A 1930s exhibit by the Eugenics Society. Some of the signs read "Healthy and Unhealthy Families", "Heredity as the Basis of Efficiency" and "Marry Wisely".
Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greekεύ̃ (eû) 'good, well' and -γενής (genḗs) 'born, come into being, growing/grown')[1] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population.[2][3][4] Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior.[5]
The contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom,[6] and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia,[7] and most European countries (e.g. Sweden and Germany). In this period, people from across the political spectrum espoused eugenic ideas. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations' genetic stock.
Historically, the idea of eugenics has been used to argue for a broad array of practices ranging from prenatal care for mothers deemed genetically desirable to the forced sterilization and murder of those deemed unfit.[5] To population geneticists, the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding without altering allele frequencies; for example, British-Indian scientist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1940 that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent."[8] Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics continues today.[9] Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with factors of measured intelligence that often correlated strongly with social class.
Although it originated as a progressive social movement in the 19th century,[10][11][12][13] in contemporary usage in the 21st century, the term is closely associated with scientific racism. New, liberal eugenics seeks to dissociate itself from old, authoritarian eugenics by rejecting coercive state programs and relying on parental choice.[14]
Eugenic programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction.[5][19][20]: 104–155
In other words, positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged, for example, the eminently intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning.[21] Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally "undesirable". This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.[21] Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; in Nazi Germany, for example, abortion was illegal for women deemed by the state to be fit.[22]
Ellen Swallow Richards (left), the first female student and instructor at MIT, was one of the first to use the term, while Julia Clifford Lathrop (right) continued to promote it in the form of an interdisciplinary academic program later to be mostly absorbed into the field of home economics.
In a New York Times article of May 23, 1926, Rose Field notes of the description, "the simplest [is] efficient living".[24] It is also described as "a right to environment",[25] commonly as dual to a "right of birth" that correspondingly falls under the purview of eugenics.[26]
Euthenics is not normally interpreted to have anything to do with changing the composition of the human gene pool by definition, although everything that affects society has some effect on who reproduces and who does not.[27]
The influential historian of education Abraham Flexner questions its scientific value in stating:
[T]he “science” is artificially pieced together of bits of mental hygiene, child guidance, nutrition, speech development and correction, family problems, wealth consumption, food preparation, household technology, and horticulture. A nursery school and a school for little children are also included. The institute is actually justified in an official publication by the profound question of a girl student who is reported as asking, “What is the connection of Shakespeare with having a baby?” The Vassar Institute of Euthenics bridges this gap![28]
Eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport noted in his article "Euthenics and Eugenics," reprinted in Popular Science Monthly:
Thus the two schools of euthenics and eugenics stand opposed, each viewing the other unkindly. Against eugenics it is urged that it is a fatalistic doctrine and deprives life of the stimulus toward effort. Against euthenics the other side urges that it demands an endless amount of money to patch up conditions in the vain effort to get greater efficiency. Which of the two doctrines is true?
The thoughtful mind must concede that, as is so often the case where doctrines are opposed, each view is partial, incomplete and really false. The truth does not exactly lie between the doctrines; it comprehends them both.
[...] [I]n the generations to come, the teachings and practice of euthenics [...] [may] yield greater result because of the previous practice of the principles of eugenics.[29]
Along similar lines argued psychologist and early intelligence researcherEdward L. Thorndike some two years later for an understanding that better integrates eugenic study:
The more rational the race becomes, the better roads, ships, tools, machines, foods, medicines and the like it will produce to aid itself, though it will need them less. The more sagacious and just and humane the original nature that is bred into man, the better schools, laws, churches, traditions and customs it will fortify itself by. There is no so certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.[30]
Giuseppe Diotti's The selection of the infant Spartans (1840)
According to Plutarch, in Sparta every proper citizen's child was inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia, which determined whether or not the child was fit to live.[31] If the child was deemed incapable of living a Spartan life, the child was usually killed in a chasm near the Taygetus mountain known as the Apothetae.[32][33] Further trials intended to discern a child's fitness included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements to fend for themselves, with the intention of ensuring that only those considered strongest survived and procreated.[34]
The lack of sources by contemporary Greeks mentioning Spartan eugenics and the lack of archeological evidence has brought ideas about Spartan eugenics into question. While infanticide was practiced by Greeks, no contemporary sources support Plutarch's claims of mass infanticide motivated by eugenics.[35] In 2007 the suggestion that infants were dumped near Mount Taygete was called into question due to a lack of physical evidence. Anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios' research found only bodies from adolescence up to the age of approximately 35.[36][37]
Plato's political philosophy included the belief that human reproduction should be cautiously monitored and controlled by the state.[38] He advocated that selective breeding should be applied to both humans and animals. Plato recognized that this form of government control would not be readily accepted, and proposed the truth be concealed from the public via a fixed lottery. Mates, in Plato's Republic, would be chosen by a "marriage number" in which the quality of the individual would be quantitatively analyzed, and persons of high numbers would be allowed to procreate with other persons of high numbers. This would then lead to predictable results and the improvement of the human race. Plato acknowledged the failure of the "marriage number" since "gold soul" persons could still produce "bronze soul" children.[39] Plato's ideas may have been one of the earliest attempts to mathematically analyze genetic inheritance, prefiguring some of what would much later become known as Mendelian genetics.[40]
The geographer Strabo (c. 64 BCE – c. 24 CE) stated that the Samnites would take ten virgin women and ten young men who were considered to be the best representation of their sex and mate them. Any selected male committing a dishonorable act would be separated from his partner.[41]
The Roman perspective
"We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason – to separate the sound from the worthless."
Francis Galton (1822–1911) was a British polymath who coined the term "eugenics".
