Bioethics report, Genome Editing and Human Reproduction: social and ethical issues but they challenge us to go further still. i I want to suggest that, although their analysis is clear and accurate, its rather ‘molecular’approach neglects the overall arc and orientation of the report. Furthermore, their conclusions about prospective parents’ reproductive obligations lack sensitivity to the proper evaluative context and offer littlein the way of policy prescriptions. A neglected aspect of the report is the dialectical relation of the three sets of considerations through which it advances: those relating to the individuals directly involved, the wider society in which they live, and the future of human being in general. In particular, Gyngell et al.’s analysis does not attend to how the second principle advanced in the report (that of solidarity and social justice) interacts with the first (that of the welfare of the future person). It also ignores an important implication of the refusal of a final synthesis (which would be that heritable genome editing–HGE–is categorically at odds with the interests of humanity), namely, to inaugurate a continual process of reflection between the first two sets of considerations. And it therefore inevitably glosses over practical questions of the mode and venue for this reflection. Something that has not been well understood in the reception of the report, perhaps due to the way in which the two principles in the third chapter are drafted, is that these should be read not as conditions that must be satisfied but as orientational principles for the development of practical governance. In insisting on this reading, I realise that I may lose some of Gyngell et al.’s approval. They see operational specificity, after all, as one of the virtues of the Nuffield report; they would, I think, like to i Gyngell C, 1 Bowman-Smart H and Savulescu J (2019) available at: http://nuffieldbioethics. org/project/genome-editing-human-reproduction. make the Nuffield report ‘ethics committee-ready’. ii This, however, would be to short circuit the work of elaborating ethical governance, in the light of broad and inclusive societal debate, in a particular set of sociotechnical circumstances. iii Unlike for Gyngell et al, then, a particular concern of the Nuffield report is how the moral argument in Chapter three relates to the discussion of political governance in Chapter 4. Let me now briefly address the main ways in which Gyngell et al.‘pick up’and depart from the Nuffield report. They argue: