Where the reach ends

Five questions this chapter names and hands on.

This chapter sets up the widening and narrowing test for pre-agency editing. It does not close every question beside it. Five are handed on.

Edits that reach across generations. Germline editing passes into children, grandchildren and every generation after. That is different from editing one person’s body. This chapter’s test reads the corridor of the future person the edit produces. Germline editing acts on the corridors of future people across generations, so the responsibility weighs more in proportion. The chapter names the difference. How the test runs across generations is its own work, and the chapter does not pretend to close it.

Edits under inequality. Editing may be available to some bodies and not to others, where the larger structure has not supplied access at the dignity-floor. That produces parasitic contraction at the level of the whole structure. One class of corridors widened, where editing is available. Another class not widened, where it is withheld. The difference passes into the shared room across generations. The chapter names this as real. Reading the edit cannot be cleanly separated from reading who has access. Chapter Twelve, on how resources are shared, takes this up directly. This chapter sets the test at the editing site, and names the duty at the access site as open work.

Regulation. The chapter has set the test. It has not built the rules for applying it. Whether and how a civilisation should permit, restrict or oversee pre-agency editing is not settled here. The book’s chapters on law, governance and economics take up the institutions. This chapter gives the reading those institutions would have to honour.

Where in development the edit is made. An edit can act on the embryo. It can act on the egg or the sperm. It can act on a body’s own cells in a way that also reaches its children. The book calls these the embryonic site, the gametic site and the somatic-with-germline-effect site. Different technologies act at different points in a body’s growth. The test is the same at each. What differs is what surrounds it: what the corridor is at the point of editing, and how the future person stands in relation to the decision. The detailed reading at each site is its own work.

A child who has begun to choose. Some edits act on a person whose capacity to choose has begun but is not yet adult. A child given gene therapy, for example. That child stands between the site this chapter reads and the site the next chapter reads, on authority over your own mind. The chapter names the site. The detailed reading belongs partly here, partly to the next chapter, and partly to open work these five chapters do not pretend to close in full.

These are limits, not failures. This chapter sets the test for pre-agency editing. The further reaches are next work, in the book’s other chapters and in the wider debate among institutions.

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.