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Could Colorblindness Cure Be Morally Wrong?
destinyland writes "One in 12 men suffers from colorblindness, though '[t]he good news here is that these folks are simply missing a patch of DNA ... which is just the kind of challenge this Millennium is made for. Enter science.' But NPR's Moira Gunn (from Biotech Nation) now asks a provocative question. Is it wrong to cure colorblindness? She reports on an experiment that used a virus to introduce corrective DNA into colorblind monkeys. ('It took 20 weeks, but eventually the monkeys started distinguishing between red and green.') Then she asks, could it be viewed differently? 'Are we trying to 'normalize' humans to a threshold of experience?'"
"Would you like to be cured?"
Problem solved.
Deleted
Who knows what kind of mutations would best preserve human life here on Earth . . . or in Space . . . or on another planet? We're infants playing with power tools!
Are we talking about curing the lower case color blind or the upper case Color Blind?
I am waiting for the tetrachromat patch. So, I think you can assume my position.
i think it would be morally wrong to have the ability to cure the colorblind (or any other disability or disease) but not do it out of some delusional religious belief.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's not all puppies and kittens. When I asked my wife for my gray towel, she looked at me quite puzzled. It was shortly thereafter that the mystery of why her husband was using a purple towel was solved.
After calming me down with some orange slices and some fetal spooning, E.T. revealed to me his singular purpose.
Plus infrared and ultraviolet.
What kind of stupid, half-witted, pseudo-concern is this? This is the same as asking if a cure for cancer is morally wrong; after all, it, too, is [ultimately] due to faulty genetics.
I'm a consenting adult.
If I want to put a drug into my body, it's my right. If I want to put a penis into me, it's my right. If I want to put my penis into something, it's my right.
If I want my DNA changed, then it's my right. Anyone who says otherwise is a prohibitionist and a statist, just like people who support our government locking up consenting adults for other victimless acts.
When Qualia is concerned, nothing is certain. It's reasonable to produce scientific measurements of this and that. But what colours (or saturation) they *map* to inside the brain is another matter. For example, some creatures are monochromats, which means they can probably only see one colour. But what that colour actually is, is anyone's guess.
Apparently, some people have four colour cones instead of three. Do they see a new colour competely outside our range, or just have extra 'depth' to distinguish our current range more easily?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
What about deaf? Apparently, there are some parents who would deliberately wish to have a deaf child.
'We celebrated when we found out about Molly's deafness,' says Lichy. 'Being deaf is not about being disabled, or medically incomplete - it's about being part of a linguistic minority. We're proud, not of the medical aspect of deafness, but of the language we use and the community we live in.'
Now the couple are hoping to have a second child, one they also wish to be deaf
Not that I know anything about it, but they are out there. I hope those in the know will chime in here.
I can see how the topic of meddling with DNA to augment/fix people can be a slippery slope, but by itself the question of "is it morally wrong to cure colorblindness" seems to be the same as "is it morally wrong to cure short/far sightedness". We already normalize things like this and it's entirely by individual choice. You can choose to wear your glasses or not and now you'll be able to get your color vision corrected or not.
It can't be wrong if we are fixing an inability to process particular wavelengths of light.There are definitely other things that we could do when we mess with bio-engineering /genetics etc that could raise moral and ethical issues . Now, using DNA to provide someone the ability to hear like a dog etc etc, that is more serious stuff ofcourse or maybe not.
Maybe it is moral that if we have technology that can improve our senses, it is ok to improve it even if we humans were not gifted with it at birth. I dont believe Nature is perfect.
No. It's not "normalization". Being able to differentiate between colors is incredibly valuable.
Now if they were researching gene therapy to make swarthy folks more acceptably white we might have something to complain about.
In a related note: If I could get gene therapy to let me see further into the UV and IR ranges I'd totally go for it.
As the child of a color-blind dad, I think the worst part is getting all the various shades of brown, red and green play-dough mixed up into one nasty brown color all the time. Eventually we stopped letting him get near it. Although reflecting back, that may have just been his way of getting us to clean up ourselves....
