The future person’s authority

The future person cannot be consulted. The room they will arrive in is real now.

The chapter’s load-bearing commitment is this. The future person’s capacity to choose is what the edit must respect. That needs to be said precisely.

The future person does not exist when the edit is made. Their capacity to choose is not there. They cannot be consulted. Their choice cannot be honoured at the level the commitment demands. The chapter agrees, and does not pretend otherwise.

What the chapter sets out is this. The future person’s capacity to choose will exist. The corridor they will stand in is real before that capacity begins. The editor’s commitment acts on a corridor that will, in time, belong to a person whose capacity to choose is intact.

The room

The image is a building. The larger structure is the building. The body the future person will live in is a room, being built before its occupant arrives. Building is real work. The room’s size, its walls and its windows are decisions the building makes.

Build a room with enough light, enough space and good access to the building’s corridors, and it will support whoever turns out to live there.

Build a room narrow, and you have chosen the occupant before they arrived. Their activities fixed in advance. The views the windows could have opened onto closed. The room’s links to the building’s corridors cut down.

Pre-agency editing is building the room. The test reads what the building gives the occupant to come.

This is the fact the editor carries. The editor is not in conversation with the future person. The editor is acting on the corridor that person will inherit.

So the responsibility here is not based on consent. Consent cannot be had at the editing site. The responsibility is based on the corridor. The editor is responsible for whether the corridor produced is one the future person’s choice can work within, at the width the larger human structure supplies.

That responsibility can be stated. It is responsibility for the room the occupant will arrive in. Three conditions. The room admits the width the larger human structure supplies. The room does not narrow the occupant’s capacity to connect below what nature’s ordinary variation would have produced. The room does not select the occupant’s path in advance, for ends outside the occupant’s own choice.

An editor who attends to these three acts on the future person’s behalf. In the exact sense the chapter needs.

An editor who does not is committing parasitic contraction before the person can choose. Whatever the intent. Whatever the institutional procedure the edit was made under.

Parental authority

The responsibility is not cancelled by parental authority.

Parents have real authority over many decisions about the body their child becomes. The chapter does not dispute it.

What parental authority does not include is the authority to narrow the future person’s corridor in directions that person’s own choice could not have selected against.

Cosmetic selection of a child’s traits is parasitic contraction the chapter refuses, whatever the parents’ authority. Eye colour. Height. Body type. Sex, where it is chosen for the parents’ preference rather than to prevent a sex-linked condition.

Parental authority is real where the parents’ choices act on conditions the child’s own choice, once it begins, will be free to take up. Parental authority is not authority over the child’s corridor itself.

The distinction matters. Parental authority is how most decisions about pre-agency editing will be made in practice. So the chapter has to be exact about where that authority ends.

Parents can choose the school their child attends. They cannot choose the mind the child will bring to school.

Parents can choose the languages spoken at home. They cannot choose the capacity for language the child will develop.

Editing is the second kind of decision, not the first.

The edit is where the child’s way of connecting with the world is being built. A school and an edit act on different things. So parental authority cannot read the same at both.

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.