CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

I'm not anti-GMO but i've been more wary ever since I realized it will inevitably be used to make better citizens (and not by making them better humans).

For abortion, you can claim it impacts others both ways, are you impacting a new born from having its life, or are you preventing a yet to be born child from having a troubled life, and saving family, parents and society its burden.

For a vaccine, are you putting others at risk of a disease by not taking the vaccine?

For bio-hacking, are you possibly creating dangerous virus or bacterias that could harm others, are you making modifications to yourself which will put a tole on the medical system if you later need assistance or special treatment if you mess up, etc.

This is the same reasoning with drugs often, will your modified behavior cause harm to others if you consume them?

Etc.

None of this is black and white, but I think having these discussions on "what harm to others it can cause" is justified.

The first problem is that you are claiming that the child's body is the woman's body. It isn't and you know that. You know that is it an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc, etc. In order to justify abortion, you would need to argue that murder (which is the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being) is justifiable. The logical consequences are devastating. For example, if murder of the most innocent, powerless, dependent, and vulnerable, by those with power over them no less, becomes justifable, then it becomes impossible to argue for the legitimacy any human rights whatsoever. You can't just make up moral principles out of thin air or assign arbitrary boundaries to them according to taste.

The second problem is that this logic seems to put the cart before the horse. In other words, you've decided that abortion is a right axiomatically and you've decided to dismiss anything that would undermine that belief. But the moral acceptability of abortion is not axiomatic and must be judged according to prior moral principles.

"This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine."

See my first point above. Here conservatives are indeed speaking of just their own bodies, so this is a false equivalence.

I'm in favor of drug use (at least almost all), tattoos, body modifications, trying experimental medicine, everything that affects your body. I can see drawing the line at "doing this thing could become a contagion so you can only do it in BSL-4 isolation". But it's your body, your life, you want to spend it stoned or a voluntary amputee or whatever so long as don't take from me, then you should be free to do so.

If you couldn't gouge out your right eye and cast it from thee (Matthew 5:29), would you still have freedom of religion?

> "So you cannot say you have the right to self-harm. Now, if you have, say, a defect in your body that is preventing the proper functioning of your body, then we may correct this defect through intervention. This is restorative, that is, it seeks to restore the function due to the body by virtue of how it ought to function. This is the basis of medicine."

What about vaccination and such where the intent is to cause a small amount of harm now, to prevent a problem you don't have - and may have never faced in any future. This is not restoring a defect, it's augmentative and preventative. Do you not have the right to cause that small harm? And yet that's in opposition to your "direct self-harm is even worse morally than harm of others because it is in direct opposition to one's own good". It's in alignment with one's own good. So, for example, are the torn muscle fibres when weight lifting, or the buildup of lactic acid causing muscle burn when running, or working through the night with no sleep in an emergency.

Less seriously, piercings for jewellery are self-harm and for one's greater happiness in appearance. Do people have no right to wear small pointy uncomfortable high-heel shoes? Is that immoral?

> "I think it's pretty obvious that right implies morally acceptability."

I think it's pretty obvious that there isn't a single "moral acceptability" which everyone agrees on. For example some have the right to eat animals and others consider that morally inacceptable. Some US states have different rules on public nudity than others, and some groups of people have different opinions on the morality of it.

> "You can't claim to have a right to something evil"

Not sure I follow this one; you can't really have a right to murder others, but in the sense of self-harm is it really "evil" to hurt yourself? What is evil and also doesn't involve harm to anyone else?

> "For example, do you have the right to lobotomize a perfectly healthy brain?"

One could argue whether a "perfectly healthy" brain would choose to lobotomize itself, but let's say it does - why do you say that's "very problematic"? The main objection I have - assuming the person is considered sane and healthy - is who is going to pay for the care afterwards, i.e. the harm rolls over onto others and is not purely self-harm. If you could sign that away - it's basically a slow and horrible suicide method.

I think it's pretty obvious that right does NOT imply moral acceptability, and that you can have a right to something evil. In our societies, we have a great deal of disagreement about what things are morally acceptable/permissible. For a good liberal society, we may allow many things that we think are actually immoral, even evil. You need look no further than, say, the religious arena (including atheists) for such disagreement. People disagree about the moral acceptability of worshiping different gods (or about worshiping any 'gods'), calling someone an asshole, teaching your children one thing or another about sex, about engaging in particular sexual acts, about giving charity (or refraining from giving charity) to certain causes, and so on.

We grant people rights to do certain things (and I'm glad we do), but that does not entail that those things are therefore morally acceptable/permissible. You have a right to do them, but maybe you ought not.

Anyway, Maybe a few years ago the barrier to entry was too high for most people but that is so not the case anymore. Even just this year a friend sent me a link to a $2000 gizmo that was about the size of a pack of gum that could do desktop sequencing. Generating your own custom DNA in your bedroom is considerably harder (but not impossible) but it is not at all difficult to order a custom sequence from a half dozen different retailers. The file you send them is just a big chunk of a few letters. It’s assembly code with no comments (yes I know folks do put in comments in text sometimes and sometimes biologically but just like always comments lie more than not), they functionally cannot be checking for what it could do if what you’re working on is even remotely novel. For the price of a playstation you can have it delivered to your door next day air.

There are very real risks here for our entire planet. Possibly one of our largest risks. To hide behind “it’s too difficult for a malicious actor” is not helpful. I think genetic literacy is maybe the only thing we all can do as we might be entering very weird territory as a closed system that has a bent towards global narcissism and self harm.

Something that gives me some comfort is that to be good at it you really have to do a gross and difficult deep dive into how all life works and I think there are very few people that could do that and still feel like it’s ok to do harm at even a small scale. The things we are going to see in the next few years will be pretty fucking weird. I guess when you get down to this level, the only thing to have is something like faith. Eeeek.