The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883,[45][46][47][a] directly drawing on the recent work delineating natural selection by his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[49][50][51][b] He published his observations and conclusions chiefly in his influential book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton himself defined it as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations".[53] The first to systematically apply Darwinism theory to human relations, Galton believed that various desirable human qualities were also hereditary ones, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.[54] And it should also be noted that many of the early geneticists were not themselves Darwinians.[51]
Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from various sources.[55] Organizations were formed to win public support for and to sway opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, including the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907 and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen and modified their message to meet religious ideals.[56] In 1909, the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes.[56]
Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists, with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies in the United States were first implemented by state-level legislators in the early 1900s.[57] Eugenic policies also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain.[58] Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium,[59] Brazil,[60]Canada,[61]Japan and Sweden.
Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed eugenics as a social philosophy—a philosophy with implications for social order.[62] That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits ("positive eugenics") or reduced rates of sexual reproduction or sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits ("negative eugenics").
Many leading British politicians subscribed to the theories of eugenics. Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Churchill believed that eugenics could solve "race deterioration" and reduce crime and poverty.[52][71][72]
As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century, when it was practiced around the world and promoted by governments, institutions, and influential individuals. Many countries enacted[73] various eugenics policies, including: genetic screenings, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and sequestering the mentally ill), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, ultimately culminating in genocide. By 2014, gene selection (rather than "people selection") was made possible through advances in genome editing,[74] leading to what is sometimes called new eugenics, also known as "neo-eugenics", "consumer eugenics", or "liberal eugenics"; which focuses on individual freedom and allegedly pulls away from racism, sexism or a focus on intelligence.[75]
Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben.[80] Other biologists who were themselves eugenicists, such as J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher, however, also expressed skepticism in the belief that sterilization of "defectives" (i.e. a purely negative eugenics) would lead to the disappearance of undesirable genetic traits.[81]
Among institutions, the Catholic Church was an opponent of state-enforced sterilizations, but accepted isolating people with hereditary diseases so as not to let them reproduce.[82] Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalize voluntary sterilization were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party.[83] The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii.[56] In this, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned sterilization laws: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."[84]
In fact, more generally, "[m]uch of the opposition to eugenics during that era, at least in Europe, came from the right."[20]: 36 The eugenicists' political successes in Germany and Scandinavia were not at all matched in such countries as Poland and Czechoslovakia, even though measures had been proposed there, largely because of the Catholic church's moderating influence.[85]
"We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: 'What is to come next?"
Morel for one, clearly influenced by Lamarck, claimed that environmental factors such as drugs or alcohol would revert one's offspring to an evolutionarily more primitive stage.[88]
The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's The Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms evolution and progress were in fact often used interchangeably in the 19th century.[89]
The rapid industrial, political and economic progress in 19th-century Europe and North America was, however, paralleled by a sustained discussion about increasing rates of crime, insanity, vagrancy, prostitution, and so forth. Confronted with this apparent paradox, evolutionary scientists, criminal anthropologists and psychiatrists postulated that civilization and scientific progress could be a cause of physical and social pathology as much as a defense against it.[90][page needed]
According to the theory of degeneration, a host of individual and social pathologies in a finite network of diseases, disorders and moral habits could be explained by a biologically based affliction. The primary symptoms of the affliction were thought to be a weakening of the vital forces and willpower of its victim. In this way, a wide range of social and medical deviations, including crime, violence, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, and pornography, could be explained by reference to a biological defect within the individual. The theory of degeneration was therefore predicated on evolutionary theory. The forces of degeneration opposed those of evolution, and those afflicted with degeneration were thought to represent a return to an earlier evolutionary stage. One of the earliest and most systematric approaches along such lines is that of Bénédict Morel, who wrote:
"When under any kind of noxious influence an organism becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for development, but will form a new sub-species, which, like all others, possesses the capacity of transmitting to its offspring, in a continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities, these being morbid deviations from the normal form – gaps in development, malformations and infirmities"[91][d]
Accordingly, degeneration theory owed more to Lamarckism than Darwinism, for only the former knew a "use it or lose it" lemma so characteristically intuitive as to enter the public[93] such as artistic imagination at the unprecedented scale that it did.[e]
Dysgenics refers to any decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or generally adaptive to their environment due to selective pressure disfavouring their reproduction.[95]
In 1915 the term was used by David Starr Jordan to describe the supposed deleterious effects of modern warfare on group-level genetic fitness because of its tendency to kill physically healthy men while preserving the disabled at home.[96][97] Similar concerns had been raised by early eugenicists and social Darwinists during the 19th century, and continued to play a role in scientific and public policy debates throughout the 20th century.[98]
Despite these concerns, genetic studies have shown no evidence for dysgenic effects in human populations.[99][101][102][103] Reviewing Lynn's book, the scholar John R. Wilmoth notes: "Overall, the most puzzling aspect of Lynn's alarmist position is that the deterioration of average intelligence predicted by the eugenicists has not occurred."[104]
Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, refers to any government-mandated program to involuntarilysterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done by surgical or chemical means.
Purported justifications for compulsory sterilization have included population control, eugenics, limiting the spread of HIV, and ethnic genocide.
Several countries implemented sterilization programs in the early 20th century.[105] Although such programs have been made illegal in much of the world, instances of forced or coerced sterilizations still persist.
Eugenic feminism was a current of the women's suffrage movement which overlapped with eugenics.[106] Originally coined by the Lebanese-British physician and vocal eugenicist Caleb Saleeby,[107][108][109] the term has since been applied to summarize views held by prominent feminists of Great Britain and the United States. Some early suffragettes in Canada, especially a group known as The Famous Five, also pushed for various eugenic policies.
Eugenic feminists argued that if women were provided with more rights and equality, the deteriorating characteristics of a given race could be averted.
