Eugenics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethical re-assessment
Modern inquiries into the potential use of genetic engineering have led to an increased invocation of the history of eugenics in discussions of
bioethics, most often as a cautionary tale. Some
ethicists suggest that even non-coercive eugenics programs would be inherently unethical.[
citation needed] This view has been challenged by such thinkers as
Nicholas Agar.
[148]
In modern bioethics literature, the history of eugenics presents many moral and ethical questions. Commentators have suggested the new eugenics will come from reproductive technologies that will allow parents to create "
designer babies" (which biologist
Lee M. Silver prominently called "
reprogenetics"). This will be predominantly motivated by individual competitiveness and the desire to create the best opportunities for children, rather than an urge to improve the species as a whole, which characterized the early 20th-century forms of eugenics. Because of its less-obviously coercive nature, lack of involvement by the state and a difference in goals, some commentators have questioned whether such activities are eugenics or something else altogether. Supporters of eugenics programs note that
Francis Galton did not advocate coercion when he defined the principles of eugenics.
[149] Eugenics is, according to Galton, the proper label for bioengineering of better human beings, whether coercive or not. Critics[
who?] counter that
conformity and other social and legal pressures make eugenics programs inherently coercive.[
citation needed]
An example of such individual motivations includes parents attempting to prevent homosexuality in their children,
[150] despite lack of evidence of a
single genetic cause of homosexuality. The scientific consensus in America, which stems from the 1956 research of Dr.
Evelyn Hooker, is that homosexuality in any case is not a disorder. Therefore, it cannot be treated as a defective trait that is justifiably screened for as part of legitimate medical practice.
[151]
Daniel Kevles argues that eugenics and the conservation of natural resources are similar propositions. Both can be practiced foolishly so as to abuse individual rights, but both can be practiced wisely.
James D. Watson, the first director of the
Human Genome Project, initiated the
Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Program (ELSI) which has funded a number of studies into the implications of human genetic engineering (along with a prominent website on the history of eugenics), because:
In putting ethics so soon into the genome agenda, I was responding to my own personal fear that all too soon critics of the Genome Project would point out that I was a representative of the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that once housed the controversial
Eugenics Record Office. My not forming a genome ethics program quickly might be falsely used as evidence that I was a closet eugenicist, having as my real long-term purpose the unambiguous identification of genes that lead to social and occupational stratification as well as genes justifying racial discrimination.
[152] Distinguished geneticists including Nobel Prize-winners
John Sulston ("I don't think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world")
[153] and Watson ("Once you have a way in which you can improve our children, no one can stop it")
[154] support
genetic screening. Which ideas should be described as "eugenic" are still controversial in both public and scholarly spheres. Some observers such as
Philip Kitcher have described the use of genetic screening by parents as making possible a form of "voluntary" eugenics.
[155]
