Four positions

Four positions. Each gets something right. The test is a fifth.

Today’s debate on pre-agency editing has gathered around four positions. The structure places itself among them, not only against the old eugenics.

Bioconservatism

This position says pre-agency editing differs from ordinary reproduction in ways that bring unacceptable risks. It risks turning the child into a commodity. It risks bending the bond between parent and child, by making children the products of their parents’ design. It risks wearing away a humility that the ordinary passing on of life has always supplied.

What it gets right. The editing site is different. Parental authority has limits. Pressure from institutions to optimise can produce parasitic contraction at scale.

Where it falls short: it collapses every kind of editing into the optimisation case. The structure agrees that optimising towards someone else’s preference is parasitic. It does not agree that correcting a lethal disease is the same as optimising. The two differ exactly where the test reads. The structure does not collapse them.

Curing a lethal disease is not the same act.

Liberal eugenics

This position says pre-agency editing is permitted wherever it expands the future person’s options. Any edit a reasonable future person might endorse, if asked, is permitted. The larger structure’s role is only to make sure people have access, and to prevent the worst abuses.

What it gets right. Consent by anticipation means something at the editing site. The future person’s authority is what the edit must, in some sense, respect.

Where it falls short: it treats more options as a clean test. The structure reads the corridor the edit produces. Not the options the editors believe it will supply.

An edit can widen the options on the surface and contract the person underneath. It can select a high-functioning configuration that closes the person’s paths at the level of mind or temperament. That is parasitic contraction, and the surface reading misses it.

Transhumanism

This position says pre-agency editing is how the operator gets beyond its biological corridor. Enhancing the future person is a commitment the larger structure should speed up, not hold back.

What it gets right. The body a person inherits is contingent, not necessary. The operator is not tied to one material, and it can be extended. And some editing does widen what a person can register and commit within.

Where it falls short: it turns widening into a direction, a standing commitment to enhancement. The structure reads each edit by the corridor it produces. It does not endorse enhancement as widening across the board. The future person at the centre of the distribution is not categorically less viable than the one at its edge.

More is not wider.

The chapter on augmentation takes this up in detail, after the person exists. Here, before the person can choose, the structure refuses the transhumanist direction.

Procedural consent

This position says pre-agency editing is permitted wherever institutions supply proper consent procedures for the parents and proper safeguards for the future person. The question comes down to whether the process met the institution’s criteria.

What it gets right. Institutions matter. The conditions under which the decision is made are relevant.

Where it falls short: it reduces the test to the procedure. The structure reads what the edit does to the future person’s corridor. Not whether the institution produced the edit with adequate consent.

An edit made with perfect consent that still narrows the future corridor is parasitic. An edit made with imperfect consent that still widens it is permitted at the editing site. The procedure is real. The procedure is not the test.

The fifth

Four positions. Four readings of what pre-agency editing is. The structure gives a fifth. The widening and narrowing test, applied to the corridor the edit produces. The editor’s authority at the editing site is weighed by their responsibility for what the future corridor will be.

The structure takes the strongest part of what each position gets right. It places each in the four conditions, as they run where one person’s capacity to choose acts on the corridor of a future person whose capacity to choose has not yet begun.

Four positions. The test is a fifth.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 6 — Genetic Engineering. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/06-genetic-engineering/. The film, The room before the occupant: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-6.1 to APP-6.5.