North American eugenics
American eugenicists generally pursued more public-facing work and accordingly became widely known for their racism in particular. Along these lines, they were often harshly criticized by their British counterparts.[110]
While its American practice was ostensibly about improving genetic quality, it has been argued that eugenics was more about preserving the position of the dominant groups in the population. Scholarly research has determined that people who found themselves targets of the eugenics movement were those who were seen as unfit for society—the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and specific communities of color—and a disproportionate number of those who fell victim to eugenicists' sterilization initiatives were women who were identified as African American, Asian American, or Native American.[111][112] As a result, the United States' eugenics movement is now generally associated with racist and nativist elements, as the movement was to some extent a reaction to demographic and population changes, as well as concerns over the economy and social well-being, rather than scientific genetics.[113][112]
Following the Mexican Revolution, the eugenics movement gained prominence in Mexico. Seeking to change the genetic make-up of the country's population, proponents of eugenics in Mexico focused primarily on rebuilding the population, creating healthy citizens, and ameliorating the effects of perceived social ills such as alcoholism, prostitution, and venereal diseases. Mexican eugenics, at its height in the 1930s, influenced the state's health, education, and welfare policies.[114]
Mexican elites adopted eugenic thinking and raised it under the banner of “the Great Mexican family” (Spanish: la gran familia mexicana).[115]
Unlike in other countries, the eugenics movements in Latin America were largely founded on the idea of neo-Lamarckian eugenics.[116] Neo-Lamarckian eugenics stated that the outside effects experienced by an organism throughout its lifetime changed its genetics permanently, allowing the organism to pass acquired traits onto its offspring.[117] In the Neo-Lamarckian genetic framework, activities such as prostitution and alcoholism could result in the degeneration of future generations, amplifying fears about the effects of certain social ills. However, the supposed genetic malleability also offered hope to certain Latin American eugenicists, as social reform would have the ability to transform the population more permanently.[116]
The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power.[118] Some common early 20th century eugenics methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals, and racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany) as "degenerate" or "unfit", and therefore led to segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, and even mass murder.[119] The Nazi policy of identifying German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit and then systematically killing them with poison gas, referred to as the Aktion T4 campaign, is understood by historians to have paved the way for the Holocaust.[120][121][122]
"All practices aimed at eugenics, any use of the human body or any of its parts for financial gain, and human cloning shall be prohibited."
By the end of World War II, many eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany.[125]H. G. Wells, who had called for "the sterilization of failures" in 1904,[126] stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? that among the human rights, which he believed should be available to all people, was "a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment".[127] After World War II, the practice of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group" fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[128] The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons".[129]
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, actively promoted eugenics as late as 1983.[130] In 1984, Singapore began providing financial incentives to highly educated women to encourage them to have more children. For this purpose was introduced the "Graduate Mother Scheme" that incentivized graduate women to get married as much as the rest of their populace.[131] The incentives were extremely unpopular and regarded as eugenic, and were seen as discriminatory towards Singapore's non-Chinese ethnic population. In 1985, the incentives were partly abandoned as ineffective, while the government matchmaking agency, the Social Development Network, remains active.[132][133][134]
Liberal eugenics, also called new eugenics, aims to make genetic interventions morally acceptable by rejecting coercive state programs and relying on parental choice.[135][14] Bioethicist Nicholas Agar, who coined the term, argues for example that the state should only intervene to forbid interventions that excessively limit a child’s ability to shape their own future.[136] Unlike "authoritarian" or "old" eugenics, liberal eugenics draws on modern scientific knowledge of genomics to enable informed choices aimed at improving well-being.[14]Julien Savulescu further argues that some eugenic practices like prenatal screening for Down syndrome are already widely practiced, without being labeled "eugenics", as they are seen as enhancing freedom rather than restricting it.[137]
However, some critics, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, have argued that modern genetics is a "back door to eugenics".[138] This view was shared by then-White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a "new era of eugenics", and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, "where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products".[139] The United Nations' International Bioethics Committee also noted that while human genetic engineering should not be confused with the 20th century eugenics movements, it nonetheless challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who do not want or cannot afford the technology.[140]
Contested scientific status
In the decades after World War II, the term "eugenics" had taken on a negative connotation and as a result, the use of it became increasingly unpopular within the scientific community. Many organizations and journals that had their origins in the eugenics movement began to distance themselves from the philosophy which spawned them, as when Eugenics Quarterly was renamed Social Biology in 1969.
The elongated berry formed by various plants of the genus Musa we know as banana before (left) and after (right) purposeful human domestication
Teosinte (left) was cultivated and eventually evolved into modern corn (right).
