Most People Support Eugenics
By: Daniel Goldman
Tags: Humanity, Ethics, Future, Genetics, Eugenics

Most People Support Eugenics

It’s just that most people aren’t willing to call what they support “eugenics.”

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Unpopular view: I’m a eugenicist, and most people in the world likely are as well, even if they don’t want to call themselves eugenicists, because of the connotation that is associated with it. However, the association of negative history is not reason enough to avoid the concept.

Shying Away from History

It may seem like a good idea to simply avoid eugenics because of the history associated with it. But we do not shy away from socialism, even though the economic system is connected to many negative historical events, including mass starvation in Soviet Russia. But just as it is inappropriate to equate socialism with Stalin’s Russia, it is inappropriate to equate eugenics with some of its malicious examples.

Defining Eugenics

At its most basic, eugenics means “well-born.” With the discovery of genes, the focus moved to the genetic level, but eugenics itself predates the conceptualization of genes by a number of years. It wasn’t until 1909 that the term “gene” was coined to describe the basic unit of inheritance (genome.gov). However, “eugenics” was coined in by Sir Francis Galton in 1883 (University of Virginia). To understand the basic ethos of eugenics, it might be useful to look at one of Galton’s comments.

What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.

Natural selection occurs. It is indeed cruel, at least according to the ethical sensibilities of many. Our enslavement to natural selection itself results in many ethical conundrums. Medical advancements save a great deal of lives. Many people now survive cancer. Many people survive and go on to have children.

This outcome is wonderful. However, there are genetic predispositions to these afflictions, and so we are inadvertently increasing the rate of such genetic predispositions. Gene therapy can quite literally eliminate these predispositions and save lives at the same time. We are getting to the point of having power over natural selection, rather than being its slaves. That is eugenics.

Schools of Eugenics

In order to fully understand the issue of eugenics, it is necessary to look at a number of schools of thought, and how eugenics is applied. Eugenics is often divided into “positive” and “negative” eugenics. The former is focused on promoting traits that are deemed to be good, and the latter is focused on eliminating traits deemed to be harmful (eugenicsarchive).

However, eugenic goals can be accomplished voluntarily or through force. Many eugenicists promoted the former, but the most vile supported the latter. These individuals promoted the use of force and coercion to promote their goals and often involves forced sterilization, and even execution. It is this form of eugenics that took root in America and in Nazi Germany.

These two divisions are quite different from the categories of “positive” and “negative” eugenics. They do not have their own terms, as far as I know. However, the types of eugenics that has led to such terrible historical events and such a horrible view of eugenics could be called “purgative eugenics.”

Natural selection is, at its core, purgative eugenics. The process of natural selection eliminates individuals that cannot survive. One might wish to argue that natural selection cannot be a form of eugenics, because natural selection is inherently natural, while eugenics is inherently artificial. And if humans were divine beings, separate from nature, they would be right. But humans are animals, as far as science is aware. So there really isn’t as much of a distinction between purgative eugenics and natural selection as one might want to argue.

So, if purgative eugenics is so bad — and it is — we should be seeking a way beyond natural selection. And modern eugenics practices can do just that. Gene therapy is eugenics. A person who promotes eliminating the sickle cell mutation from our genome through CRISPR and related technologies is promoting eugenics. So really, most people likely do support eugenics. It’s just that they don’t want to call it by that name.

This form of eugenics does not rely on the death or inability of an individual to reproduce in order to occur. It is a system which is free of the suffering associated with purgative eugenics/natural selection. Instead, such forms of eugenics are “facilitative.”

Issues

If there is any place where Galton erred, it is on his views of race, which at the time were seen as largely being a biological classification. Both eugenicists and those that opposed it often viewed race as biological. However, we now understand that there is no such valid biological division between human populations.

A more general issue with eugenics is simply the difficulty in deciding what traits are indeed useful and which ones should be included vs which ones should be removed. It may seem easy to say that we should remove sickle cell mutations from the human genome, but in some locales this mutation can be advantageous.

Moreover, DNA is not a blueprint. DNA is a complex system which drives the formation of the building blocks and the very buildings for the body. These builders then go on to create the organism, acting largely through self arrangement processes. It can therefore be very difficult to determine how editing a gene will impact the organism as a whole.

Relationship to Transhumanism

A final topic that I would like to discuss is the relationship between eugenics and transhumanism, which have a lot in common. Both seek to improve the human condition, in a matter of speaking. The key difference between eugenics and transhumanism is that eugenics seeks to improve the human condition by making improvements, while still keeping the population essentially human, while transhumanism, as the name suggests, seeks to improve the human condition by making us no longer human.

Ironically, I am more uneasy about transhumanism than I am about eugenics. I’m am fairly confident that this opposition is mostly just my own personal investment in “being human” rather than any reasonably justified position. I always have to ask myself, “if we stop being human, then what are we?”

Further Reading

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