How about you just let people invent the cure and then let them ask the individuals who are colorblind if they want to be cured or not? It's only "morally wrong" if you try to force someone to be "cured" from something they don't see as a disease.
Let's ask another question: Is it morally wrong to deny someone a cure because in your own infinite arrogance you think it's "wrong" to give it to them?
Liberty in your lifetime
Ahh... Another Dr. Pangloss who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds... We've been dealing with this sort of idiocy for quite some time now, at least since Voltaire satirized it in 1759
http://www.shmoop.com/candide/dr-pangloss.html
I say "fuck you" to your moral objection. Color blindness is a disability. It may not be anywhere near as serious as being handicapped, missing an appendage, or say, a whole eye, but it does cause problems nonetheless.
If I could get my colorblindness fixed/cured/eliminated and it's affordable, I'd do it. Seriously, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but there's stuff I simply don't see and I'm not even that color blind. The orange paint on grass used by contractors? Essentially invisible to me. Entire fields are closed to me due to colorblindness. Can't become an electrician due to color coding, for example.
The whole "moral" aspect is by people who think that an amputee shouldn't want their legs back just to be "normal" (obviously, an extreme example).
If I'm colorblind and that can be fixed, awesome.
If I'm blind and that can be fixed, awesome.
If I'm deaf and that can be fixed, awesome.
If I'm paraplegic and that can be fixed, awesome.
Seriously, how is this possibly a moral argument?!?
While I despise being sue-happy, this is one of the cases where I really hope the child sues her parents when she grows up for intentionally crippling her.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
There's a little more gray area with deaf people. For better or worse, being deaf is part of what defines who they are and how they see and experience the world. It could be argued that changing the fact that they are deaf would change who they are as people, which can seem a little bit scary. Now personally I think that defining yourself by a disability is as mind bogglingly short sighted and stupid as defining someone else by their disability which is a form of prejudice, but people none the less do it.
OTOH none of the people I know who are colour blind seem to define themselves that way. They don't seem to split the world into people like them and people like me, at least not on the colour blindness axis, so there's probably little risk of large personality shifts.
better link
Would curing a slow-growing cancer or rheumatoid arthritis morally wrong?
How about giving someone a pair of glasses, or contacts or perhaps laser-eye surgery?
How about restoring hearing to a deaf person (or simply the ability to hear about 20KHz again)?
How about vaccinating against rubella or meningitis to prevent deafness?
Or vaccinating people succeptible to polio or small pox?
Well one could argue that many of these are approximatly the same level of intervention as curing color blindness.
The article generally assert that if DNA is some magic new science to be wary of because someone else's "fix" can be another person's "enhancement" as if this is some sort of new issue. Sadly it is not. HGH is a recent example of something not-dna related. HGH is medically useful to accelerate the development of children that have development deficiencies and are used by some atheletes to gain an enhancement. Some people are taking ritalin and adderall to help with hyperactivity, but others to get better SAT scores. An older example might be taking antibiotics or steroids.
DNA retro-technology isn't moral or immoral, it's just a new technology like many others that spun out of scientific research. The people who apply the technology are either moral or immoral (or amoral) about it. Sadly there are some of each type that apply any technological advance. I guess the question at least keeps bioethicist employed.
What if they someday find a "gay gene" (or even just those for various intersex conditions) and cure those?
"Would you like to be heterosexual, just like everyone else?"
(The interesting thing about that is that you can piss off both sides of that debate. What if, in the future, being gay or not was indisputably a choice thanks to medical science? Would those who chose to cure themselves be seen as traitors or...?)
Lol. Green ketchup. Silly color-blind AC, ketchup is blue.
I remember reading that story and being shocked at how narrow minded the parents were. Why would you wish your children to experience a more limited fraction of the universe than they need to? If I had children and a doctor told me that they could have the ability to sense magnetic fields or see ultraviolet then I'd be very happy for them to have that opportunity. I wouldn't say 'no, please cripple their senses to the same degree that mine are crippled so that they can relate to me better' and doing so sounds like it comes very close to child abuse.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I have the same color blindness; and I don't see it as a defect. When inspecting a collection of machined parts, I could unerringly spot the defective parts visually. The defects were as small as .0015". I attribute this acuity to not being distracted by colors I can't see. My ability to discern form in greyscale is also much higher than almost everyone else I know. But don't ask me to look for numbers in the dots.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Interesting thread on that very topic is to be found here. In that same story were several other threads on the same topic, and one even discussing that messed up family (if I remember correctly). Here is another quite emotional comment. As far as I can tell, it boils down to the fact that if you 'cure' someone, it implies that they were deficient to begin with, and a lot of deaf people object to the idea that they are deficient. Sad that it gets in the way of the joys of music and the convenience of talking, but to each his own.