In his original lecture "Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics", Karl Pearson claimed that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine.[145] Similarly apologetic, Czech-American Aleš Hrdlička, head of the American Anthropological Association from 1925 to 1926 and "perhaps the leading physical anthropologist in the country at the time"[146] posited that its ultimate aim "is that it may, on the basis of accumulated knowledge and together with other branches of research, show the tendencies of the actual and future evolution of man, and aid in its possible regulation or improvement. The growing science of eugenics will essentially become applied anthropology."[147]
The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from "ought" to "is" and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons.[148]
Amanda Caleb, Professor of Medical Humanities at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, says "Eugenic laws and policies are now understood as part of a specious devotion to a pseudoscience that actively dehumanizes to support political agendas and not true science or medicine."[152]
The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based on genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan. He demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family with red eyes,[52]: 336–337 demonstrating that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance.[52]: 336–337 [clarification needed] Additionally, Morgan criticized the view that certain traits, such as intelligence and criminality, were hereditary because these traits were subjective.[153][f]
Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect.[156] Andrzej Pękalski, from the University of Wroclaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics program selects a pleiotropic gene that could possibly be associated with a positive trait. Pękalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics program that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two go together.[157]
While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology, at this point there is no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some conditions such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual, so eliminating these genes is undesirable in places where such diseases are common.[144] Such cases in which, furthermore, even individual organisms' massive suffering or even death due to the odd 25 percent of homozygotes ineliminable by natural section under a Mendelian pattern of inheritance may be justified for the greater ecological good that is conspecifics incur a greater so-called heterozygote advantage in turn.[158]
Edwin Black, journalist, historian, and author of War Against the Weak, argues that eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry.[2] Indeed, the most disputed aspect of eugenics has been the definition of "improvement" of the human gene pool, such as what is a beneficial characteristic and what is a defect. Historically, this aspect of eugenics is often considered to be tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience.[2][159]
Regarding the lasting controversy above, himself citing recent scholarship,[161][162]historian of science Aaron Gillette notes that:
Others take a more nuanced view. They recognize that there was a wide variety of eugenic theories, some of which were much less race- or class-based than others. Eugenicists might also give greater or lesser acknowledgment to the role that environment played in shaping human behavior. In some cases, eugenics was almost imperceptibly intertwined with health care, child care, birth control, and sex education issues. In this sense, eugenics has been called, "a 'modern' way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms".[163]: 11
Indeed, granting that the historical phenomenon of eugenics was that of a pseudoscience, Gilette further notes that this derived chiefly from its being "an epiphenomenon of a number of sciences, which all intersected at the claim that it was possible to consciously guide human evolution."[163]: 2
In a book directly addressed at socialist eugenicist J.B.S. Haldane and his once-influential Daedalus, Betrand Russell, had one serious objection of his own: eugenic policies might simply end up being used to reproduce existing power relations "rather than to make men happy."[166]
Environmental ethicistBill McKibben argued against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span and biological constraints on physical and cognitive ability. Attempts to "improve" themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem meaningful in a world where such limitations could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished, he argues, since it would inevitably produce temptations to tamper with such things as cognitive capacities. He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish as examples.[167]
Michael J. Sandel is an American political philosopher and a prominent bioconservative. His article and subsequent book, both titled The Case Against Perfection,[168][169] concern the moral permissibility of genetic engineering or genome editing. Sandel compares genetic and non-genetic forms of enhancement pointing to the fact that much of non-genetic alteration has largely the same effect as genetic engineering. SAT tutors or study drugs such as Ritalin can have similar effects as minor tampering with natural born intelligence. Sandel uses such examples to argue that the most important moral issue with genetic engineering is not that the consequences of manipulating human nature will undermine human agency but the perfectionist aspiration behind such a drive to mastery. For Sandel, "the deepest moral objection to enhancement lies less in the perfection it seeks than in the human disposition it expresses and promotes.”[169] For example, the parental desire for a child to be of a certain genetic quality is incompatible with the special kind of unconditional love parents should have for their children. He writes “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design or products of our will or instruments of our ambition.”[169]
Michael Sandel in 2012
Sandel insists that consequentialist arguments overlook the principle issue of whether bioenhancement should be aspired to at all. He is attributed with the view that human augmentation should be avoided as it expresses an excessive desire to change oneself and 'become masters of our nature.'[170] For example, in the field of cognitive enhancement, he argues that moral question we should be concerned with is not the consequences of inequality of access to such technology in possibly creating two classes of humans but whether we should aspire to such enhancement at all. Similarly, he has argued that the ethical problem with genetic engineering is not that it undermines the child's autonomy, as this claim "wrongly implies that absent a designing parent, children are free to choose their characteristics for themselves."[168] Rather, he sees enhancement as hubristic, taking nature into our own hands: pursuing the fixity of enhancement is an instance of vanity.[171] Sandel also criticizes the argument that a genetically engineered athlete would have an unfair advantage over his unenhanced competitors, suggesting that it has always been the case that some athletes are better endowed genetically than others.[168] In short, Sandel argues that the real ethical problems with genetic engineering concern its effects on humility, responsibility and solidarity.[168]
"If the use of cochlear implants means that there are fewer Deaf people, is this 'genocide'? Does our acceptance of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion mean that we are 'drifting toward a eugenic resurgence that differs only superficially from earlier patterns'. [...] [This] overlooks the crucial fact that cochlear implants do not have victims."
Australian bioethicist Peter Singer (2003),[172] some of whose own relatives were killed in the Holocaust.[173]
Some, for example Nathaniel C. Comfort of Johns Hopkins University, claim that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making process from the state to patients and their families.[174] Comfort suggests that "the eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society; and the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic bio-medicine are too great for us to do otherwise."[175] Others, such as bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson of Keele University and Honorary Research Fellow Eve Garrard at the University of Manchester, claim that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral.[176]
In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible (so long as such policies do not infringe on individuals' reproductive rights or exert undue pressures on prospective parents to use these technologies) in order to maximize public health and minimize the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements.[20]
In his book A Theory of Justice (1971), American philosopher John Rawls argued that "[o]ver time a society is to take steps to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects".[177] The original position, a hypothetical situation developed by Rawls, has been used as an argument for negative eugenics.[178][179] Accordingly, some morally support germline editing precisely because of its capacity to (re)distribute such Rawlsian primary goods.[180][181]
Bostrom and Ord introduced the reversal test to provide an answer to the question of how one can, given that humans might suffer from irrational status quo bias, distinguish between valid criticisms of a proposed increase in some human trait and criticisms merely motivated by resistance to change.[182] The reversal test attempts to do this by asking whether it would be a good thing if the trait was decreased: An example given is that if someone objects that an increase in intelligence would be a bad thing due to more dangerous weapons being made etc., the objector to that position would then ask "Shouldn't we decrease intelligence then?"
"Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias." (p. 664)[182]
Ideally the test will help reveal whether status quo bias is an important causal factor in the initial judgement.
A similar thought experiment in regards to dampening traumatic memories was described by Adam J. Kolber, imagining whether aliens naturally resistant to traumatic memories should adopt traumatic "memory enhancement".[183] The "trip to reality" rebuttal to Nozick's experience machine thought experiment (where one's entire current life is shown to be a simulation and one is offered to return to reality) can also be seen as a form of reversal test.[184]
The utilitarian perspective of Procreative Beneficence
An argument[vague] in favor of this principle is that traits (such as empathy, memory, etc.) are "all-purpose means" in the sense of being instrumental in realizing whatever life plans the child may come to have.[190]
Philosopher Walter Veit has argued that because there is no intrinsic moral difference between "creating" and "choosing" a life, eugenics becomes a natural consequence of procreative beneficence.[185] Similar positions were also taken by John Harris, Robert Ranisch and Ben Saunders respectively.[191][192][193]
Transhuman perspectives
The term directed evolution is used within the transhumanist community to refer to the idea of applying the principles of directed evolution and experimental evolution to the control of human evolution.[194] Law professor Maxwell Mehlman has said that "for transhumanists, directed evolution is likened to the Holy Grail".[194]
Riccardo Campa of the IEET wrote that "self-directed evolution" can be coupled with many different political, philosophical, and religious views within the transhumanist movement.[195]
Problematizing the therapy-enhancement distinction
Self-described opponents of historical eugenics first and foremost,[g] are known to insist on a particularly stringent treatment-enhancement distinction (sometimes also called divide or gap). This distinction, naturally, "draws a line between services or interventions meant to prevent or cure (or otherwise ameliorate) conditions that we view as diseases or disabilities and interventions that improve a condition that we view as a normal function or feature of members of our species".[199]
And yet the adequacy of such a dichotomy is highly contested in modern scholarly bioethics. One simple counterargument is that it has already long been ignored throughout various contemporary fields of scientific study and practice such as "preventive medicine, palliative care, obstetrics, sports medicine, plastic surgery, contraceptive devices, fertility treatments, cosmetic dental procedures, and much else".[200] This is one way of conducting ostensively what has been coined the "moral continuum argument" by some of its critics.[201][h]
Granting these assertions' validity, one may, once more, call this first and foremost a moral collapse of the therapy–enhancement distinction. Without such a clear divide, restorative medicine and exploratory eugenics also invariably become harder to distinguish;[i] and accordingly might one explain the matter's relevance to ongoing transhumanist discourse.
Incomplete pedigree chart of House Atreides from which one half of the Kwisatz Haderach had been strategically bredIn the movie, "Gattaca" also refers to the futuristic building complex that hosts the astronauts for an ongoing space colonization program.
The Star Trek franchise features a race of genetically engineered humans which is known as "Augments", the most notable of them is Khan Noonien Singh. These "supermen" were the cause of the Eugenics Wars, a dark period in Earth's fictional history, before they were deposed and exiled. They appear in many of the franchise's story arcs, most frequently, they appear as villains.[205][j]
The film Gattaca (1997) provides a fictional example of a dystopian society that uses eugenics to decide what people are capable of and their place in the world. The title alludes to the letters G, A, T and C, the four nucleobases of DNA, and depicts the possible consequences of genetic discrimination in the present societal framework. Relegated to the role of a cleaner owing to his genetically projected death at age 32 due to a heart condition (being told: "The only way you'll see the inside of a spaceship is if you were cleaning it"), the protagonist observes enhanced astronauts as they are demonstrating their superhuman athleticism. Nonetheless, against mere uniformity being the movies key theme, it may be highlighted[208] that it also includes a twelve fingered concert pianist nonetheless taken to be highly esteemed. Even though it was not a box office success, it was critically acclaimed and it is said to have crystallized the debate over human genetic engineering[k] in the public consciousness.[209][210][l] As to its accuracy, its production company, Sony Pictures, consulted with a gene therapy researcher and prominent critic of eugenics known to have stated that "[w]e should not step over the line that delineates treatment from enhancement",[213]W. French Anderson, to ensure that the portrayal of science was realistic. Disputing their success in this mission, Philim Yam of Scientific American called the film "science bashing" and Nature's Kevin Davies called it a "surprisingly pedestrian affair", while molecular biologistLee Silver described its extreme determinism as "a straw man".[214][215][m]
In an even more pointed critique, in his 2018 book Blueprint, the behavioral geneticistRobert Plomin writes that while Gattaca warned of the dangers of genetic information being used by a totalitarian state, genetic testing could also favor better meritocracy in democratic societies which already administer a variety of standardized tests to select people for education and employment. He suggests that polygenic scores might supplement testing in a manner that is essentially free of biases.[217] Along similar lines, in the 2004 book Citizen Cyborg,[216]democratic transhumanistJames Hughes had already argued against what he considers to be "professional fearmongers",[216]: xiii stating of the movie's premises:
Astronaut training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons;
In the United States, people are already being screened by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease, for actuarial purposes;
Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society should simply develop genetic information privacylaws, such as the U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination. Enforcing these would not be very hard once a system for reporting and penalties is in place.[216]: 146-7
Social Darwinism – Group of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices
Wrongful life – Civil law action which alleges that a defendant has wrongfully caused a child to be born
References
^Galton, Francis (2002) [1883]. Tredoux, Gavan (ed.). Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development(PDF). pp. 17, 30. Retrieved 21 July 2023 – via Online Galton Archives. what is termed in Greek, eugenes namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viriculture which I once ventured to use.... The investigation of human eugenics – that is, of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced – is at present extremely hampered by the want of full family histories, both medical and general, extending over three or four generations.
^English, Daylanne K. (28 June 2016). "Eugenics – African American Studies". Oxford Bibliographies. Archived from the original on 24 June 2019. Racially targeted sterilization practices between the 1960s and the present have been perhaps the most common topic among scholars arguing for, and challenging, the ongoing power of eugenics in the United States. Indeed, unlike in the modern period, contemporary expressions of eugenics have met with widespread, thoroughgoing resistance
^ abcSpektorowski, Alberto; Ireni-Saban, Liza (2013). Politics of Eugenics: Productionism, Population, and National Welfare. London: Routledge. p. 24. ISBN9780203740231. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 16 January 2017. As an applied science, thus, the practice of eugenics referred to everything from prenatal care for mothers to forced sterilization and euthanasia. Galton divided the practice of eugenics into two types—positive and negative—both aimed at improving the human race through selective breeding.
