The New Eugenics: Jacques Testart and French Bioethics (2007)

In recent years, the notion has gained currency that a new form of eugenics may be in the process of emerging. This new eugenics has, it is claimed, managed to divest itself of the totalitarian associations of the past, and functions primarily by means of the ever-increasing use of genetic screening techniques. In The Future of Human Nature Jurgen Habermas has sought to engage with the philosophical and ethical implications of techniques such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis. (1) As he emphasises, developments in the area of genetics and biotechnology ultimately challenge our self-understanding as human beings. Although there have been any number of eugenic projects throughout history, the mainstream of humanist secular and religious thought in Europe has based the notion of the uniqueness of the individual upon the certainty that a human being's genetic endowment could not be programmed or manipulated in advance. (2) However, Habermas argues that, once manipulation does become possible, the 'rather ordinary contingency' of the individual's genetic inheritance--the uncontrollable result of human fertilisation--is thrown into question. If it becomes possible for parents to consider the genetic traits of their offspring as being open to manipulation, they begin to exercise a kind of control that intervenes in the ethical freedom of the unborn child. What Habermas calls 'organic nature' was previously either 'given' or, in the case of eugenics, 'bred', but now we face the possibility of it being produced as an 'artifact'. This situation raises the issue of whether this new possibility of genetic intervention necessitates normative regulation or can be seen simply as a means of individual 'self-empowerment' and of expressing individual preferences. In attempting to conceive of some sort of framework that might encourage informed regulation of such forms of genetic intervention, Habermas draws on the twin tenets of Kant's categorical imperative: the principle that human beings should always be treated as ends in themselves, along with the principle that we should act in conformity with what we perceive to be universal laws. (3) He also draws on Hannah Arendt's concept of 'natality', which is to say the link she perceives between birth and the 'beginning' that is inherent to all human action. It is only when we are on the point of mastering the contingency of our genetic inheritance, Habermas argues, that we realise how crucial the contingency of birth is to our conception of ourselves as individuals capable of action in the world. (4) Troy Duster, in Backdoor to Eugenics, has located this new eugenics within what he identifies as a gradual, almost imperceptible, shift towards the acceptance of a genetic paradigm in recent years, which threatens to facilitate a 'backdoor' route to eugenics. (5) He acknowledges that by the 1950s social-rather than hereditarian--theories appeared to have won the battle to explain and analyse the great human concerns of the era. However, he feels that, partly as a result of the fact that the new genetic technologies promise more immediate, practical, and apparently unproblematic gains for the individual, and partly because science quite simply makes such powerful and persuasive claims, genetic explanations have become increasingly prevalent. Pierre Bourdieu, in the foreword to Duster's book, sees the fact that characteristics such as intelligence and the propensity to violence are viewed in purely genetic terms as one symptom of a return to essentialism that characterises what he regards as the current era of cultural reaction and conservatism. (6) He fears that the outcome of this resurgence of essentialist thinking and the rise of the new biotechnologies will be the slow imposition of a eugenic worldview by means of routine bureaucratic practices of genetic intervention. Duster points to developments in the field of human molecular biology as a key component of this putative return to genetics and, from a historical perspective, Lily E. …