Reprogenetics refers to biotechnological tools used to
affect the genes of a future child. How can society develop and use
reprogenetic technologies in a way that ends up going well?
This essay investigates the history and nature of historical eugenic
ideologies. I’ll extract some lessons about how society can think about
reprogenetics differently from the eugenicists, so that we don’t trend
towards the sort of abuses that were historically justified by
eugenics.
(This essay is written largely as I thought and investigated,
except that I wrote the synopsis last. So the ideas are presented
approximately in order of development, rather than logically. If you’d
like a short thing to read, read the synopsis.)
Some technologies are being developed that will make it possible to
affect what genes a future child receives. These technologies include
polygenic embryo selection, embryo editing, and other more advanced
technologies. Regarding these technologies, we
ask:
Can we decide to not abuse these tools?
And:
How can we decide to not abuse these tools?
In other words, there is an open problem: What ideology should we
have around the development and use of reprogenetics?
An ideology called “eugenics” arose in the late 19th century,
ascended to power in much of the developed world in the first half of
the 20th century, and then slid into ignominy after the Second World War
and the genocidal horrors of Nazi Germany. Eugenic ideology motivated
cruel state policies such as pressured or forced sterilization,
euthanasia, and racial discrimination, as well as invasive social
pressures on people’s private reproductive choices.
Eugenics was the closest thing that has existed to a pervasive
ideology based around somehow intervening on human reproduction. Since
eugenics went almost maximally poorly for society, it raises the
question of how to avoid outcomes like that. The strategy I take here
is, coarsely speaking:
- Understand the core wrong ideological engines of eugenics—especially
the ones that led to abusive policies.
- Negate those ideological engines.
- Incorporate those negations into a positive alternative
ideology.
A bit more precisely, the goal is to construct an ideology that can
structure how society relates to reprogenetics, so that the benefits of
reprogenetics are realized without risking the abuses of historical
eugenics. To do so, I try to construct bulwarks, within an alternative
ideology, against each of the wrong ideological engines that would take
society in the direction of enacting eugenic abuses. (This is probably
not actually something that can be accomplished with perfect confidence
and coverage; how much it can be accomplished, quantitatively, remains
to be seen.)
It’s tempting to make a shallow analysis of historical eugenics and
what was wrong with it, and be done with the issue. For example, we
could simply say that historical eugenics was coercive, and coercion is
what made it bad. To negate this, we will instead subscribe to
non-coercive eugenics. Problem solved? As another example,
historical eugenics was often negative, i.e. it involved
suppressing some people’s reproduction; we could instead subscribe to
only positive eugenics, which only promotes reproduction
(perhaps selectively) and which therefore involves less hostility.
However, neither of these could be called a moral or ideological core
of eugenics. For the most part, eugenicists did not specifically set
out to be coercive or to suppress reproduction (though some of them
probably did, in some sense, set out with that goal). Rather,
they set out with various other goals, such as purifying the gene pool
of disease, reducing the burden on society of caring for the ill, or
bringing about a racial utopia. The strength of their various
justifications proved in the end to be enough to enact abusive
policies. Furthermore, there were eugenic policies that were
non-coercive, positive, or both, while still being abusive and still
being an integral part of an ideology producing other abusive policies.
(See the section “Some basic moral
elements of eugenic ideologies”.)
In fact, I’ve found eugenics to be difficult to characterize in a
simple and comprehensive way. Eugenic ideologies were quite pervasive,
showing up in the Anglosphere, in Europe, in South America, and in some
places in Asia. As a correlate of their pervasiveness, eugenic
ideologies were highly variegated. They came in many forms: different
goals, different implementations, different associated politics (from
reactionary to progressive), and based on different scientific
understandings (from Weismann vs. Lamarck, to Pearson vs. Mendel). (See
the sections “The
variegation of eugenic ideology” and “The goals of eugenics”.)
That said, I think there is something like an ideological core of
eugenics. Roughly speaking, the core idea can be stated like this:
There are Good traits and Bad traits that a child could be born with.
These traits impact everyone, so they’re very important. Therefore, we
should make sure that future children are born with Good traits and not
with Bad traits.
(See the section “The
Eugenical Maxim as the shared moral core of eugenics?”.)
From this core idea of Good and Bad traits, other elements of
historical eugenics logically flow. If you believe in a single notion of
Good traits, you might tend to justify (over)confidently applying that
criterion to everyone. You might believe, as a correlate, that there are
Good and Bad people, or families, or even races (the ones who tend to
have more Good or Bad traits, respectively). You’d probably view
non-standard individual genomic choices as deviant, affording
state-enforced prohibition; you might even view the Goodness of traits
to be a state interest that’s so compelling it can even justify blunt
coercion such as forced sterilization of undesirables. (See “The mindsets that
underlie eugenic ideologies” and “How eugenic
mindsets flow from the Eugenical Maxim” below.)
We can approximately negate this idea of Good and Bad traits. Then we
can take that negation, and incorporate it into an alternative ideology
around reprogenetics. For example, we can incorporate it into my
proposed alternative (which I call “Genomic
Emancipation”), as follows:
There aren’t Good and Bad traits that can be decided on by collective
consensus. Instead of imposing a consensus idea of Good traits on future
children, parents should be empowered to autonomously make genomic
choices on behalf of their own future children.
Since genomic emancipation negates the core idea of eugenics, it is
opposed to eugenics. (See the section “Comparison of
eugenics vs. genomic emancipation” below.) For example:
- genomic emancipation supports the
principle of genomic liberty, contra eugenics;
- genomic emancipation abhors the centralization of genomic
choice-making, contra eugenics;
- genomic emancipation respects the intensely private nature of
reproduction and genomic choices, contra eugenics;
- and genomic emancipation embraces positive-sum thinking and
solutionism, contra eugenics.
However, just negating the core idea isn’t enough of a bulwark
against eugenic ideologies. As an ongoing project, we want to have
detailed policies, ethical rules, and ideals that provide guidance for
people interacting with reprogenetics. These policies, rules, and ideals
should steer society away from mindsets that contribute to eugenic
abuses, and should provide legible norms that society can coordinate to
enforce. Some ideas are listed below in “Some
practical norms for good development of reprogenetics”. For
example:
- Pluralism about different visions of the good
life.
- Distrust of the state to intervene in reproduction,
on the basis that disinterested parties shouldn’t be allowed to impose
reproductive choices on people.
- Minimizing the soft eugenics of social stigma,
e.g. through unbiased genetic counseling,
genetic nondiscrimination rules, and rules about
privacy of reprogenetics services.
- Careful, independent genomic choice-making by
parents.
- Maintaining recourse so that a world with
reprogenetics doesn’t silence certain types of people or certain values;
e.g. children whose parents used reprogenetics should be heeded
especially carefully.
- Minimizing centralized control or ownership over
reprogenetics, e.g. by making science and technology open and
licensable, and through anti-trust laws.
- As a culture, generally not being dismissive about
concerns around reprogenetics, being
non-Teamist, and meditating on key values such as
pluralism and positive-sum
thinking.
- Eugenics: an ideology based around controlling human reproduction in
order to improve the traits of the population.
- Historical eugenics: a large-scale social movement, at its peak in
the first half of the 20th century in much of the world, that led to the
implementation of many policies justified by eugenics.
- Reprogenetics: any technology that can affect the genes of a future
child, e.g. polygenic embryo screening or embryo editing. As a set of
technologies, reprogenetics is mainly a value-neutral tool. It lends
itself to relatively more humane uses compared to historical eugenics,
but it could be used well or poorly, for good or bad ends.
- Genomic emancipation: an ideology based around empowering parents to
make genomic choices on behalf of their own future children, in order to
emancipate those children.
The history of eugenics is well-documented, and it is large and I’m
not well-informed about it, so I won’t go into much detail here. To fix
in our minds a picture of how eugenics has historically been applied
that’s hopefully clear enough for our purposes, the next two sections
will describe some concrete aspects of the wide range of eugenic
ideologies. Several of the subsequent sections will summarize some
aspects of historical eugenics, especially focusing on its underlying
ideological engines.
