Seven Traits for the Future

he problem of designing our descendants can be envisaged in two quite different ways: what are we to do as parents in raising our own children? Or, what may be desirable traits to engender and construct in a whole society? It is the latter question that I have chosen to answer, and hence I ask: insofar as we possess the techniques for systematically favoring or promoting in our descendants some traits and behaviors rather than others, ought we to do so, and in the interests of what ideals or goals? I am not concerned with picturing one ideal type of individual, but rather with describing traits that might be found scattered throughout a population; nor am I suggesting the desirability of any one individual possessing all of these traits, let alone that of every individual possessing them equally. The problem that I then confront turns out to be in part a political problem. For what we will be permitted to do to promote certain traits will not be determined