^Hansen, Randall; King, Desmond (1 January 2001). "Eugenic Ideas, Political Interests and Policy Variance Immigration and Sterilization Policy in Britain and U.S". World Politics. 53 (2): 237–263. doi:10.1353/wp.2001.0003. JSTOR25054146. PMID18193564. S2CID19634871.
^Lucassen, Leo (2010). "A Brave New World: The Left, Social Engineering, and Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Europe." International Review of Social History, 55(2), 265–296. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44583170
^ abc"Eugenics". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022.
^Lederberg, Joshua (1963). "Biological future of man." In G. Wolstenholme (ed.), Man and His Future. London: Churchill, p. 264. "Most geneticists [...] are deeply concerned over the status and prospects of the human genotype. Human talents are widely disparate; much of the disparity has a genetic basis. The facts of human reproduction are all gloomy - the stratification of fecundity by economic status, the new environmental insults to our genes, the sheltering by humanitarian medicine of once lethal defects"
^Lederberg, Joshua (1963). "Molecular Biology, Eugenics and Euphenics", Nature 63(198), PMID 13929012 doi:10.1038/198428a0, p. 428
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^ abcBuchanan, Allen; Brock, Dan W.; Daniels, Norman; Wikler, Daniel (2000). From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521669771. OCLC41211380.
^Making Patriots by Walter Berns, 2001, page 12, "and whose infants, if they chanced to be puny or ill-formed, were exposed in a chasm (the Apothetae) and left to die;"
^Sneed (2021). "Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece". Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. 90 (4): 747. doi:10.2972/hesperia.90.4.0747. S2CID245045967.
^Brumbaugh, Robert S. (1954). "Plato's Genetic Theory", Journal of Heredity, 45(4):191–196, doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a106472
^Geographica, Strabo, Book 5, page 467. "And they say that among the Samnitae there is a law which is indeed honourable and conducive to noble qualities; for they are not permitted to give their daughters in marriage to whom they wish, but every year ten virgins and ten young men, the noblest of each sex, are selected, and, of these, the first choice of the virgins is given to the first choice of the young men, and the second to the second, and so on to the end; but if the young man who wins the meed of honour changes and turns out bad, they disgrace him and take away from him the woman given him."
^Buxton, Richard (1999). From Myth to Reason?: Studies in the Development of Greek Thought. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780199247523. But the exposure of deformed babies seems to have been a more widespread practice. For Athens, the most conclusive allusion is in Plato's Theaetetus
^Hansen, Randall (2005). "Eugenics". In Gibney, Matthew J.; Hansen, Randall (eds.). Eugenics: Immigration and Asylum from 1990 to Present. ABC-CLIO. Retrieved 23 September 2013.
^Barrett, Deborah; Kurzman, Charles (October 2004). "Globalizing Social Movement Theory: The Case of Eugenics"(PDF). Theory and Society. 33 (5): 487–527. doi:10.1023/b:ryso.0000045719.45687.aa. JSTOR4144884. S2CID143618054. Archived(PDF) from the original on 24 May 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2013. Policy adoption: In the pre–World War I period, eugenic policies were enacted only in the United States, which was both the hotbed of international eugenics activism and unusually decentralized politically, so that sub-national state units could adopt such policies in the absence of central state approval.
^Goering, Sara (2014), "Eugenics", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, archived from the original on 7 November 2020, retrieved 4 May 2022
^Turda, Marius (2010). "Race, Science and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century". In Bashford, Alison; Levine, Philippa (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford University Press. pp. 72–73. ISBN9780199888290.
^"Lancelot Hogben, who developed his critique of eugenics and distaste for racism in the period...he spent as Professor of Zoology at the University of Cape Town". Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2010 ISBN0199706530 (p. 200)
^"Whatever their disagreement on the numbers, Haldane, Fisher, and most geneticists could support Jennings's warning: To encourage the expectation that the sterilization of defectives will solve the problem of hereditary defects, close up the asylums for feebleminded and insane, do away with prisons, is only to subject society to deception". Daniel J. Kevles (1985). In the Name of Eugenics. University of California Press. ISBN0520057635 (p. 166).
^Congar, Yves M.-J. (1953). The Catholic Church and the Race Question(PDF). Paris: UNESCO. Archived(PDF) from the original on 4 July 2015. Retrieved 3 July 2015. 4. The State is not entitled to deprive an individual of his procreative power simply for material (eugenic) purposes. But it is entitled to isolate individuals who are sick and whose progeny would inevitably be seriously tainted.
^Beer, Daniel (2008). Renovating Russia: the human sciences and the fate of liberal modernity, 1880-1930. p. 36.
^Pareti, Germana (2016). "Before and after Lamarck. The improvement of the human species between inheritance and degeneration". Studi francesi. 60: 216–232.
^Jordan, David Starr (2003). War and the Breed: The Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations (Reprint ed.). Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. ISBN978-1-4102-0900-9.
^Carlson, Elof Axel (2001). The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. pp. 189–193. ISBN9780879695873.
^Carlson, Elof Axel (2001). The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. ISBN9780879695873.
^ abFischbach, Karl-Friedrich; Niggeschmidt, Martin (2022). "Do the Dumb Get Dumber and the Smart Get Smarter?". Heritability of Intelligence. Springer. pp. 37–39. doi:10.1007/978-3-658-35321-6_9. ISBN978-3-658-35321-6. S2CID244640696. Since the nineteenth century, a 'race deterioration' has been repeatedly predicted as a result of the excessive multiplication of less gifted people. Nevertheless, the educational and qualification level of people in the industrialized countries has risen strongly. The fact that the 'test intelligence' has also significantly increased, is difficult to explain for supporters of the dysgenic thesis: they suspect that the 'phenotypic intelligence' has increased for environmental reasons, while the 'genotypic quality' secretly decreases. There is neither evidence nor proof for this theory. Citations in original omitted.
^Neisser, Ulric (1998). The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures. American Psychological Association. pp. xiii–xiv. ISBN978-1557985033. There is no convincing evidence that any dysgenic trend exists. . . . It turns out, counterintuitively, that differential birth rates (for groups scoring high and low on a trait) do not necessarily produce changes in the population mean.