For a concise and informative history of eugenics, see Diane Paul’s
1995 book “Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present”. For a good overview of the debate
around “liberal eugenics”, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
article “Eugenics”
(written by Sara Goering (2014) and revised by Inmaculada de Melo-Martin
(2022)).
See also Kevles (1995) and the wikipedia articles on “Eugenics” and “History of
eugenics”.
Eugenic ideology was pervasive in the first half of the 20th century.
It had strong support in the societies of much of the Anglophone and
European world, and has been seen in some form in countries ranging from
China and Russia to Canada, Brazil, and India. It
enjoyed wide uptake among most sectors of society: among the subscribers
to some form of eugenic ideology could be found many scientists, other
academics, professionals, elites, workers, peasants, Protestant clergy,
and judges. Hundreds of universities offered courses on eugenics, and
social organizers ran programs aimed at promoting or suppressing
reproduction within and between various groups of people. Many actual
and proposed state policies carried eugenic justifications, including
racist immigration restrictions as well as hundreds of thousands of
forced or pressured sterilizations. These aggressive eugenic policies
culminated in the horrors of Nazi Germany, but did not at all start or
end there.
While there were practical objections to specific eugenic policies,
e.g. disputes about the scientific basis for their effectiveness, there
was little pushback against the morality of eugenic ideology. A
few exceptions: The Catholic Church objected to sterilization due to the
sanctity of procreation, Britain’s Labour Party objected to eugenics
because it would target the working class, and liberal individualists
objected to eugenic infringements on autonomy.
A correlate of the pervasiveness of eugenic ideology was the extreme
variegation of the ideologies held by eugenicists. As described in the
following subsections, eugenicists had a wide range of political views,
scientific understandings, implementation policies, and eugenic
goals.
There were eugenicists who were reactionary, conservative,
progressive, socialist, technocratic, aristocratic, populist, or
utopian. Opinions on eugenic policy changed not just with scientific
understanding, but also with political and economic shifts.
- There was popular support for and participation in eugenics, as well
as scientifically literate support.
- The scientific understanding of heredity evolved greatly over the
course of the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th
century. Darwin opened up the field; Lamarckian environmental
inheritance opposed Weismann’s insight into the germ plasm; and
Pearson’s quantitative biometrics, stemming from Galton’s investigations
into heredity, butted against Mendelian patterns of discrete
inheritance. Throughout that whole course of investigation, there were
eugenicists, including ones who were scientifically literate and
up-to-date.
- Sometimes eugenicists updated their beliefs and policy
recommendations. Sometimes they clung to old or renewed illusions
(e.g. as in the case of neo-Lamarckian eugenics in France and other
places).
- Sometimes, they apparently updated their beliefs but not their
policies. A eugenicist might, for example, advocate for forced
sterilization. At first that policy was justified by the need to protect
the gene pool. Later, when Mendelian heredity and the prevalence of
hidden recessive genes showed that such policies would have negligible
effects on the overall gene pool, that same policy was instead justified
in terms of the societal burden of undesirable offspring.
- Race science and mythology took a greater or lesser place in eugenic
ideologies. Madison Grant wrote detailed and fanciful racial breakdowns
of European peoples, and pushed “Nordic” supremacy; on the other hand, for example the
eugenics of J.B.S. Haldane (a Communist), at least later in his career,
was not focused on racial differences.
- These concrete social and governmental policies were implemented in
the first half of the 1900s, to different degrees in different places:
- social pressure against reproduction of undesirables, and social
reward for “better babies”
- racist, classist, or ableist pressure towards birth control,
restriction of marriage, and segregation into institutions
- racist immigration restrictions
- anti-race-mixing laws
- voluntary, pressured, or coerced castration or sterilization
(hundreds of thousands), for many conditions (sickness, crime, mental
illness, feebleness, long-term unemployment)
- pressure and government resources for breeding of desirables
- abortion bans for desirables
- infanticide / euthanasia / murder
- deportation
- genocide (cultural destruction and reservations in colonized lands;
concentration camps, labor camps, death camps, mass murder, killing
squads in Nazi Germany)
- These policies were sometimes proposed, but as far as I know not
widely implemented (outside of Nazi Germany):
- class maintenance by anti-mixing laws
- execution of undesirable children
- restricting welfare and medical care for undesirables (maybe in
Sweden too)
- forced or pressured insemination
- breeding for different traits for different social classes
- encouraging citizens to report to the state any undesirables having
children
- There were even, in some cases, policies that could (broadly
speaking) be construed as eugenics, that were directly contradictory to
other such policies. For example, Canada might have tried to prevent
race-mixing between Aboriginals and Europeans. Instead, it instituted
various policies generally aimed at destroying Aboriginal life,
including via assimilation. Assimilation would be dysgenic and
undesirable from the more central racist eugenicist point of view of a
Grant or a Stoddard. But still, it is a government forcibly implementing
racially discriminatory policies, including segregation and coercive
sterilization, aimed at controlling the reproduction of its subjects.
See the next subsection.
In trying to understand what eugenics is, and how to avoid bad
outcomes related to genetics and reproduction, we want to understand
what the underlying driving forces behind eugenics are. Eugenics, as it
actually played out, is presumably the result of some mixture of
different social attitudes, socioeconomic and political conditions,
scientific knowledge and tools, and other conditions; and this mixture
varies in different places and times; so a full causal fault analysis
would be difficult and complicated.
But as one step, we can at least aim to understand the goals
behind eugenics, and maybe hope to thus find a fulcrum of eugenic
ideologies and policies. However, at least at first blush, the goals for
eugenics (both implicit and explicit) are quite variegated as well. They
include:
- Preventing the deterioration of society, humanity, or a specific
“superior” race (e.g. Nordic, Aryan, Anglo-Saxon).
- Preventing race-mixing.
- Preventing “inferior” (e.g. foreign, indigenous, visibly distinct,
culturally distinct) races from swamping the higher races through higher
fertility or immigration.
- Perfecting humanity or a race.
- Suppressing or eliminating specific “inferior” races (e.g. Jewish,
Black, Asian, Native American) or lower classes of people (workers, the
poor, nomads).
- Creating a beautiful future founded on a good, perfected, purified
gene pool.
- Sparing the immediate unborn of undesirable traits such as illness,
mental illness, weakness, feeble-mindedness, poverty, immorality,
addiction, sexual promiscuity, laziness, or criminality.
- Sparing the immediate unborn of being raised by people with those
undesirable traits.
- Avoiding the societal burden of dealing with people with those
undesirable traits, e.g. damage they cause or the financial burden of
giving them medical care or shelter.
- Avoiding being swamped by people or races who have those undesirable
traits and low social value, but who have high fertility.
- Avoiding the societal burden of genes for those undesirable traits
spreading through the gene pool.
- Gaining the societal benefit of people with desirable traits,
e.g. work output, leadership, or enjoyable beauty.
- Gaining the societal benefit of genes for those desirable traits
spreading.
- Having a stronger population for international competition or
conflict.
- Restoring the purifying effect of the natural selection that would
happen in the absence of peace, medicine, and social welfare.
- Creating or maintaining social classes, each with heritable traits
appropriate to that class’s role in society.
- Suppressing or eliminating certain cultures living in a country
(e.g. destroying an indigenous People as a People).
One wonders: What even is eugenics, if eugenic ideologies can have
this variety of political associations, scientific bases,
implementations, and motives? Is eugenics one thing, or just a family
resemblance of different ideologies having something to do with
genetics and reproduction, held by a variety of people from different
countries, ethnicities, and sectors of society? Is there a core element
of how eugenics is justified that is morally objectionable, so that
other practices that avoid that core are morally acceptable?
Historical eugenics was very often coercive, implementing policies
using force. Does this define eugenics, so that a policy that is
non-coercive is not objectionable as eugenics? Or is eugenics defined as
negative, so that a policy could be acceptable as long as it does not
involve suppressing specific people’s reproduction, but only
encouraging? Imagine the government started paying specifically
light-skinned people to have children. This would be non-coercive (as
usually understood, leaving aside that it involves taxation), and it
would be strictly positive (incentivizing specific people to reproduce
more). But it would also be wrong and eugenicsy.
