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Nornagest comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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I'm saying what I think would happen, not what should happen.
You can object to what you want, but a statement that starts "Governments will likely regulate it..." is a prediction, not an objection.
It's a prediction based on the existence of objections. If you use that prediction to then argue against the objections, it becomes self-defeating, since successfully using the prediction that way destroys the basis for being able to make the prediction.
I am not arguing against objections to government-mandated genetic modification. I am arguing that, as a matter of fact, Western governments in the near future are unlikely to fully exploit that kind of mandate, partly because those objections are common.
Analogously, I don't believe Western governments are likely, at the moment, to burn opposition literature en masse. It does not therefore follow that arguments for free speech aren't worth taking seriously -- just that the existence of a valid underlying principle doesn't imply imminent dystopian peril.