^Webster University, Forced Sterilization. Retrieved on 30 August 2014. "Women and Global Human Rights". Archived from the original on 7 September 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2016.
^Rosario, Esther (13 September 2013). "Feminism". The Eugenics Archives. Archived from the original on 9 September 2019. Retrieved 27 October 2018.
^Saleeby, Caleb Williams (1911). "First Principles". Woman and Womanhood A Search for Principles. New York: J. J. Little & Ives Co. MITCHELL KENNERLEY. p. 7. The mark of the following pages is that they assume the principle of what we may call Eugenic Feminism
^Gibbons, Sheila Rae. "Women's suffrage". The Eugenics Archives. Retrieved 31 October 2018. Dr. Caleb Saleeby, an obstetrician and active member of the British Eugenics Education Society, opposed his contemporaries – such as Sir Francis Galton – who took strong anti-feminist stances in their eugenic philosophies. Perceiving the feminist movement as potentially "ruinous to the race" if it continued to ignore the eugenics movement, he coined the term "eugenic feminism" in his 1911 text Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
^Heron, D. (9 November 1913). "English expert attacks American eugenic work", New York Times, part V, 1
^Newman, Carla (Spring 2018). "Bartering from the Bench: A Tennessee Judge Prevents Reproduction of Social Undesirables; Historic Analysis of Involuntary Sterilization of African American Women". Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives. 10 – via Gale OneFile: LegalTrac.
^ abKluchin, Rebecca (2009). Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980. Rutgers University Press. pp. 10, 73, 91, 94, 98–100, 102, 182–183.
^Mukherjee, Siddhartha (2016). The Gene. Scribner. pp. 82–83.
^Burleigh, Michael (2000). "Psychiatry, German Society, and the Nazi "Euthanasia" Programme". In Bartov, Omer (ed.). Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath. London: Routledge. pp. 43–57. ISBN0415150361.
^Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. pp. 256–258. ISBN9781441761460.
^Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in the revised version published in the Federal Law Gazette Part III, classification number 100-1, as last amended by the Act of 19 December 2022 (Federal Law Gazette I p. 2478). https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html
^Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such as:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
^"Report of the IBC on Updating Its Reflection on the Human Genome and Human Rights"(PDF). International Bioethics Committee. 2 October 2015. p. 27. Archived(PDF) from the original on 8 October 2015. Retrieved 22 October 2015. The goal of enhancing individuals and the human species by engineering the genes related to some characteristics and traits is not to be confused with the barbarous projects of eugenics that planned the simple elimination of human beings considered as 'imperfect' on an ideological basis. However, it impinges upon the principle of respect for human dignity in several ways. It weakens the idea that the differences among human beings, regardless of the measure of their endowment, are exactly what the recognition of their equality presupposes and therefore protects. It introduces the risk of new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who cannot afford such enhancement or simply do not want to resort to it. The arguments that have been produced in favour of the so-called liberal eugenics do not trump the indication to apply the limit of medical reasons also in this case.
^ abGalton, David (2002). Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century. London: Abacus. p. 48. ISBN0349113777.
^Salgirli, S. G. (July 2011). "Eugenics for the doctors: Medicine and social control in 1930s Turkey". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 66 (3): 281–312. doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrq040. PMID20562206. S2CID205167694.
^Degler, C. N. (1991). In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-506380-5, p.44
^Raz, Aviad (2009). Community genetics and genetic alliances: eugenics, carrier testing and networks of risk (Genetics and Society), Routledge, ISBN978-0-415-49618-6
^Caleb, Amanda (27 January 2023). "Eugenics and (Pseudo-) Science". The Holocaust: Remembrance, Respect, and Resilience. Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved 18 February 2023.
^Carlson, Elof Axel (2002). "Scientific Origins of Eugenics". Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement. Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
^Currell, Susan; Cogdell, Christina (2006). Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in The 1930s. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. p. 203. ISBN9780821416914.
^Ladd-Taylor, Molly (2001). "Eugenics, Sterilisation and the Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe". Gender & History 13(2): 298-327. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.00230
^Dokötter, Frank (1998). "Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics". American Historical Review 103: 467-78
^Singer, Peter (2003). "Shopping at the genetic supermarket." In Asian Bioethics in the 21st Century, ed. S.Y. Song, Y.M. Koo, and D.R.J. Macer, 309–331. Tsukuba: Eubios Ethics Institute.
^Singer, Peter (2003). Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna. Pymble, NSW: Fourth Estate. pp. Chapter 33–Theresienstadt. ISBN0-7322-7742-6.
^Comfort, Nathaniel (25 September 2012). The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN9780300169911.
^Rawls, John (1999) [1971]. A theory of justice (revised ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 92. ISBN0674000781. In addition, it is possible to adopt eugenic policies, more or less explicit. I shall not consider questions of eugenics, confining myself throughout to the traditional concerns of social justice. We should note, though, that it is not in general to the advantage of the less fortunate to propose policies which reduce the talents of others. Instead, by accepting the difference principle, they view the greater abilities as a social asset to be used for the common advantage. But it is also in the interest of each to have greater natural assets. This enables him to pursue a preferred plan of life. In the original position, then, the parties want to insure for their descendants the best genetic endowment (assuming their own to be fixed). The pursuit of reasonable policies in this regard is something that earlier generations owe to later ones, this being a question that arises between generations. Thus over time a society is to take steps at least to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects.
^Shaw, p. 147. Quote: "What Rawls says is that "Over time a society is to take steps to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects." The key words here are "preserve" and "prevent". Rawls clearly envisages only the use of negative eugenics as a preventive measure to ensure a good basic level of genetic health for future generations. To jump from this to "make the later generations as genetically talented as possible," as Pence does, is a masterpiece of misinterpretation. This, then, is the sixth argument against positive eugenics: the Veil of Ignorance argument. Those behind the Veil in Rawls' original Position would agree to permit negative, but not positive eugenics. This is a more complex variant of the consent argument, as the Veil of Ignorance merely forces us to adopt a position of hypothetical consent to particular principles of justice."