Is it eugenics exactly when the government does anything involved
with influencing reproduction? But if there were a huge social movement
to socially pressure poor people or dark-skinned people into not having
kids, that would also be wrong and eugenicsy. Is eugenics about Social
Darwinism, racism, or race wars? These orientations played a central
role in many eugenic abuses, but supremacism in some
form is not the least bit unusual, and people made plenty of
progressive and race-neutral arguments for eugenic policies.
Of course, these elements, such as coercion and racism, are important
to understanding eugenics. They are central drivers of the worst
historical abuses. And, although they don’t offer an exact comprehensive
definition of eugenics, they do show some of the main moral structure of
eugenics. For example:
- Negative eugenics (suppressing reproduction) will
tend to be coercive, as it more acutely infringes on personal
liberties.
- Population-level goals (such as changing the
average or prevailing traits) will tend to justify negative as well as
positive eugenics, and justify heavier-handed policies, because to
affect a whole population takes a large and broad force.
- Social benefits (removing burden and increasing
benefit gained from future people) will tend to apparently justify state
coercion and override liberal principles, since the large benefit
accrued to all of society is held up against the ethical cost of
infringement on a single person’s autonomy.
- Paternalistic or authoritarian attitudes tend to
justify state-enforced coercive eugenics and strong social stigmas.
- Extreme racial or progressive motives will tend to
involve utopian visions.
- Utopian visions can motivate aggressive
state-enacted violence and coercive eugenics.
But, although these elements help parse eugenic ideologies, they
don’t give a single, clear, underlying core ideology that generates the
whole eugenic perspective and policy set.
In trying to find a moral core of eugenics, one tack we could take is
to focus on the state. Most of the worst actual actions taken under the
banner of eugenics were taken by a state. However, going one level
deeper to find the motivations for state eugenics, we find a variety of
motivations, which mainly only look the same in that they are pursued
through state eugenics.
Abstracting away from a concrete state, we can look more generally at
the collectivity of society. Historical eugenics is motivated by some
kind of collectivity—in a few different flavors, such as:
- goals about the collective (e.g. a small cadre esoterically
scheming to “purify” the gene pool),
- goals from the collective (e.g. society collectively being
unwilling to allow certain undesirables to procreate and add to social
burden),
- goals on behalf of the collective (e.g. a domineering
technocrat wielding state power to control reproduction, with
justifications in terms of social benefit).
The general idea of collectivity is important, and I think it’s
correct to draw from the above description a conclusion, inter alia,
that goals specifically about reproduction should not be pooled into
collective goals unless absolutely necessary. But ultimately “something
to do with collectivity and intention” is a bit of a conceptual
grab-bag. It’s vague, and in particular it doesn’t explain what, if
anything, would be wrong with eugenics; in general, we rightly invest in
collectivity all the time.
An idea I’ve entertained is that, in the end, it all comes back to
the name: “eu-genics”, good-birth / well-born. According to this
proposal, eugenics essentially means something like the belief that
there is a single universal notion of Good traits that should be passed
on to future children. In other words, a eugenicist is someone who
subscribes to the following “Eugenical Maxim”:
For each future child, there are traits that are Good for that child
to be born with, and traits that are Bad for that child to be born with.
Since there are so many future children, the Goodness and Badness of the
traits of future children is multiplied many-fold, and therefore in
aggregate those traits are extremely important.
THEREFORE, we should as much as possible use available
tools to give future children Good traits and not Bad traits.
The variables in the Eugenical Maxim have differed between different
eugenicists: which particular traits are considered Good or Bad, for
whom exactly the traits are supposed to be Good or Bad, who is “we”,
what tools are available, and what “as much as possible” means
(e.g. what other ethics to override). But I think that:
- All eugenicists would subscribe to the Eugenical Maxim (with some
setting of those variables).
- All centrally eugenic activity flows from (is motivated, justified,
and designed by) the Eugenical Maxim.
- A central poison of historical eugenic ideologies is subtly
contained in the notion of “Good” and “Bad” traits, as they are applied
in the “Therefore”. If it is “we” who are giving children “Good” and not
“Bad” traits, then it is “we” (whoever we are) who are deciding what
traits to give to future children. Whoever subscribes to the Eugenical
Maxim is implicitly saying “When it comes to judgements of which traits
are Good and Bad, the judgements that will be made by me or my group (my
social class, my scientific community, my state, my government
department, my political faction, my ideological strain) will be the
right judgements, and they should be implemented (for everyone).”. This
is an incorrect proposition and leads to the evils of historical
eugenics.
This may be a bit confusing because, while I claim to not be a
eugenicist, of course I do have plenty of opinions about what traits are
good and bad. Let the children be at least reasonably capable in most or
all normal physical and mental ways, and as free from disease and aging
as possible, and of high intelligence and moral goodness and wisdom and
kindness and diligence and creativity. In fact my position is indeed a
bit strange. I would say “Yes, there are good and bad traits; and I
would even say that these traits are even objectively good or
objectively bad (with plenty of caveats); but the fact that there are
objectively good and objectively bad traits is not what justifies
the use of reprogenetics. Instead, what justifies the use of
reprogenetics is emancipation—empowering future children in absentia,
and empowering parents on behalf of their future children, to make
genomic choices autonomously for themselves.”. (See “Genomic
Emancipation”.)
To put it another way: Often, when the question of reprogenetic
technology comes up, people will ask: “But who decides what ‘good’
means?”. A eugenicist says “Someone”, and a genomic emancipationist says
“No one”—which is to say, “No one person or body would decide;
instead each person decides for themselves, or as in the case of future
children who cannot decide for themselves, the next best steward—the
parents—decide on behalf of their future children as best they
can.”.
Why can’t we make this definition of eugenics simpler, and just say
that eugenics means any belief of the form “Someone’s notion of good and
bad traits should be imposed on someone.”? This is conceptually simpler.
And indeed, some people do use this as a definition of eugenics, and on
that basis they critique even liberal, pluralistic, autonomous,
personal, emancipatory uses of reprogenetics, saying: “Even if it’s just
two parents imposing their notion of good and bad traits on their own
future child, that’s too much imposition, too much control, and it’s
immoral.”.
The reason that the narrower definition is interesting to me is that
it seems to more cleanly divide bad policy about reproduction in
genetics (as demonstrated in historical eugenics) from good policy (as
hopefully demonstrated in genomic emancipation and good reprogenetics).
It could therefore offer a more clear guide to getting good societal
outcomes from reprogenetics and avoiding the repetition of historical
eugenic abuses.
In other words, the Eugenical Maxim is based on the idea that there’s
such a thing as Good and Bad genes or traits, where Good and Bad means
“what we should implement”. From the inside, it feels like just
believing that there’s such a thing as Good traits, because of course if
there are Good traits then children should be given Good traits.
Historical eugenicists set out to figure out which traits Are Good, and
set out to make future children (as many as possible) have Good traits.
They seemed to expect to find wide enough consensus about which traits
Are Good and that those traits should be given to future children. In
doing so, the eugenicists acted on the Eugenical Maxim.
To instead think in terms of genomic emancipation, I still want to
know what traits are Good and Bad (with various caveats). But I don’t
identify that with “what traits people should have”. As a moral
question, reprogenetic choices should be imposed upon a person
as little as possible; and only imposed by those who are as
close as possible to that person and who are as intrinsically concerned
as possible with that person’s flourishing; but no less than
necessary to accrue the clear benefits to that person by humane
genomic choices made in accordance with their will or their best
steward’s will. The state can’t be trusted with any say in
reprogenetic choices beyond the most extreme cases (see exceptions
listed in “The
principle of genomic liberty”); clinics should
follow their own ethics around the edge, but should mainly aim to
neutrally and honestly inform and empower parents; and parents should
try to do what’s best for their future child according to what that
future child would want.
To explain with an analogy, we can imagine an ideology called
“euphemics”. A Euphemicist believes that there are Good things to say
and Bad things to say. Since there are Good things to say and Bad things
to say, and so many people say so many things, it’s very important that
people say Good things. For that reason, we should as much as possible
use available tools to make people say Good things and not Bad
things.
It’s strange—it sounds so reasonable and logical, but then you’ve
just derived the urgent need for a Ministry of Truth, funded and
legislated and enforced by the state. How would you argue against
this?
