If the standard Imperial opinion on this kind of stupid could be summed up as “remove from the gene pool as soon as possible, with fire.”
Ironically, his willingness to consider human enhancement at all makes him a cut above the modal Earth bioethicist.
But considering his intention to modify people without their consent, well, the Eldrae have an entire chunk of government built to deal with people like him.
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I feel compelled to point out that he’s not actually talking about enhancement of any sort – just a forcibly induced inability to eat meat.
And the thing is, no matter how much you’d like to give self-described futurists the unearned benefit of the doubt, the actual implementation of this would be to render poor people unable to eat meat while the rich can continue to dine on whatever they like to their hearts’ content, thereby once again ensuring that the people least responsible for the problem bear the brunt of the “solution”.
Look further down the thread where some of his other ideas are quoted.
I’ll ignore that.
I will also point out that “a cut above the modal Earth bioethicist” is close to the most “damning-with-faint-praise”-ish statement it’s conceptually possible to make.
“You’re not fracking for oil, which is a compliment.
“I think.
“Mostly.”
I wonder what Imperials would make of the not exactly luddite, but still restrictive, norms for heritable genemods in the Honorverse.
I mean, in the ridiculous crossover scenario where the Spice Way program pops into the Transveil to find the crazy cousins spread over their own light-millenium with a drastically under-optimized and dangerously unstable dimensional drive…
Well, the entire Mesan Alignment is obviously borked regardless of first contact date: no amount of progress and order could possibly compensate for that much theft of liberty. But once the slavers are crushed, and even with the extensive explanations of the Final War by the remaining polities, I can’t help but think an Imperial reading the Beowulf Life Science Code will think “careful is one thing, but this is self-crippling; no wonder you’re still so primitive!”
The Imperial Navy will be delighted to join the signatories of the Cherwell Convention and enforce it with great vigor (and memory-ripping technologies that make it real easy to follow slavers back home and hit 'em where they live).
This may hopefully be seen as at least some small compensation for the Transveil trade station’s willingness to sell unregulated biotechnologies to anyone who turns up waving a decent-sized wad of cash.
(The ghost of Leonard Detweiler might be quite pleased with the results. His descendants, who have a bad case of “but it has to be done by us” syndrome, not so much.)
I can see some charities also showing up on Torch to help fix the genetic issues that freed slaves have due to Manpower’s…less than efficient methods of creating genetic slaves.
(Prolong is going to be interesting because it’s one of those technologies that will throw a bit of a curve ball.)
Mind you, the Alignment will probably make sure their suicide nanomachines includes a brain-scrambling function to ensure that they can’t be ripped in death which will be very interesting.
And the Imperial opinion of the Solarian League could be summed up as “meh.”
Hah.
“Not bad for an early release. But here’s Prolong, Indefinitely. (Available in six delicious flavors, including classic Immortality Peach!)”