^Harding, John R. (1991). "Beyond Abortion: Human Genetics and the New Eugenics". Pepperdine Law Review. 18 (3): 489–491. PMID11659992. Archived from the original on 6 October 2014. Retrieved 2 June 2016. Rawls arrives at the difference principle by considering how justice might be drawn from a hypothetical 'original position.' A person in the original position operates behind a 'veil of ignorance' that prevents her from knowing any information about herself such as social status, physical or mental capabilities, or even her belief system. Only from such a position of universal equality can principles of justice be drawn. In establishing how to distribute social primary goods, for example, 'rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth" and self-respect, Rawls determines that a person operating from the original position would develop two principles. First, liberties ascribed to each individual should be as extensive as possible without infringing upon the liberties of others. Second, social primary goods should be distributed to the greatest advantage of everyone and by mechanisms that allow equal opportunity to all. [...] Genetic engineering should not be permitted merely for the enhancement of physical attractiveness because that would not benefit the least advantaged. Arguably, resources should be concentrated on genetic therapy to address disease and genetic defects. However, such a result is not required under Rawls' theory. Genetic enhancement of those already intellectually gifted, for example, might result in even greater benefit to the least advantaged as a result of the gifted individual's improved productivity. Moreover, Rawls asserts that using genetic engineering to prevent the most serious genetic defects is a matter of intergenerational justice. Such actions are necessary in terms of what the present generation owes to later generations.
^Allhoff, Fritz (2005). "Germ-line genetic enhancement and Rawlsian primary goods." Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (1):39-56.doi:10.1353/ken.2005.0007
^Pugh, Jonathan (2015). "Autonomy, Natality and Freedom: A Liberal Re-examination of Habermas in the Enhancement Debate." Bioethics, 29(3), 145–152. doi:10.1111/bioe.12082
^Harris, John (2009). "Enhancements are a Moral Obligation". In Savulescu, J.; Bostrom, N. (eds.). Human Enhancement. Oxford University Press. pp. 131–154.
^Kirby, David A. (July 2000). "The New Eugenics in Cinema: Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in "GATTACA"". Science Fiction Studies. 27 (2): 193–215. JSTOR4240876.
^ abcdHughes, James (2004). Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. Westview Press. ISBN0-8133-4198-1.
^He concretely intended it to replace the word "stirpiculture", which he had used previously but which had come to be mocked due to its perceived sexual overtones.[48]
^He had identified eugenicists as a major obstacle to the eradication and cure of tuberculosis in his 1917 address "Consumption: Its Cause and Cure",[77]
^Morel, a devout Catholic, had, in fact, believed that mankind had started in perfection, contrasting modern humanity to the past. Morel claimed there had been "Morbid deviation from an original type".[92]
^It may be worth noting, furthermore, that some of its perils also derived from its peculiar perspective on the ability of our will to influence this process;[94] leaving a gap for moralism of the most radical sort.
^Despite Morgan's public rejection of eugenics, much of his genetic research was adopted by proponents of eugenics.[154][155]
^Invoking Bostrom and Roache once more,[200] Hofmann explicates here:
Some forms of assistive reproduction previously seen as enhancement are now considered to be treatments. This vagueness in therapy is mirrored in the classification of interventions. Vaccination can be seen as a form of prevention, but also as an enhancement of the immune system. To distinguish between laser eye surgery and contact lenses or glasses appears artificial.[202]
Because a flexible definition of health relates to a flexible definition of the disabled, any attempt to prohibit access to enhancement technology can be challenged as a violation of disability rights. Presented this way, disability rights are the gateway for the application of transhumanism. Any attempt to identify a moral or natural hazard associated with enhancement technology must also include some limitation of disability rights, which seems to go against the entire direction of human rights legislation over the last century.[203]
^It might, however, be worth noting that the enhancement method depicted is not entirely clear, insofar as the head genetic counselor portrayed by Afro-American Blair Underwood invokes something more akin to embryo selection when stating: "Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result."
^It has been cited by many bioethicists and laypeople in support of their hesitancy about, or opposition to, eugenics and the genetic determinist ideology that may frame it.[211]
Accordingly, Lee M. Silver stated that "Gattaca is a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large".[212]
^In the context of this film, James Hughes, has similarly come to argue that:
Control over human nature is unlikely to lead to neglect of environmental improvement. Society might just ramp up kids' intelligence instead of providing them with better-funded schools. But that wouldn't work very well, since smarter kids would only make the inadequacies of the schools more glaring. We will fix obesity genes, but people will still have to eat right and exercise. Fixes for lung cancer and skin cancer are unlikely to dry up our concern about industrial pollution and the ozone layer.[216]: 146
Further reading
Agar, Nicholas (2004). Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement. Wiley-Blackwell.
Buchanan, Allen (2017). Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Deliberate Biomedical Enhancement. "Philosophy in Action" series. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780190664046.
Gantsho, Luvuyo (2022). "The principle of procreative beneficence and its implications for genetic engineering." Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (5):307-328. doi:10.1007/s11017-022-09585-0
Harris, John (2009). "Enhancements are a Moral Obligation." In J. Savulescu & N. Bostrom (Eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford University Press, pp. 131–154
Kamm, Frances (2010). "What Is And Is Not Wrong With Enhancement?" In Julian Savulescu & Nick Bostrom (eds.), Human Enhancement. Oxford University Press.
Kamm, Frances (2005). "Is There a Problem with Enhancement?", The American Journal of Bioethics, 5(3), 5–14. PMID 16006376 doi:10.1080/15265160590945101
Ranisch, Robert (2022). "Procreative Beneficence and Genome Editing", The American Journal of Bioethics, 22(9), 20–22. doi:10.1080/15265161.2022.2105435
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