Section 8
Three cases
Hearing. Intelligence. Athletics. The test runs at each.
Three cases from today’s debate show where the test runs, and where the reading lives.
Hearing
The reading depends on the corridor the edit produces.
An edit that prevents profound deafness from birth, and keeps the body’s other capacities intact, admits the widening reading. The future person inherits a corridor that includes hearing. Everything else stays open to their own choice. Whether to use their hearing. Whether to take part in deaf community as a hearing person. Whether to value hearing at all.
An edit that selects deafness, because the editors value the way deaf community lives and connects, admits the narrowing reading. It closes off the future person’s hearing. It picks a community for a person whose own choice, had it begun, might not have picked it.
The test reads both directions. And the deaf-community case is itself ambiguous, in ways the chapter does not collapse. The shared room deaf community supplies is real. The corridor a deaf person stands in is not categorically narrower than a hearing person’s.
The test runs. It does not pretend to a single verdict where the corridor’s width is contested.
Intelligence
The reading depends on what the edit actually does.
An edit that prevents a condition which would have severely narrowed the future person’s modelling admits the widening reading. That is a condition that closes the corridor in directions the person could not have widened from inside.
An edit that selects for intelligence above the normal range, tuned to an outside standard the editors value, admits the narrowing reading. It closes the future person’s paths at the level of the mind. It picks one configuration, where the person’s own growth might have produced another.
Valuing higher intelligence as always widening fails the test. The future person at the centre of the distribution is not categorically less viable than the one at its edge.
Athletics
The reading depends on what the corridor the edit produces is for.
An edit that prevents a degenerative muscle condition admits the widening reading. That condition would have closed the future person’s mobility, and pushed what they can do down to the corridor’s lower edge.
An edit that selects for elite athletic capacity, tuned to a standard the editors value for the child’s competitive future, admits the narrowing reading.
The line between repairing lost mobility and selecting for elite capacity can be drawn in principle. In practice it is hard to draw. The reading is at the corridor’s actual width. Not the marketing the editors may have used.
Three cases. Three readings. The test runs at each. It does not collapse into a permissive verdict, or a restrictive one, at every point.
It needs honest engagement with the corridor the edit actually produces.
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.