In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.
Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.
As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.
Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
What about leaving this to the parents? Does the rest of the society (in practice: busibodies who have enough time to care) have a standing to stop them? Why should anyone worship their ethnic features? That strikes me as extra dystopian.
Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem.
Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel.
There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either.
Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this.
IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
Very young kids cannot consent to any treatment, and if we said "no treatments without personal consent of the patient", we wouldn't be able to treat sick newborns at all.
"ohh well that's the cost of progress"
Yes, it is. We can be a bit more careful, but progress is ultimately risky, because you are entering an unknown terrain. A lot of modern products that you now safely use, including electricity, air travel and banal over-the-counter medications, has a nontrivial body count. If your attitudes prevailed, we would have none of those.
Experimental procedures to save those already here != Experimental reproductive technology.
Before trying to play God and manipulating the very fabric of life itself you can be a foster parent or have a very frank conversation with your partner on your options.
No one’s going to know the long term effects of this until 20 or 30 years later.
“Sorry Billy , you have painful incurable diseases because we created you with experimental procedures that required merging multiple embryos together, good luck.”
What if this creates completely new genetic illnesses? Might not happen this generation, might happen 2 or 3 generations down to the line.
In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.
Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.
As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.
Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.