A Line Drawn Through People Does Not Stay Where You Put It

Today Brazil votes on augmentation, and by tonight we will have a number. But the number answers the small question. The large one — the one no ballot phrases plainly — is whether twelve billion of us still intend to belong to a single moral category, or whether we have quietly agreed that a person can be sorted into a lesser one by a procedure they did or did not undergo. History is unkind to sorting. Every line a society draws through its own people, however reasonable at the drafting table, is discovered later to have been drawn through a child. The Naturalists are not wrong that unbounded augmentation strains fairness; the caps' opponents are not wrong that a legal caste is a wound that scars inward. What both miss is that the danger is not the enhanced or the natural-born but the habit of the line itself — the ease with which we learn to look at a neighbor and see a category first. Brazil will render a verdict on policy today. It should be careful what it renders on itself.