It’s not that there aren’t Good and Bad things to say. It’s
just that it’s not that kind of Good and Bad. It’s not the kind
of Good and Bad that justifies centralized imposition on everyone. You
haven’t investigated enough to justify thinking that you’ve reached
objectively correct answers; even if you investigated more, there isn’t
an entirely objective answer (e.g. because it’s value-laden and
context-dependent); and even when you knowably have the objectively
correct answer, that doesn’t mean you should coercively impose it on
others because that could be defecting in an epistemic
Prisoner’s Dilemma.
We can give more specific, concrete reasons that Euphemics is harmful
in practice. Diversity of opinion and the marketplace of ideas would
produce better ideas in the long run; suppressing speech often doesn’t
get rid of harmful thinking and leaves it unaddressed and festering; no
centralized authority will be competent enough to cybernetically control
the sphere of speech in a net-beneficial way; a central authority is way
too much power to wield and would be corrupted and biased; apparently
contradictory propositions are sometimes actually just spoken in
different languages; some propositions are ambiguous or actually
context-dependent (e.g. “It’s raining.”); etc. But we can also compress
this into a simpler message: “There’s no such thing as Rightthink and
Wrongthink.”.
An argument is sometimes made like “Eugenics just means good birth;
how can you be against good birth?”. To go further with the theme of
etymology, we can look at “good” (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/good).
“Good” comes from Proto-Indo-European *gʰedʰ-,
meaning “to unite, to join”; from that root come also the words “gather”
and “together”. So “good” is conceptually related to uniting.
“Goodness”, in this etymological sense, is related to the
collectivity—it’s about consensus, and about the Good of the many. We
could say that, etymologically, good-birth is about collective
decisions about birth. Genomic emancipation negates collective
decision-making about birth, and negates the “good” in “eugenics”.
I’m partially satisfied by the above analysis of eugenics as stemming
from a belief in objectively Good and Bad traits. I think the analysis
at least strongly pushes against a total Wittgensteinian retreat to
understanding eugenics as a mere family resemblance. The analysis
instead gives a reasonable conjecture about a single central throughline
to eugenical ideologies, suggesting that eugenics is a Thing.
However, we have to admit that, whether or not the Eugenical Maxim
can be truly said to be the moral core of eugenics, the Maxim doesn’t
explain enough about the nature of eugenics. It doesn’t clearly
give society enough understanding to succeed in the ongoing task of
steering clear of eugenic abuses. One of the key questions in analyzing
historical motives is to understand what constitutes an engine of
ideology which would tend to drive us towards bad places. That
understanding would empower us to not drive in that direction.
We especially need the ability to avoid driving towards bad places if
we’re going to develop reprogenetic technologies: If we’re doing
reprogenetics, then several tools, individual interests, political
momenta, and background beliefs, any of which could incite and support
eugenic motives, would become much more available. For example:
- If reprogenetic technology grows more effective at influencing
traits, then there would be more incentive in general to use
reprogenetics. In particular, an authoritarian regime would have more
incentive to impose reprogenetics on its subjects. So it might do so,
and it might do so with a larger impact.
- Widespread interest in reprogenetic technology would affirm that
somehow influencing the genome of one’s future child is good and
important. Once that becomes a shared social value, the old eugenic
logic would by default have more support, motivating historical eugenic
policies.
- In order to understand that reprogenetics works, people will have to
understand that differences in inherited genes do substantively
influence many important traits. If a given person or sector of society
implements a general logic of “if genetic heredity matters, then we
should implement racist policies”, then this new shared understanding of
genetic heritability would create more support for racist policies.
(Indeed, sometimes racists seem to think that they just have to win some
argument about heredity and/or genetics of race, and then people will
get on board with implementing racist and/or eugenicist government
policies; and some anti-racists and anti-eugenicists also seem
to think that.)
So, to avoid leading to eugenic abuses, we’d have to avoid whatever
ideological engines would, within that new context created by
reprogenetics, drive us towards bad outcomes. To avoid those engines,
we’d want to clearly have an alternative ideological engine that is
opposed to eugenic ideologies, and that can beneficially structure how
we implement reprogenetics. That’s a main reason to understand what
those ideological engines are. (Another main reason is to track them as
they grow, and to cut off their connection with the context created by
reprogenetics. For example, we’d want to make the case that the logic of
“if heredity matters, then we should do racist/eugenic policies” is a
bad logic, separately from the question of whether or not heredity is
real and matters.)
Can we go deeper? Can we see the ideological engines of eugenics more
clearly?
We can list some mindsets that, in some forms, when held by single
people or by groups of people, could lead to eugenic abuses. (Note that
this list emphasizes the downsides of these mindsets because we’re
analyzing how they contribute to eugenic abuses, but some of them in
some forms have important upsides. E.g. collectivism can motivate
beneficial social welfare policies, high modernism produced efficient
housing and utilities, and a healthy skepticism of doomsaying about
sacredness makes way for technological innovation.)
Here are some of these mindsets:
- Non-liberalism, non-contractualism, not respecting consent,
authoritarianism.
- Not being enough of a principled liberal. It’s easy to say “live and
let live” when you’re wanting more freedom, or when there’s not much
that other people are doing that you find very objectionable. There’s
some additional principledness that you’d need, in order to continue not
pushing for restrictions of freedom even when you’re in power and even
when it seems like there’s a good moral argument (but no truly
compelling state or inter-citizen interest).
- Not thinking about when the boot is on the other foot.
- Not respecting autonomy and consent.
- Not seeking mutually agreeable terms. I.e. not seeking or
negotiating a government policy that avoids giving many people strong
reason to strongly object.
- Discounting the harm of disenfranchising or disinvesting people in
the collective project. Eugenics that excludes types of people, or even
types of genes, would tend to exclude some people from the collective
construction of valuations. That exclusion gives the excluded members
strong reason to strongly object and might take away much of their
motive to participate prosocially.
- Not being legally egalitarian, and therefore being willing to
mistreat or disinvest some groups, and being willing to judge some types
of people as not worthy of life, support, or autonomy.
- Not being willing enough to put limits on state power.
- Power-seeking.
- Wanting to control people; wanting to impose your vision.
- Wanting to pass judgement on people; contempt.
- Wanting to control collective intentions.
- Wanting to wield collective power, i.e. use collective intentions or
collective benefits to justify your actions.
- Overconfidence in judgements. For example:
- Overconfidence in judgements about what reprogenetic interventions
have what effects.
- Overconfidence in judgements about which effects on traits would be
good for different people with different contexts.
- Overconfidence in judgements about which traits are strictly good
(i.e. have no downsides).
- For example, is a strong fear of socializing bad? Maybe. Is it bad
on net, in expectation, for everyone? Maybe. Is it strictly
bad? No; social phobia can sometimes lead to a more intellectual,
artistic, contemplative, or independent way of being.
- For example, is being deaf bad for a child? Yeah, of course. Is
there something good and special about being deaf? Also yes. Quoting a
parent: “We celebrated when we found out about Molly’s deafness. […]
Being deaf is not about being disabled, or medically incomplete—it’s
about being part of a linguistic minority. We’re proud, not of the
medical aspect of deafness, but of the language we use and the community
we live in.”.
- (See “The
vision of Bill Thurston”.)
- Overconfidence in judgements about which tradeoffs between traits
are good, even for traits that are agreed to be good.
- High modernism.
- High
modernism, and related ideas like cybernetic governance, central
planning, and naive utilitarianism, are mindsets related to governance
of society.
- Example: evaluating people or children solely according to their net
economic output or other contribution to the state.
- Example: treating genes for disease as a public health issue, to be
dealt with by the state like a virus, via quarantine, travel
restrictions, and sacrifice if necessary.
- These governance ideas tend to involve centrally coordinated
policies. They tend to be myopically calculative, meaning that they
ignore unmeasurable / intangible / long-term consequences. They
therefore tend to ignore important consequences of policies, tend to be
overconfident, tend to ignore important illegible human values, and tend
to justify destructive imposition of policies. For example, a eugenicist
might try to “calculate a person’s utility to society”, which of course
they cannot actually do well, and which wouldn’t be the right
calculation morally speaking.
- These governance ideas can motivate and/or be motivated by eugenic
ideologies. They tend, to some extent, to be non-liberal,
non-pluralistic, context-insensitive, and to disregard human nature and
the sacredness of procreation.
