It’s
beginning to look a lot like 1913, a decade before the peak of the Social Darwinism movement, a
time when educated and concerned people joined the Race Betterment Foundation
and looked to the settled science of eugenics to save civilization from the
growing horde of the genetically inferior.
Events have
since made the word eugenics distasteful, but not the notion. The idea of human
perfection via managed procreation is back and stronger than ever, at least in
the academy. Now instead of forcible sterilization, the call is for fetal
genetic testing and selective abortion. Race is no longer the marker of
unfitness; having incorrect thoughts or unwelcome moral attitudes and genetic
unworthiness are.
Early
eugenicists embraced contraception. In 1921 Margaret Sanger argued birth control was “not merely of
eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of
Eugenics.” Two such aims were “racial regeneration” and “to improve the quality
of the generations of the future.” She said the “unbalance between the birth
rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’” was “the greatest present menace to
civilization.” She thought “Birth Control propaganda is thus the entering wedge
for the Eugenic educator.” If undesirables didn’t voluntarily stop making
babies, steps would be taken. “Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be
forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and
chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.”
Spartans
preferred exposure for the betterment of mankind while eugenicists touted
culling and sterilizing the unfit, the breeding technique used by farmers to
improve their stock. What was “unfit”? That was often left undefined, though
Sanger pegged low IQ. She often trumpeted statistics like those which showed that 39% of
white “charity obstetrical patients” at one hospital and “70% of the negroes
were found to have a mental age of 11 years or less.”
Real and
imagined racial disparities were eagerly discussed. Conclusions were drawn.
Progress was made. But then came Hitler, concentration camps, and the horrific
practical experience of purging racial impurity. Eugenicists were shamed and
clammed up. The field lay fallow for half a century, until the rise of abortion
“rights” and the expansion of the universities in the late twentieth century.
There arose a new crop of academics convinced that if only they were put in
charge, and just the right people were aborted, the world would be a better
place.
Consider
David DeGrazia, tenured at George Washington University, who in the Journal
of Medical Ethics recently advocated creating a master race via
programmatic “moral bioenhancement.” Like many, DeGrazia gazed upon the
earth and saw “an abundance of immoral behaviour.” He worried “traditional
means of moral enhancement may prove inadequate to achieve needed improvements,”
therefore more drastic measures are called for. Such as selection “of embryos
that contain a gene coding for a greater disposition to altruism” or even
implanting an “artificial chromosome that includes multiple genes coding for
stronger predispositions to a variety of moral virtues.”
He
disfavors letting emerge from the womb those whose DNA codes for “moral
cynicism” (he cites tax cheats), those not wanting to contribute “one’s fair
share,” those with “defective empathy,” those who suffer “a failure of insight
or motivation,” including those not wanting to donate more than 1% of the USA’s
GDP to foreign governments (yes, truly). Who decides on the list of desirable
and therefore allowable traits? Well, people like DeGrazia, though he concedes “it
might make sense to permit parents to adopt more debatable visions of
morality—among reasonable alternatives.”
The
buzzword among cognoscenti is “post-person,” defined in a much-cited 2009 Philosophy
and Public Affairs paper by tenured Duke professor Allen Buchanan, as those
“who would have a higher moral status than that possessed by normal
human beings” (emphasis original). Buchanan admits crafting chromosomal
übermenschen “might be profoundly troubling from the perspective of the
unenhanced (the mere persons) who would no longer enjoy the highest moral
status, as they did when there were only persons and nonpersons (‘lower
animals’).” There’s ample precedent to create this new hierarchy: “the
profoundly demented and infants, do not have some of the characteristics that
moral philosophers typically attribute to persons and that are thought to
ground the distinctive rights that persons have.” Daniel Wikler, tenured at
Harvard, agreed in a 2009 article contributed to Human Enhancement
figuring that once we create super-moral beings, it makes sense to restrict the
legal rights of the not-so-super.
Nicholas
Agar of the University of Wellington is one of only a small (and decreasing)
number of faculty who have read Mary Shelly. In a special issue of this year’s Journal
of Medical Ethics he dared speculate about possible bad and unforeseen
consequences and was immediately taken to task by a brace of academics, like
Ingmar Persson (University of Gothenburg), who has predictably chided
Agar for being “biased” against post-persons.
As is
plain, the leading new-eugenics organ is the Journal of Medical Ethics,
edited by Julian Savulescu (tenured, St Cross College, Oxford), self-appointed
champion of genetic tinkering. He is the public face of the movement, writing
in Reader’s Digest that it is “our duty” to have
“designer babies” (would their color go with our shoes?) and that “people have
a moral obligation to select ethically better children.”
He claims,
“We now know that most psychological characteristics are significantly
determined by certain genes,” like, the “COMT gene” which selects for altruism
(new-eugenicists really go for altruism). If you want your child “to be
faithful and enjoy stable relationships” then abort him if he has “a variant of
AVPR1.” Kill him, too, if he’s saddled with “a certain type of the MA0A gene”
which is “linked to higher levels of violence in children who often suffer
abuse or deprivation.”
