I'm confused about your confusion. All I meant was that future generations will probably think it's weird and immoral that we allow children to have genetic diseases, when we have the technology to stop it.

I'm trying to ask a deeper question in response. Asking what "our children" means was an attempt to get there with a somewhat Socratic method.

What I'm trying to do is get you to consider the full implications of not caring about whether things are "natural". What if we not only swapped around genes, but edited genes directly to cure things? What if we added enhancements? What if we completely genetically engineered babies from scratch and called them "our children", would that be okay with you? What if we made AI enabled robots and called them "our children"? Why not... just not have children at all anyway? At what point do you draw the line, and by what principle? To say that "natural" humans doesn't matter raises the question of why "humans" matter at all in the first place.

I raise the issue of the "human experience" because that's the paradigm I live in, and I wonder what I'm going to do without it. I suspect that anybody who cares about "the next generation" but doesn't care if babies are "natural" also thinks they're living within the "human experience" but they haven't thought it through. I think that if you don't care about "natural" babies, you might as well go all the way and be an anti-natalist. I'm actually quite open to that as well, at least it's consistent.

BTW one way of avoiding genetic diseases without genetic engineering would be genetic screening. Such things exist as I understand, I met a guy who said he worked for a company that did this sort of thing. Certain couples just avoid having children. Maybe they can adopt. Is that unfair to them that they don't get to have "their" children? Again, why does that even matter if you don't care about things being "natural"?

Thank you for continuing this conversation so late after the article was posted, btw. Now that I've laid it all out I wonder what ideas you have in response.

> What if we not only swapped around genes, but edited genes directly to cure things? What if we added enhancements? What if we completely genetically engineered babies from scratch and called them "our children", would that be okay with you? What if we made AI enabled robots and called them "our children"?

All of these things will happen in the (potentially near) future. The world will be much weirder, but also better.

I mean you can argue that people shouldn't reproduce at all, but good luck convincing everyone of that any time soon. A significant percentage of people believe even having such a view is horribly immoral (it's associated with eugenics and other bad things) and that reproduction is a basic human right.

So if we are going to be reproducing, there is nothing wrong with removing genetic diseases.

> good luck convincing everyone of that any time soon

I wonder why people's willingness to accept is your standard for what is acceptable. I would think convincing people of having designer babies, while less extreme, has the same hurdle.

> we are going to be reproducing

And again, "we ... reproducing" seems a little strange here if you're willing to accept a future with robotic "offspring" as an extension of your view. It's more like "we are creating new life and bestowing our culture onto it". Is that what people really want? Is there any point to it?