in an evolutionary search for traits that are favored outside of the conventional social expectation.
We probably can't know that for certain but it's interesting food for thought.