Qxe4
...it is to even ask such a question.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Actually, you have hit the nail on the head. The doctor goes to cure your son's colorblindness, and asks: "While we're in there, would you like to pay some more money to make him taller? Boost his IQ? Make him live longer?"
I'm taking this example from Dr William Leiss. The problem is not that this would be wrong for the child (just assuming for the moment that there wouldn't be nasty unintended side-effects). The problem is the impact on society as a whole. Rich people can afford to extend their lifespans, make themselves beautiful, smarter, and so on. The elite become physically different from birth: physically, mentally, perhaps even morally superior. Imagine a society in which the rich lived twice as long. Do you think this would be just? Do you think freedom and stability could exist under these circumstances?
If this happens, Leiss worries that there will be one more genetic tweak: some of these elites will make their offspring genetically incompatible with others. Differences between classes will be transformed into differences between species.
Of course curing colorblindness on its own will not do that. It may be extremely desirable. But at some point fixing things turns into improving things, and that can be a very dangerous road to go down. There is no clear line between fixing and improving. Before we start down this path, we should think very hard about where we draw that line. Once the line has been crossed, momentum and the power of wealth will be very hard to stop.
Someone I love very much is colorblind. But I think the dangers really do bear thinking about.
Yeah, the 'moral dilemma' is kinda silly. But why stop at curing colourblindness? When can I get my IR and UV vision?
Here is a tale from one of the great Now-It-Can-Told memoirs of World War I:
Of Spies &
Stratagems by Stanley P. Lovell
Lovell was the director of R&D for the OSS. The man who became Bill Donovan's Professor Moriarty. You'll find no better introduction to the real world of spy tech than here.
A most important field of deception and concealment concerned the landing of spies and saboteurs on enemy occupied coastlines, and at the exact spot where he or she would be met by friendly personnel from the underground organizations. This proved to be a most difficult problem for us to solve. Such landings had to be made on nights with no moon.
Early in the war fixed lights and blinkers were used on the shore to mark the rendezvous, but enemy airplanes and sur face vessels often spotted them. Many an agent and his reception committee of resistance fighters were surrounded, picked up and summarily shot.
The ideal shore signal to guide the O.S.S. agent to the selected place was an ultra-violet beacon. A small UV bulb, powered by a single dry-cell battery, would flash intermittently for almost a year. The difficulty arose when we found that even a person with superior eyesight could pick out the ultra-violet signal in the blackness of night only from a distressingly short range. I could not detect it at all beyond one hundred feet. I was about to abandon the UV system of landing signal as worthless, when a surgeon specializing in cataract
removals told me by chance that patients who had undergone that operation had extraordinary sensitivity to ultra-violet light. We asked for volunteers and tested several people whose cataracts had been removed. To our astonishment we found that they could see and pinpoint the little, flashing ultra
violet light from over a mile away, whereas the rest of us could
see nothing but inky blackness.
Brave, elderly people, so selected, guided our operators
infallibly to these normally invisible rendezvous. I am certain
the Germans and the Japanese never had the faintest idea of
how it was done.
Ok how about this.
The whole potential human genome is a search space.
By removing the gene for colorblindness we could remove access to potentially valuable volumes of the search space.
Suppose that the gene for colorblindness turned out to be connected with a gene for telepathy
such that if we remove colorblindness from the human genome we effectively rule out any possibility of evolving telepathy? (ASSUMING one thinks of telepathy as a potential valuable thing for humans to acquire; lets not get sidetracked by that).
Just an arbitrary example of the way in which we could exclude possibilities from future generations.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Quite a number of years ago my brother in law had a car that was getting small rust spots all over it so he decided it needed to be fixed. He called me up to come help him as there were a lot of rust spots. I went over and it took us nearly all day to sand them down and prime them up. He said he would handle the final painting of them. It was a dark brown car. What I did not know was that he has green/brown color blindness. He called me up a couple of days later to say he had it all done. So I went over to take a look at the finished handy work. I damn near busted a gut from laughing because he now had a dark brown car with dark green spots all over it. At first he would not believe me so he called my sister out (she had not seen the car since we started the repairs) and the look on her face and the question "How come there are dark green spots all over it?" started me laughing all over again.
People can afford to be different today and I don't see any problem with it. I don't hate wealthy people because they can afford nice cars, attain beautiful women (often more than one), and receive more specialized care. I see nothing wrong with their success and I hope to be one of those people someday. What I would hate is for someone like you to tell me that I can't strive to differentiate because it might upset a few people and make them envious.
It's not all puppies and kittens. When I asked my wife for my gray towel, she looked at me quite puzzled. It was shortly thereafter that the mystery of why her husband was using a purple towel was solved.
That's like the time I found out my brown pants are actually a shade of green. I knew I was a little colorblind but still. And who the fuck wears green pants (except for me apparently) ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
As the rich pay the early adopter costs, the companies will continue to come out with better mods, reducing the price of the previous ones. The price for the older mods will soon come down enough for middle class folks to mod themselves, and eventually enough to be covered by insurance plans as standard. At least in the world we should strive to create, that is how it would work. There is nothing wrong with the wealthy getting it first, they pay more for it and thereby allow for a higher (if unequal) quality of life for all. It worked that way with lasik in the US. I'm not sure if it worked that way because it was an optional elective surgery so it wasn't the "pay-up or die" situation that allows for higher prices, or whether it was that the insurance companies were completely uninvolved, or for some other reason that the hops have hidden from me.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
You are completely misunderstanding the argument. What you seem to be describing is a form of meritocracy. The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed. Anyone could be smart, anyone could be hard-working. The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior. You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring. Those advantages could be insurmountable.
Also, I guarantee that the social barriers created on the basis of physical differences would be at least as much an impediment to success. If the rich look like supermen, there will be intense prejudice against anyone who obviously lacks those advantages. Prejudice would run rampant because it actually had a basis in fact.
Historically the aristocracy were in fact physically different. The rich ate a diet including meat and a variety of other foods. The poor had only a limited diet of nutritionally incomplete foods - with insufficient protein, for example. Imagining eating a gruel of millet and turnips every day. The difference between rich and poor was manifested physically. You could tell a poor person just by looking at him: his status was physically marked on his body. In a physical conflict the rich would be likely to win simply because they were physically superior.
You are also injecting an ideological implication when you talk about "hate." I never said anything about hating wealthy people. I spoke only of the kind of society such engineering would produce. If the poor could see that they had virtually no chance to succeed no matter how hard they worked, there would be constant unrest. As there was in the middle ages, when peasant revolts were a constant fact of life.
I don't agree that it is easy to differentiate. In some cases perhaps. But in most there is no objective standard for what is "normal." Our idea of normal is cultural, and some people draw the lines in very different places (there is extensive scholarship on this point). Genetics are not normative: evolution makes no value judgments about which characteristics are good and which are bad. Some turn out to be more successful in a given context, but that doesn't make them "good" in a human sense.
I recall a news report that claimed introversion was a disorder that afflicted 25% of the population. Well, maybe in America. In China, if anything it would be extroversion that was considered abnormal.
