The word “eugenics” invariably calls one thing to mind: the efforts of the Nazi party to purify the Aryan race of “undesirable traits” during the Holocaust. These horrific events remain among mankind's darkest moments. Yet in recent years, a group of bioethicists have begun to reclaim this term, calling for a new “liberal eugenics,” that they say could spur humanity on to a higher stage of evolution.

To some extent, eugenics is already currently in practice: In America, more than 90 percent of fetuses that test positive for Down Syndrome are aborted. But this new brand of liberal eugenics would seek to emphasize positive traits rather than to suppress those seen as negative ones. Scientists can already choose the sex of an infant with relative certainty and can select for traits like hair and eye color. And many scientists expect that they will have even greater control in the near future. 

For Julian Savulescu, Director of the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford, this debate is more than just academic. “Humans must change our morality,” he tells Big Think—otherwise, we will wipe ourselves out. "We exist in a unique moment in human history," he says. According to Savulescu, we possess technologies that, if used improperly, could obliterate the earth. At the same time, natural crises like global warming threaten a similar fate if decisive, coordinated action isn’t taken. Yet we can't seem to put the goals of the planet in front of our own short-sighted needs, as demonstrated by last year's Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Unlike Stephen Hawking, Savulescu believes there is hope here on earth, but overcoming these major problems will require “cooperation at a global level in a way that humans so far have not cooperated.”  Because of our pre-historic past as hunter-gatherers, man's capacity for morality is “limited,” he says. Evolution favored a tribal, short-sighted sense of morality. But now tremendous advances in science have placed potentially apocalyptic technologies in the hands of a people whose sense of morality is largely unchanged from our pre-historic days. We will have to become “post-humans," Savulescu believes.

One way such an engineered evolution could be achieved is through this new form of eugenics. “Our sense of fairness and our basic moral dispositions, like our patterns of sexual behavior and our relationships, have strong biological contributors capable of being understood and being manipulated or changed,” he said at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney last year. Savulescu advocates screening for genes and proteins associated with poor impulse control as well as those for psychopathy and anti-social personality disorder; at the same time genes for compassion and moral thinking should be promoted. Doing so would not only make global cooperation more likely, it would lessen the likelihood of nuclear or biological weapons falling into the wrong hands.