- Collectivism.
- I define collectivism very broadly, to include any form of somehow
overly privileging the collective when making governance decisions.
- The Collective might for example be a race, a nation, a region, a
social class, or all of humanity; it might include both present and
future people.
- Conceptually, the throughline is any form of strongly collectively
pooling intentionality, whether real or imagined. (Like many items in
this list, this can of course be truly desirable in many of its
forms.)
- This can mean:
- Prioritizing judgements held by the collective (either
stated explicitly, or enacted implicitly, by many / most members) over
irregular judgements held by individuals or small groups. For example,
if most people judge that it’s better for the child if
a future child is given genes for a higher IQ, then a collectivist view
might say that this prevalent preference justifies forcing all
individuals to give their own future child those genes.
- Prioritizing goals held by the collective over more
personal goals. For example, if most people think that it’s better
for society if future children are harder working, that would
be imposed on everyone.
- Prioritizing goals allegedly good for the collective (as judged by
the collective, or some individual, or a small group). For example,
justifying suppressing reproduction of persons judged to be of a race
whose genes would poison the gene pool.
- Prioritizing goals about the collective (e.g., somehow
influencing the gene pool; not necessarily in a way that’s intended to
be good for the collective or all its members, e.g. racist
goals). In particular, visions of a Good collective (e.g. a gene pool
that’s a specific race, whether real or imagined, or having specific
traits or a specific distribution of traits).
- Giving the collective a lot of power to execute choices, including
in a way that overrides individual or small-group values. E.g. writing
laws that give a state a lot of power to enforce specific genomic
choices or to influence reproduction.
- Abusing the priority given to the collective (in order to achieve
non-collective goals).
- Collectivism is especially prone to trample individual values.
Partly the reason is obvious—by definition, it privileges collective
values. But further, Collectivism is, in one way or another, about
motives or justifications that carry the full weight of the Collective.
Since the Collective is very big, these justifications naively would
carry a huge amount of weight, and would therefore override individual
values. It’s a kind of conceptual-political defeat in
detail.
- For example, egregious violations of personal autonomy, such as
forced sterilization or murder, have been justified in terms of social
burden. As the argument goes, if someone is weak or ill, then they and
perhaps their descendants will be a burden to society, requiring food
and shelter and medical care, without giving much back to society.
- Not respecting the sacredness of procreation and of life.
- In other words, procreation and life are sectors of the world that
usually shouldn’t be messed with even, if it seems like they should be
messed with; or should only be messed with by taking a lot of extra
care. Some specific reasons:
- Reproduction is intensely private and personal;
- people often care about their own reproduction much more than they
are aware of;
- messing with reproduction tends to have more bad consequences than
expected;
- and compared to most things, it’s harder to explicitly understand,
explain, and negotiate about one’s values around one’s
reproduction.
- Some mindsets, e.g. high modernist, collectivist, technocratic,
authoritarian, or naive-consequentialist, tend to discount these aspects
of reproduction. They therefore tend to trample those values.
- Intuition.
- Contempt, disgust.
- E.g. being “impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness” may be a basic personal orientation
that is not responsive to other principles, ideologies, or facts. That
orientation may drive one to support aggression towards and degradation
of the vulnerable.
- E.g. wanting to get rid of people who are distasteful or deviant,
whether or not they’re actually harmful.
- Aggression, dominance.
- Some people want to hurt people regardless of facts, numbers, etc.
They may use various scientific or prosocial sounding justifications for
aggressive policies. Thus, the conclusion of “we should do aggressive
policies” would survive changes in scientific understanding or social
values, finding new justifications in the new justificatory
context.
- For example:
- some people are aggressively racist, wanting to hurt various kinds
of people;
- some people engage in scapegoating;
- some people align with whatever social faction promises
violence.
- Non-pluralism, over-universalizing.
- Not being enough of a pluralist. Pluralism is when you accept the
existence of multiple large-scale overarching social structures
(multiple genetic / ethnic clusters, states, religions, cultures,
ideologies, societies, epistemic communities, social or economic niches,
moral views, or systems of norms).
- In particular, being pluralist about reproduction and inheritance
means accepting that different people or groups have different values
about inherited traits for their children. Generators of these different
values about traits would include:
- epistemic disagreements about the nature and consequences of various
traits;
- temporary local differences, such as fads, or societies that haven’t
yet processed these questions;
- within one society, the value of social and economic specialization,
e.g. having some people who are good at science and some who are good at
political organization;
- fundamentally different individual values, e.g. valuing artistic
creativity vs. diligence;
- and fundamentally different autonomous groups, e.g. different
cultures with different long-term values even after reflection and
growth.
- Universalizing is when you want one vision or criterion to be
applied to everyone. Wanting, or assuming, that there’s a single global
notion of Good traits for future children to be born with, would tend to
be an overly universalizing stance.
- For example, even advocates of “liberal eugenics” tend to set out to
figure out which traits support all life plans for the future child, or
avoid suppressing any reasonable life plans, or similar. I can agree that criteria like
this are good to investigate in order to gain moral understanding about
genomic choices, and that criteria aimed at generally empowering the
future child are better criteria than “Good” or “fit” or similar. But,
this is still seemingly an investigation aimed at figuring out a
criterion for genomic choices that makes object-level judgements, and
that is somewhat comprehensively prescriptive (rather than just
prohibiting some small set of choices). Such a criterion would tend to
exclude other ways of making genomic choices, and one can easily imagine
it being enforced formally (even by the state, perhaps).
- Not being morally egalitarian.
- That is, not holding that everyone is morally equal. Specifically,
not holding that each person is equally:
- a moral patient, so that their interests (desires,
suffering, pleasures) are given equal weight a priori.
- a moral agent, so that their decisions (preferences,
negotiations, agreements) are given equal weight a priori.
- Some eugenicists would not view it as very costly, or at all costly,
to harm undesirables. Because they’re undesirable (i.e. have traits that
are vicious, inferior, diseased, weak, etc.), they are less of a person
or not a person.
- Judging people and groups of people.
- Historically, the only tools available to eugenicists were
suppressing or promoting the reproduction of people or groups of people
(families, clans, races, regions, classes). So they did that.
- (This gives an incomplete picture. There were eugenicists with a
Lamarckian viewpoint, e.g. in France. These would target
specific practices in the hopes of preventing those practices from
causing the acquisition of undesirable characteristics that are then
passed on through inheritance. This would, at least narrowly in the
respect of not targeting whole people or groups for reproductive
control, tend to be more humane than Weismannian eugenics (focused
solely on inheritance through the germ cells).)
- Eugenics involves a stance of inclusion / exclusion; some people are
good, and should get resources and should reproduce more, and others are
the opposite.
- Judgy orientations: essentializing, biodeterminism, fixed mindset.
- These orientations push towards passing judgement on someone.
- Essentializing a person means treating them as though they “are”
their traits, race, genes, or pedigree.
- Essentializing someone pushes away from considering illegible value
that they might provide.
- Essentializing someone pushes toward comparing them to the median
essence of other citizens (thus potentially finding them overall
unworthy, rather than considering the totality of their life).
- Essentializing someone pushes away from considering more granular
interventions (e.g. editing a single gene rather than sterilizing the
person).
- Biodeterminism means thinking that life outcomes are strongly or
completely determined by inheritance.
- Fixed mindset (the opposite of growth mindset) means thinking that
skills, knowledge, and personality are fixed and can’t be self-modified
and self-improved.
- Judging people tends to pull away from social welfare and other
methods of supporting someone to improve their behavior and health.
- Judging people tends to justify taking irreversible
action—judgements are taken to be final, authoritative, and decisive for
further action.
- Judging people or larger units tends to pull towards trampling
individual rights, since that is a more blunt realm of intervention (in
other words, you can’t sterilize specifically someone’s disease-bearing
DNA; you either sterilize the person or you don’t).
- Since there weren’t more precise tools for controlling reproduction,
there was a ready justification for controlling at the level of persons
or larger units. Motives for controlling persons or larger units other
than actual eugenic motives could take refuge in eugenic justifications.