It's been the single most defining element to my life. Colorblindness shaped my world view from my early youth and has only served to reinforce that view. I'm colorblind. Typically Red Green and I've known since right around my 6th birthday. My grandfather and older brother were as well and when I started getting things wrong I experimented to see if I was or not. I'd pick crayons that had a basic title: Skyblue, Brick Red, Lemon Yellow and I'd find a selection of men and women (teachers, aunts, uncles), without the label, I'd ask them: What color is this crayon? I found if I asked 10 separate people I got 10 answers. If I asked 10 people in a group I got about 4-6 answers and an argument amongst them. One Christmas gathering I did this and it ended up turning into a huge family argument. Granted they're a bit dysfunctional. This taught me that we clearly live in our own shell of a world. Each of our perceptions are unique unto us. I find it a miracle that we've ever communicated or agreed on anything at all. Men already see 30% less of the spectrum than women, yet a colorblind man will insist (very often) that he's correct. I sincerely doubt that any two people have a 100% understanding or perception agreement on anything they experience together. If I were ever a juror and had to decide on a case that was based on eyewitness testimony I do not care how I felt, I'd dismiss it entirely. We are grossly flawed in thinking there is a universality to our understanding of our life. We live in bubbles only barely seeing into someone's bubble.
I'm not grayscale colorblind. But I have trouble, at times, depending on context, differentiating between blue-green, blue-purple, green-brown, brown-red, red-green, purple-gray, gray-green... I'm sure you get the picture.
I'd love to be able to tell when my cellphone or DS Lite needs charging just by the light of the power indicator.
I'd love to be able to tell my girlfriend that the red of her blouse goes great with the highlights in her hair.
I wish I could see those Magic Image thingies.
I hate picking out "the wrong shirt" on St. Patty's Day.
I can't tell resistor colors apart - I had to get help in that class in school.
I had to tell a Navy Sub recruiter that I am colorblind. He stopped calling.
I can't play a lot of video games because of color problems. Metroid Prime, Devil May Cry. Had issues in certain zones in Everquest; still have issues in certain zones in World of Warcraft.
It would make my life easier.
"The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed."
I am sorry that I actually believe this due to the fact that I am an immigrant and never learned the entitlement mindset. "The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior. You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring. Those advantages could be insurmountable."
Has this ever *not* been the case throughout the world? Women for example will rarely mate with someone shorter than themselves. Women look for mates that can provide security (or at least the best they can attract). Men look for healthy (beautiful) looking women. Would you rather turn this upside down? I've personally seen this kind of nonsense in communist China where janitors were given the title of professor or doctor while the professors were drowned and doctors were sent to work the fields. I've personally suffered from this kind of upside-down society as have millions of other Chinese people
Technology is actually the great equalizer as the cost of technology comes down. When in the history of man kind could anyone publish written or video content to the entire world on a shoestring budget? If humans could buy technology to improve themselves - and businesses will strive to ensure that the masses could afford the technology while still earning a healthy profit - it would equalize the difference.
Either let me cure my colorblindness or EVERYONE has to stop using red/green LEDS for status lights.
Those of us that ARE colourblind would LOVE to have it corrected. People don't realise how much of an impact it can have.
I work in IT, not because it's what I dreamt of doing as a kid, but because I wasn't allowed to be a Pilot, a Captain (my father used to drive tugboats for a living) or even a Police officer.
If you haven't experienced it first hand, then you have no right to question whether people who do experience it every single day of their lives, should be "allowed" to change it.
I want the same employment opportunities as everyone else, and I want my nephew (son of my sister) to have the same employment opportunities as everyone else too, whether he's inherited the gene or not as well.
What you seem to be describing is a form of meritocracy. The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed.
You're mixing up quite a bit here.
Merit: it includes IQ, looks, strength, etc.
American dream: everyone is ALLOWED to attempt success (unlike how some parts of the world work, with castes or nobility)
Nothing says hard work will be enough.
Anyone could be smart, anyone could be hard-working. The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior.
Genetic superiority is one kind of merit.
You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring.
This is how it works right now. Note however that there isn't a sharp line between elite and non-elite, and that the elite barely ever reproduce.
Example: I chose a wife based on exactly those attributes, and she chose me in the same way. If you could add up all the attributes to make an eliteness score, you'd likely find that my score is nearly the same as my wife's score. There is an obvious reason for that: we all chase after the best we think we can catch. Now, unsurprisingly, my kids are turning out like my wife and I. It looks like I have passed my advantages on to my offspring.