Savulescu
and the other new-eugenicists making these sorts of arguments delude
themselves. “We” do not know that psychological characteristics are
significantly determined by certain genes. And, as Yoav Benjamini and others have confirmed, the possibility of
falsely associating a trait with a gene is high. If your baby is discovered to
have “a version of the COMT gene” it does not mean that he will
necessarily be altruistic. He may well grow up to be a cad. The implied claim
that biology explains all or most behavior is false—do all identical twins act
identically?
It is true
that some genes are associated with some behaviors, but the
association is statistical. Experiments with very limited numbers of (mostly
white, educated, young, Western) volunteers show that more people who exhibit a
specific behavior, or that fail to exhibit another, are more likely to have or
lack certain genes than others in the experiments. Having a certain gene or
genes thus does not mean a person will exhibit, or fail to exhibit, a behavior,
especially a behavior as complex as altruism, which can only be measured
crudely. Therefore it is absurd to say that by killing those who possess or
lack a given gene will certainly promote desirable behaviors. Plus, nobody has
any idea what would happen to the human population if certain genes are
systematically removed (via abortion) or inserted (via injection). Perhaps the
post-persons created in this program will be more altruistic, but they may also
be more indolent or stupid as a consequence. To claim that this cannot be so is
to argue wishfully, without evidence.
New-eugenicists
aren’t claiming definitiveness, however. They know that gene-behavior
connections are correlational and that behavior is difficult to unambiguously
define. They know they’re using the “loaded-dice” argument such that aborting
those with or without approved genes only increases the chances of desired
behaviors, but doesn’t guarantee them. They know the correlations are weak, but
they claim they’re good enough.
But just
think. Here in the United States there are certain genes positively associated
with crime, particularly violent crime. One group of people sporting a certain
gene combination commit proportionally far more crime than others lacking these
genes. This association is strong, vastly stronger than the correlation between
altruism and the COMT gene, or any other gene-behavior connection; the
statistical evidence is indisputable. Savulescu and his brother eugenicists’
logic is that those who display these genes should be aborted to create a
better society. Who but an academic could get away with making arguments like
this?
Legal
abortion guarantees eugenics. Already, babies testing for Down’s syndrome are
often aborted. Scientists have recently derived tests to discover over 3,500 genetic
“faults.” It’s
early days with the technology, so expect that number to rise, with definitions
of “faults” increasingly provided by new-eugenicists. What’s forgotten in this
rush for perfection is that no test is error free, and the error rate of the
test depends on the “fault,” which means that a certain fraction of the
pre-born who are killed will die healthy, wrongly suspected as having “faults.”
But you can’t make an omelette, etc.
Eugenics
via abortion for sex selection is legal in the United States, and even touted.
The Manhattan-based Center For Human Reproduction tells pregnant women they may want
to abort if they are concerned about diseases which “are inherited via the
mother but only male offspring are affected (muscular dystrophy, hemophilia,
etc.). In other cases, conditions are more severely expressed in one gender
(Fragile X syndrome, autism in males, etc.) than the other.” They’re not
suggesting your unborn baby boy is unhealthy, but they warn against
having a boy because boys in general are less healthy. Curiously, the bias here
is against males and not females as it is in the rest of the world. Congress
gave itself a chance to ban sex selection, but in 2012 they voted down the Prenatal
Nondiscrimination Act
which would have made such abortions illegal.
New-eugenicists
know that, despite their best and most earnest efforts, a few unauthorized
babies will slip past the goalie. Sensitivity training can’t cure them all.
Academic philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva say kill ‘em
while they’re still infants, before they have a chance to use their forbidden
genes. The pair call their procedure “after-birth abortion.” The subtitle of
their 2012 JME paper is “Why should the baby live?” Their argument? The “moral
status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both
lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an
individual.”
For the
small fraction of genetically inferior who make it out of the womb and past
Giubilini’s and Minerva’s abattoir, there is always sterilization (as practiced
by China, say) or drugs. For example, some claim propranolol douses racism. Sterilization is eugenics, but
drugging somebody might seem not, or at least not per se. But
administration of chemicals can interfere directly with the ability to
procreate, or it might alter behaviors which are correlated with procreation,
and that makes it eugenics.
Yet drugs,
or rather “enhancement” of the already living, is not as optimal as eugenics
argues Savulescu, particularly when it comes to eliminating lawlessness. In a
2006 Journal of Applied Philosophy paper he said “specific genetic
markers” can be tied to “criminal tendency,” i.e. that criminality is
heritable. That’s what he writes from the safety of his ivory tower. Hey,
Julian, let’s me and you head to a pub in Melbourne and you can tell the blokes
there what it would be like if a country was populated only by criminals with
their heritable genes. Should make for an interesting discussion.
