Sick of shaving, Jeffrey Israel wonders whether genetic modification could eventually stop men from growing facial hair in the first place. He considers the ethics:
Maybe by eliminating the ability to grow a hipster beard or mustache we would eventually eliminate "the hipster" from the catalogue of "kinds of people" who inhabit our social world. So what? Fops, poindexters, and Milquetoasts are pretty much extinct kinds of people and this is not generally seen as tragic.
But what about future Hasidic Jews and Sikhs? I suspect some conservationist intuitions will bubble-up when we consider these cases. Isn’t the elimination of an essential part of what it means to be a particular kind of person, gulp, genocide? If the extinction of "hipster" as an available kind of person is ok, but the extinction of "Hasidic Jew" as an available kind of person is not ok, then we need to know precisely why.
Just let it grow.
The Dish 