Some advocates of “eugenic” policies continued advocating for some of
those policies even after the original eugenic justification was shown
scientifically unsound, which shows that the original justification was
at least not their entire reason to advocate for that policy.
- Social Darwinism, zero-sum thinking, Malthusianism.
- Historical eugenicists often thought in zero-sum (constant-sum,
perfectly adversarial) terms. These orientations don’t sufficiently
countenance the possibility and desirability of “growing the pie”,
e.g. just having more of every type of person and making everyone richer
while supporting those in need.
- For example, some thought in terms of conflicts between races, where
inevitably eventually one race would win over the others (dominating or
exterminating them). That leads to conflictual stances towards other
groups. Obviously.
- Some thought in terms of tradeoffs between different people, where
someone born with a disease is “taking up a spot” so that a more capable
person is excluded from existing. This leads to thinking of birth as a
shared resource to be distributed or denied by the collective.
- These orientations can contribute to paranoia and insecurity,
e.g. fears of being replaced or outcompeted; fears of disappearing as a
race or class; thinking the whole future of the country or world is at
stake with the issue of demographic or population-genetic trends. If the
wrong sort of people are reproducing, then the right sort aren’t, and
the ratio of good to bad dwindles.
- These orientations can also contribute to urgency and panic around
eugenic policies. Urgency can further circumvent any liberal principles
or compassionate feelings that might backstop the collective decision to
impose abuses on some members of the population.
- Non-Solutionism, techno-pessimism.
- The only tools for population control available to historical
eugenicists were tools for intervening at the level of people or groups
of people. Those tools are intrinsically blunt-force and therefore
require large tradeoffs between more control over traits and more
coercion, vs. less control and less coercion. The common response to
those tradeoffs was to accept the costs (generally imposed on someone
else). I’m not aware of anyone saying something to the effect of “Maybe
we should avoid a bunch of harmful coercion, and instead look for
technical solutions that more precisely alter heredity without
coercively controlling people’s reproduction.”.
- If they had been more Solutionist or techno-optimistic, they might
have been more inclined to wait.
- (Of course, more precise reprogenetic tools can also be applied with
authoritarian coercion, so Solutionism isn’t a full moral answer by
itself. But, non-Solutionism does indicate something about the
sociopolitical decision-making procedure involved in eugenics: There
wasn’t that strong a care for the harms done or commitment to avoiding
it by finding another way.)
To illuminate the structure of eugenic ideologies a bit more, this
section lists some ways that the eugenic mindsets listed in the previous
section are given support by the Eugenical Maxim from the above section
“The
Eugenical Maxim as the shared moral core of eugenics?”.
I would presume that these connections cannot even come close to
fully explaining how and why any given instance of eugenics happened
(any specific advocacy, state policy, or social attitude). Take, for
example, the behavior of Nazi Germany. That behavior was of course
heavily influenced by eugenic ideologies in multiple ways—think for
example about ideas of racial purity and racial conflict; ideas of the
population as a single body with contamination, purity, cleansing, and
weak elements; subordination of the individual to the nation and the
state; and utopian visions of the gene pool. However, there was ample
ideological kindling from other sources, such as mystical ideas of the
Volk, as well as anti-Semitism as a method of scapegoating (perhaps for
fears of modernity). That kindling was added to by
Germany’s military defeat and humiliation, and by severe economic
strain, before being ignited.
So, the support from the Eugenical Maxim given to eugenic mindsets is
only partial. Furthermore, the direction of support is ambiguous
(perhaps depending on particular cases, or depending on what question
we’re really trying to answer). Which comes first, authoritarianism or
eugenics? Which comes first, high modernism or disrespecting the
sacredness of procreation? We can note that the causality can go in both
directions (surely high modernism promotes believing that there are
objectively Good and Bad traits which can be measured well enough for
any practical purpose, and that belief promotes high modernist
policies), and also allow these relationships to be open questions.
Still, I think these (vague, conjectured) connections show some
important elements of how eugenic ideologies work. In the following,
“promotes” means “would tend to often, though not necessarily, promote”.
A belief in objective Good and Bad traits promotes:
- Universalism / totalitarianism / non-pluralism (i.e. applying the
same criteria to everyone). Universalism promotes:
- High modernism. (If the same criteria for traits applies to
everyone, then it makes sense to design and impose regular systems on
everyone, disregarding local context.) High modernism promotes:
- Essentialism.
- Disrespect for the sacredness of procreation.
- Non-Solutionism. (It may sound paradoxical to say that high
modernism is not solutionist, but what I mean is this: If you think in
terms of imposing policies in a systematic, widespread way, then you are
impressed with the power of such policies. You tend to be more attracted
to the impact of those policies, rather than being attracted to
developing technology that would enable more precise interventions—the
sort of interventions that get the benefits of the blunt-force policy,
without the noble sacrifices (of someone else’s wellbeing).)
- Non-liberalism / authoritarianism / centralized power over
reproduction. (If you discount the existence of multiple legitimate
perspectives on traits, there’s less reason to maintain liberal power
structures that enforce room for pluralistic autonomy.) Non-liberalism
promotes:
- Power-seeking. (If there’s going to be one centralized power to
wield over everyone’s reproduction, you want to be the one wielding that
power.)
- Coercion. (Authoritarianism inherently involves some people
controlling some other people in a harmful and unjust manner, thus
provoking resistance and thus requiring coercion to enforce.)
- Overconfidence. (If someone argues to you that they should
be allowed to reproduce despite having Bad traits, they might argue in
terms of autonomy or pluralism, rather than by presenting reasons that
their trait is actually Good. If you believe there are objectively Good
and Bad traits, then you may discount such arguments and falsely believe
there aren’t good counterarguments to your eugenic policies, and
therefore be overconfident in specific trait judgements or general
eugenic policies.) Overconfidence promotes:
- Power-seeking. (If you’re confident and everyone else is obviously
wrong and won’t listen, what’s left is to seize power and do the good
thing yourself.)
- High modernism. (If you’re confident about judgements of Good and
Bad traits, it seems fine to impose regular systems on everyone.)
- Essentialism. (If you think there are objective universal Good
traits, then it makes more sense to score people on a single axis and to
view people as well-summarized by that score.) Essentialism promotes:
- Not being morally egalitarian. (If someone is Bad, it’s easy to
think of them as also having less moral weight in general, i.e. being
less of a moral patient.)
- Not being morally egalitarian promotes not being
legally egalitarian. Why treat everyone equally before the law
if they are not equal as moral patients or agents?
- Fixed mindset.
- Judging whole people.
- Overconfidence in judgements about which traits are strictly good
and what are good tradeoffs between traits.
- Contempt, disgust, domination. (If there is a simple good / bad
distinction, the Bad people are easy targets for intuitions,
e.g. intuitions for scapegoating or wanting to dominate.)
- Racism and racist policies.
- Non-pluralism.
- Non-Solutionism. (If people “are” Good or Bad, it seems less
important to avoid infringing on a whole person’s body and autonomy, so
you don’t seek out technology that would enable that.)
- Disrespect for the sacredness of procreation. (If something is
viewed as objective, it makes less sense to view it as intensely
personal or to have surprising aspects or consequences; \(2+3=5\) is simple, canonical, and
infinitely solid, and therefore doesn’t need to be treated as cryptic,
personal, and provisional.) Disrespect for sacredness promotes:
- Non-pluralism.
- High modernism.
- Collectivism. (If you think there’s objective Good and Bad traits,
then you tend to happily multiply the impact of traits by the size of
the collective, and therefore tend to take the collective perspective.)
Collectivism promotes:
- Authoritarianism.
- Universalism.
- Aggression. (If you think that the weight of the Collective is
behind your judgements, then you may feel more justified in and/or have
more “righteous zeal” for violence in service of the Collective will. In
particular, respect for life can be overridden.)
Discussions about big social and state policy questions often get
tense. One source of tension is discourse goals that differ between two
interlocutors. For example, one person might try to think through a
domain by sharing factual information; but another person might be
focused on promoting and demoting various policy proposals, and might
interpret the first person’s factual statements as supporting or
attacking some policy proposal, and then object to that support or
attack. Neither person is necessarily in the wrong; it could be that
both people are doing good and useful computations, even if the result
is misunderstanding and apparent conflict. (Of course, there can also be
actual conflict.)