Historically the aristocracy were in fact physically different. The rich ate a diet including meat and a variety of other foods. The poor had only a limited diet of nutritionally incomplete foods - with insufficient protein, for example. Imagining eating a gruel of millet and turnips every day. The difference between rich and poor was manifested physically. You could tell a poor person just by looking at him: his status was physically marked on his body. In a physical conflict the rich would be likely to win simply because they were physically superior.
Historically??? You can tell today. Obesity is very common among the poor people who live on corn syrup and trans fats. The rich folk subsist on organic produce and seafood. Lots of desirable things are associated with each other: having money, being educated, being tall, being non-obese, looking attractive, facial symmetry, not having STDs, etc.
The difference is that today the poor are not excluded by law. They are unlikely to succeed, but they are allowed to try. We have social mobility, not a social lottery.
I am colorblind and it is a serious handicap.
Before the euro, my country had two bank notes of similar color. I couldn't tell one from the other by color. One of 10 times the value of the other. On a few occasions, I received more change than expected.
I can't open an atlas and use it like you normally would. On every high school exam, the teacher had to help.
I am also a physicist and I couldn't do the spectra analysis practicum during my first year of study. I am likewise limited in the amount of colors I can use to graph data. Some data are multicolored 2D contour plots. Either I have to ask someone what the values are or make educated guesses or apply other time consuming tricks.
On the traffic lights, red is up, green is bottom. I hope they never change it/make it random or my life will be cut short.
It limits my options in life. I can never be a chemist for example.
I also feel I am missing out on some of the beauty in the world.
And so on and so on.
If someone loses a leg in an accident, do you deny him a wheel chair or prosthetic limb? Do you deny someone glasses as their eyesight deteriorates with old age? What about someone who is born deaf? Do you do deny that person the hearing aid implant?
I am colorblind and I want a cure, damnit !!!!
comes when this goes beyond fixing "issues", and starts improving on aspects of the human body.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Indeed, that is fine. On the other side if a cure for deafness becomes available as a British tax payer who has to subsidize deaf children and adults through a range of help and other things given to them, I would consider it completely fair for these benefits to be removed should the cure be removed. So in this particular case should Molly's parents refuse the cure for themselves and Molly then they will have tens of thousands of pounds of annual assistance removed.
Morally there is no reason whatsoever for me to pay to provide assistance for a condition that can be cured.
That's very inspiring, but don't you see? - that's just the point. For every affliction recognized by the AMA, there is always SOMEONE who stared his affliction down and through sheer perseverance and determination, rose to heights he would never reached if he'd been born "normal".
... right? What about AIDS or cancer? Or (more on topic) blindness? Is restoring sight to the blind equally immoral?
I applaud your courage and your attitude but what about the ones who didn't make it? For every success story like yours, how many fell by the wayside because they didn't have what it took to make it in this cruel world under the burden of their handicap? Or who simply had one too many problems to get out from under them? Shall we just tell them as they reach the end of their endurance and give up because it's just too painful that well, there was something that could have helped them by curing some or all of their problems but that society had deemed it immoral to take away the thing that made them special?
How about the ones who simply didn't care to have their affliction be the defining feature of their lives and who have even greater aspirations for themselves? At the risk of offending you (I assure you that that is not my intention), I can't help but sense a bit of "well, I could do it - so can everyone else". Fair enough, but what if they don't have to? Would it be moral for me to wish an affliction on another human being simply because that may make him a better, stronger human being? There are challenges aplenty in this messed up world! Why would I wish for anyone to have more of them than absolutely necessary? It's not a videogame that one should wantonly jack up the difficulty level just for the added challenge.
And more to the point, can't you extrapolate from ADD (as in your case) to EVERY SINGLE HEALTH PROBLEM EVERY SEEN and say that curing that problem was morally wrong because it disrespected the courage and inspirational fortitude that their lives might have displayed? What if I held out the example of Roosevelt as an inspiring example of how a man could have polio and still be one of the greatest presidents the free world has ever seen (which would be fine) but further went on to say that eradicating polio might have been the wrong thing to do because the disease might have brought out the best in some people. Clearly, the polio example is ridiculous
At some point I can't help but feel that people are making a virtue out of necessity and holding on to it even when it becomes optional because it has now been converted into a virtue.
