No, I don't think that heuristic passes the sniff test. There are lots of situations where the doing the functional opposite of a morally wrong action is also morally wrong. It's wrong for me to take $50 from you and give it to Bob, and still wrong for me to take $50 from Bob and give it to you. It's wrong to kill babies and wrong to force women to create babies. In these cases the moral inverse isn't to do something that creates the opposite effect, but to just not do the bad thing. Changing a kid's genes so he's smarter may or may not be immoral but it's not related to whether changing a smart kid's genes so he's normal intelligence, at least not in such a formal logic kind of way.
By inverse, I mean reversing states of the world. If Alice and Bob have exactly equal wealth, then transferring $50 from Alice and giving it to Bob decreases total utility, because of the decreasing marginal utility of money. If Bob now has $100 more wealth than Alice, then transferring $50 from Bob to Alice increases total utility by the same amount. If by "take" you meant steal, then returning the stolen money is obviously also a good thing.
If it's wrong to kill babies, then it's good to resuscitate ones that have died (assuming they're in the same state they would have been: no brain damage, etc.)
If making one average child a genius is bad for the world, then making one genius child average must be good for the world.
If you're a utilitarian, then the heuristic is basically a tautology: If moving from state A to state B decreases utility by X, then moving from state B to state A increases utility by the same amount.
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No, I don't think that heuristic passes the sniff test. There are lots of situations where the doing the functional opposite of a morally wrong action is also morally wrong. It's wrong for me to take $50 from you and give it to Bob, and still wrong for me to take $50 from Bob and give it to you. It's wrong to kill babies and wrong to force women to create babies. In these cases the moral inverse isn't to do something that creates the opposite effect, but to just not do the bad thing. Changing a kid's genes so he's smarter may or may not be immoral but it's not related to whether changing a smart kid's genes so he's normal intelligence, at least not in such a formal logic kind of way.
By inverse, I mean reversing states of the world. If Alice and Bob have exactly equal wealth, then transferring $50 from Alice and giving it to Bob decreases total utility, because of the decreasing marginal utility of money. If Bob now has $100 more wealth than Alice, then transferring $50 from Bob to Alice increases total utility by the same amount. If by "take" you meant steal, then returning the stolen money is obviously also a good thing.
If it's wrong to kill babies, then it's good to resuscitate ones that have died (assuming they're in the same state they would have been: no brain damage, etc.)
If making one average child a genius is bad for the world, then making one genius child average must be good for the world.
If you're a utilitarian, then the heuristic is basically a tautology: If moving from state A to state B decreases utility by X, then moving from state B to state A increases utility by the same amount.