This kind of talking past each other comes up a lot in the case of
reprogenetics. Questions like “Is this eugenics?” tend to come up, and
then interlocutors somehow fail to engage with each other. Here are some
categories of discourse goals around reprogenetics, and in particular
around questions like “Is this eugenics?”:
- Object level investigation and debate.
- I.e., sharing and comparing ideas, facts, and arguments about what
to do with reprogenetics.
- Procedural affirmation.
- Someone focused on procedural affirmation is asking the question “By
engaging with the topic in the way we are right now, what overall
procedure are we implicitly endorsing for making decisions on this topic
in general?”.
- For example, suppose that Alice starts talking about reprogenetics
on the object level, e.g. talking about technical safety standards for
some assisted reproductive technology. Then Bob, who is interested in
procedural affirmation, makes an objection that’s strange to Alice’s
ears. Bob tells Alice that she has to bring in more voices.
Alice might respond that, sure, it would be helpful to get more
information and perspectives from various people, but at the moment
she’s just trying to think about what makes sense technically, directly.
Bob is uncomfortable because Alice seems to be affirming a broad policy
along the lines of “I (Alice) will think on my own and figure out What
Should Be Done with reprogenetics [and then I will unilaterally
technocratically impose this on society without consulting society].”.
Alice is uncomfortable because from her perspective, Bob’s policy seems
to be “No one should try to actually figure out what to actually do with
reprogenetics [unless perhaps they are a Bob-approved person].”.
- Bob and Alice might agree that such a policy would be bad; and they
might not have a disagreement about technical safety standards. But they
are putting very different weights on procedural affirmation
vs. concrete modular progress.
- Deference to consensus.
- Bob might in general want to defer to the moral consensus of
society, while Alice wants to reevaluate some questions.
- For example, Bob wants to generally take a stance against affecting
genes of future children, even if he has to resort to motivated
reasoning. On the other hand, Alice wants to think explicitly about
which uses of reprogenetics are moral or immoral, or should be legal or
illegal. From Alice’s point of view, Bob is being a conformist and
potentially abdicating a responsibility to make ethical progress on
novel difficult questions. From Bob’s point of view, Alice is being
hubristic / unilateralist and is selfishly and/or recklessly asserting
her own values without sufficient regard to what society thinks, as well
as potentially harboring evil intentions and possibly inviting social
punishment for her behavior (and for anyone who doesn’t distance
themselves).
- Deference
is both necessary and problematic, and it’s
far from trivial to defer gracefully. So neither Bob nor Alice are
clearly in the right.
- Underlying motivations.
- Bob might be trying to suss out what Alice’s motivations are.
- For example, Bob might be trying to enforce norms about acceptable
vs. unacceptable motivations around reprogenetics.
- It could be difficult for Bob to figure out Alice’s motivations,
especially if there are multiple different motivations that recommend
similar actions, and especially if Alice has an incentive to hide her
motivations. For example, Alice might be a genomic emancipationist,
hoping to empower individuals directly with reprogenetic technology; or
Alice might be a eugenicist, hoping to use reprogenetics to gradually
shift the Overton window around heritability until she can push for
coercive state policies to control the population for racial or
eugenic-utopia purposes. These are very different long-term goals, but
they could recommend some overlapping short-term actions.
- From Alice’s point of view, it can seem like there’s not much to do
besides state her goals and then work towards them honorably; but
there’s no guarantee that such a plan would, or should, assuage Bob’s
worries.
- Value affirmation.
- Even if Alice doesn’t actually hold some specific objectionable
motivation, she might recommend some actions that are ambiguously
motivated. Then, Bob might worry that other people who do hold
the objectionable motivation would be rallied or emboldened by Alice’s
recommended actions.
- Introspection on worries.
- Sometimes, Bob doesn’t have a clear worry, but does have an
intuitive worry, and is trying to figure out what that worry is. This
can be confusing for Alice because Bob’s worries would seem
inconsistent, rather than just inchoate.
- The problem is compounded by the fact that eugenics is such a
sprawling and variegated ideology, and it’s hard to understand what
exactly to worry about. You can tell that eugenics ended up very
horribly in the 20th century, but it’s hard to tell what exactly went
wrong. So it makes sense to be vaguely worried without being able to
immediately clearly explain what you’re worried about.
In my view, all of these ways of engaging in discourse are reasonable
and have their place. I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there are
different legitimate discourse goals. Without keeping discourse goals in
mind, people might repeatedly exchange statements with each other that
seem, to the other person, to be statements made in bad faith
(e.g. off-topic, evasive, or willfully misunderstanding). Hopefully,
with goals in mind, people’s statements would seem at least not
adversarial when they really aren’t adversarial; and ideally, people
could decide together to work together towards whatever shared goals
they might have. I would also suggest that someone who puts a lot of
weight on one mode of discourse might benefit from being open to other
modes (ideally in a mutual exchange).
This section compares the ideology of eugenics against the ideology
of genomic emancipation. One goal of explaining the differences between
those ideologies is as part of a defense of genomic emancipation.
Another goal is to more fully construct an ideology of genomic
emancipation that would lead to desirable futures. (See “Appendix:
Why envision genomic emancipation?”.)
Here are claims that a eugenicist and a genomic emancipationist would
agree on:
- Many important traits are somewhat heritable in the colloquial
sense, i.e. the child will somewhat resemble the parent. Much of this is
genetic, meaning that the difference between individuals is determined
by differences in genes (as opposed to environment that’s shared or
transmitted from parent to child). Such traits include physiological,
mental, and behavioral traits, as well as life outcomes.
- It’s technically possible to affect genetic inheritance.
- There’s no strong moral or ethical reason to avoid all possible ways
of affecting genetic inheritance.
- Morally speaking, it benefits the child and society if the future
child is given genes that tend to lead to health and capability. The
world where such choices are taken is a vision of a good world.
- It’s good to develop reprogenetics (technology that enables
individuals to affect genetic inheritance).
- It’s acceptable and in some contexts desirable for someone to make
genomic choices on behalf of a future child.
Those overlaps are only partial. Here are some delimitations of these
overlaps, showing some of where eugenics and genomic emancipation come
apart:
- Heritability.
- A eugenicist tends to argue for higher heritability, and in
particular for average genetic differences between races. One reason is
the motive to justify imposition of policies based on genes and/or race;
another reason is general attitudes about people and races actually
distorting the eugenicist’s perceptions. This leads to a distorted
picture of heritability. For example, a eugenicist might tend to presume
that a behavioral trait is greatly determined by genes. Many behavioral
traits are in fact significantly influenced by genes, but it’s
complicated and hard to disentangle social/environmental effects from
genetic effects, so there’s plenty of ambiguity to serve as grist for an
ideologically biased mill.
- A genomic emancipationist wants an accurate understanding of the
genetics of traits, in order to empower parents with reprogenetics.
- A eugenicist would tend to essentialize people as overall Good and
Bad (undesirable, unfit, degenerate, lower, inferior), and would tend to
tie that judgement to genes.
- A genomic emancipationist views traits as small, separable elements
of a person, more like equipment rather than who the person really
is.
- Affecting inheritance.
- A eugenicist would tend to underestimate the technical costs
involved in affecting genes at the population level.
- Moral prohibitions on affecting genes.
- A eugenicist views the interest of the collective (the state, the
race, humanity as a whole) as being paramount, generally overriding
individual autonomy, so that there should be little restriction on the
state’s ability to control the genomic choices of its population.
- A genomic emancipationist views it as paramount to have the
decision-maker about a person’s genes be as close to that person as
possible, such that it’s plausibly bad in expectation to have, say, a
state, or a scientific committee, or even a reprogenetics clinic, be the
primary decision-maker about a future child’s genes. They would
therefore oppose pressure or coercion about genomic choices. (And
furthermore they would restrict the state’s power to restrict genomic
choices; see “The
principle of genomic liberty”.)
- A eugenicist tends to view there as being few or no restrictions
whatsoever on what means are acceptable to use for affecting
genes, since the collective interest in a future child’s genes is so
large.
- A genomic emancipationist values autonomy, and therefore would
oppose any individually harmful means of affecting reproduction (such as
forced sterilization).