Mind you, all of what I said only makes sense if the alleged cure is actually reasonably safe and WORKS. Given a choice between a completely uncertain cure and a reasonably certain but uncomfortable life, I would probably want to choose the latter. I can't imagine the kind of dilemma a parent would face if asked to choose between such bleak options but the choices are not always so stark.
I can only say in conclusion that if mankind was "meant" to always play the hand that was dealt (if that even means anything), we would still be living in caves and cowering in the dark. Science (especially medical science) is humanity looking "Fate" in her disgusting, passionless eyes and telling her ever so politely to go F*** herself.
This situation seems to be similar to the ongoing debates about the morality of cochlear implants (for the hearing impaired): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Controversy
A few thoughts...
First, I'm colorblind. I'd say it impacts me maybe 1% of my life. Graphs at work must use primary colors. Earlier in life I had the damnedest time with resistor markings. Even now when I crimp CAT5 cable I have someone double-check the colors. For a lot of colorblind people, they can detect the colors, it's just really hard and they have to stare and concentrate. Of course total colorblindness (no color at all) is a different, more rarer condition.
What I wanted to point out though is that earlier in the thread someone got chastised for asking what people would think about a "cure" for gayness if it turned out to be due to a genetic difference. The reason that's a good question is that, unlike colorblindness, it brings into the picture concepts of self-identity and culture. AFAIK no one identifies strongly as being colorblind, or considers themselves part of the "colorblind community".
We ran into this exact problem with my son, who has the Connexin 26 mutation, making him profoundly deaf. We were faced with a choice regarding the "cure" of cochlear implants. The deaf community is strongly against them, in large part because they see the coming demise of sign language and their culture (IMHO). They would go so far as to use disingenuous arguments like "let the child decide when they are 18"--way after the period of language acquisition. In the end we decided that being deaf wasn't "normal" despite what the deaf community said. Was that elitism or practicality? Being deaf has a much bigger impact on one's life than being colorblind.
There's a huge assumption in the phrase "colour blindness". Most languages call it Daltonism, after the discoverer, which makes sense because most of us can see colours, just not quite the same ones you do. For most of us blue and yellow are seen the same as an ISO standard human. Green is more interesting. I see several colours which I've had to learn to group together as "green", since they don't have much in common to me. Yellow-green is obvious, but I also see blue-green (not turquoise - different colour) and red-green. Those infernal bi-coloured LEDs show red-green. Blue-green is the colour of a "go" traffic light green in my country (UK) and in most countries I've visited. Twenty years ago I would still see the odd old red-green traffic "go" light, but they seem to have been replaced as a matter of policy. The difference between a blue-green "go" and a red "stop" is huge for me: no chance of confusion. An amber (I think it's called yellow in the USA) traffic light is much closer to red, and I have to use the position to distinguish them.
Size of the colour patch also matters: I can distinguish finer gradations in colour if the patch is larger. Luminance differences also help. This is part of the reason why specific mains wiring colours in the UK (and I think the EU) were chosen: for most colour-blind people, there is no risk of confusion.
Would I get it changed? Possibly, but it would be a risk trade-off like laser eye surgery for my myopia, with a much more restricted up-side. It would be useful for getting the right white balance for my photography, but not as much of an advantage for that as you might expect.
Much more important, lower risk, and easier is to make sure that you use the right colours for user interfaces - road signs, software etc. - or provide some sort of word-around. Let me give an example: I have to prepare a weekly Powerpoint 2003 slide summarising the state of my projects. There are two places where I have to colour something red/amber/green. One is a cell in a table, and the other is a filled circle. Unfortunately there are different dialogs for editing these colours: one contains two rectangles - the first containing recently used colours, and the second a wider palette. The other dialog contains a hexagonal palette. It doesn't matter hugely exactly which amber or green I use, but I'd like it consistent across the slide. This two-dialog arrangement means that I can't use the position of a colour in a palette to get a consistent selection.
Since come what may, you will always be dealing with people with uncorrected vision even if an upgrade is available, it's worth taking a few minutes to get this right when you are doing design work. It doesn't need to compromise the experience of anyone with standard sight, any more than a blue-green traffic light bothers them.