- Beneficial genes.
- A eugenicist argues that the societal benefit of some genes is
enough to justify using collective force to make future children have
those genes.
- A genomic emancipationist argues that, almost regardless of how much
benefit some genes might give to society, that benefit doesn’t justify
making anyone have those genes. In other words, the moral question of
which genes are beneficial to society is largely separated away from
policies about genomic decision-making. The vision is a hope which can
be pursued indirectly through reprogenetics and genomic emancipation,
but not directly by affecting genomic choices in “the right
direction”.
- Genomic choice-making.
- A eugenicist argues that it’s good for society, the state, or
scientific committees to make genomic choices on behalf of future
children.
- A genomic emancipationist mostly rejects that, and instead argues
that it’s good for a future child’s parents to make genomic choices on
behalf of that child.
The Eugenical Maxim described above in “The
Eugenical Maxim as the shared moral core of eugenics?” summarizes
eugenics as believing in Good and Bad traits that strongly affect
society and that therefore should be strongly promoted in the
population.
Genomic emancipation (as described in “Genomic
Emancipation”) approximately negates the
Eugenical Maxim. The simple concrete meaning of genomic emancipation
is:
Making biotechnology to empower parents on behalf of their future
children.
The abstract ideal of genomic emancipation is:
The birthright of human spirits includes fuller self-unfolding via
self-sovereignty over their own genomes.
Eugenics says that there are Good and Bad traits, selected for by
society and/or nature. Genomic emancipation says that there are not Good
and Bad traits in that sense; individual choice is somewhat opposed to
the judgements of both society and nature, and individual choice should
generally win out. Parents should make autonomous genomic choices, and
these choices should reflect some differences between parents
in ideas of what traits their future children should get. There are
ethics of genomic choice under genomic emancipation, but they don’t
derive from a universal imposed notion of Good and Bad traits.
A eugenicist would justify developing reprogenetics because it’s Good
/ Bad for these genes / traits / people / races to be propagated. A
genomic emancipationist would justify developing reprogenetics because
it’s good for people to be empowered autonomously.
Eugenics and genomic emancipation overlap in some concrete
goals—mainly, wanting to develop reprogenetic technologies (including
the scientific understanding of reproduction and of the genetics of
traits). But, they diverge on most key goals:
- What genes are to be affected?
- Eugenics: affect the gene pool, i.e. the prevalence in the
population of various genes.
- Genomic emancipation: affect individuals (including sometimes
promoting some variants in some individuals and demoting those same
variants in other individuals).
- How are genes to be affected?
- Eugenics: any tool that works, including reprogenetics and also
including person-level interventions (e.g. sterilization) and
group-level interventions (e.g. paying smart people to have kids, or
having race-based immigration restrictions).
- Genomic emancipation: only use reprogenetic tools that empower
individual parents on behalf of their own future children.
- What state policies are to be implemented?
- Eugenics: any policies that are politically and technically feasible
that will promote good genes.
- Genomic emancipation: the state should implement a policy that
restricts the state from interfering on questions of which genes to give
a child. (To promote equality of access, the state could subsidize
general access to reprogenetics, without punishing or rewarding specific
genomic choices.)
- Who should be given power over genomic choices?
- Eugenics: scientific consensus and/or the state, with implementation
help from social pressure.
- Genomic emancipation: parents are given the final say over genomic
choices for their own future children; they can be influenced (partly,
but not super much) by the willingness of clinics to provide specific
services and by social pressure; and there are a few restrictions on
genomic choices that can be implemented by the state (see “Exceptions
to the genomic liberty principle”).
- How should genetics of reproduction be presented?
- Eugenics: affecting genes of children should be presented in a
positive light in order to encourage more people to do it.
- Genomic emancipation: affecting genes of children should be
presented in as accurate a light as possible, in order to empower
parents to make informed genomic choices.
Eugenics and genomic emancipation differ on several underlying
mindsets:
- Concentration of power.
- Eugenics: anti-liberal, authoritarian, power-seeking, non-pluralist,
universalizing, collectivist.
- Genomic emancipation: the opposite of that. Collective motives and
judgements are not used, or are used only in extreme cases, to justify
state infringement on procreative liberty. There’s some small element of
collectivism: trait-communities (e.g. the Deaf community) could be given
some ability to self-regulate genomic choices (e.g. they could vote to
ban making deaf children). That setup would provide a midway point
between total autonomy (which potentially unnecessarily allows some
future children to be harmed) and total centralization of genomic
choices. (This is in significant tension with genomic liberty, of
course.)
- Contractualism.
- Eugenics: rejects pluralistic views of the good life or good traits
and imposes collective judgements on individuals; individuals who have
their own choices overridden would have good reason to reject a societal
eugenics contract.
- Genomic emancipation: not inherently contractualist, but I think
genomic emancipation, and in particular genomic liberty, is a reasonable
proposal for a social contract around reprogenetics that shouldn’t be
too objectionable to too many people (see “Genomic
liberty as a proposed civil compromise”).
- Consent.
- Eugenics: collective judgement should be promoted; the consent of a
future child doesn’t play much practical role; there is presumed consent
of the child to be improved by the collective judgement about the good
life.
- Genomic emancipation: the consent of the future child is key, but of
course cannot be applied directly to that child’s genomic choices.
Leaving the future child’s genome up to nature is also a potential
vector for the child to be non-consensually harmed; there’s no perfect
alternative. The best available alternative is to empower the future
child’s parents (see “Emancipation
of whom?”). Consent can also be computed retrospectively, and then
applied prospectively, by asking children affected by reprogenetics what
they think of the genomic choices their parents made (see “Habermas
and multigenerational feedback”).
- Racism.
- Eugenics: not inherently racist, but tends toward racism because—as
the logic goes—if there are Good and Bad traits, and different races
have different amounts of Good traits, then some races are better than
others and should be promoted.
- Genomic emancipation: orthogonal to racism; is explicitly
non-discriminatory in terms of empowering everyone with
reprogenetics.
- The sacredness of procreation and of life.
- Eugenics: sacredness is overridden by collective values.
Reproduction and even life can be interfered with to protect the gene
pool.
- Genomic emancipation does not respect the sacredness of the
naturalness of procreation; it does respect the sacredness of
the personal autonomous aspect of procreation. It does not
necessarily respect all life—because some reprogenetic
technologies involve creating very early human embryos without an intent
to implant them—but it is generally consonant with a general humanist
emancipatory project, which includes healing and preventing all unwanted
incapacity.
- Overconfidence in judgements, high modernism.
- Eugenics: not inherently overconfident, but tends to be
overconfident in effect, by discounting the value of information and
traits that lie outside the interest of whatever centralized eugenic
council controls the state’s eugenic decisions.
- Genomic emancipation: maintains freedom for diversity and hopefully
maintains (and in
some ways increases) actual diversity, which is a kind of way to
avoid overconfidence. On the other hand, genomic emancipation gives more
leeway for parents to enact overconfident views through genomic choices;
this should be tempered (perhaps by clinics exercising a right to refuse
service). The soft eugenics of social pressure is an open question, and
even under genomic liberty social pressure might tend to somewhat
overconfidently project consensus values onto individuals.
- Inclusion / exclusion.
- Eugenics: some people are desirable and should reproduce more;
others are undesirable and should reproduce less.
- Genomic emancipation: everyone should reproduce as much as they
want, including people with genetic diseases; all parents should be
empowered to empower their future children.
- Zero-sum thinking.
- Eugenics: tends to be Social Darwinist, zero-sum, Malthusian.
- Genomic emancipation: has a large positive-sum component: using
reprogenetics, parents can help give their future child a good life
without taking anything away from anyone else, e.g. by giving them
health and capability. However, zero-sum conflicts could arise due to
genomic liberty, e.g. the race for tall sons.
- Non-Solutionism.
- Eugenics: tends to not wait for technological solutions and instead
rushes ahead with blunt-force, harmful tools.
- Genomic emancipation: calls for empowerment of individuals through
technology. I would say: if we could only affect genes by grievously
interfering in reproduction, then we would have to find another
way.
A main goal of this investigation has been to help construct an
ideology for the beneficial development of reprogenetic technologies. As
a subset of that goal, we want to construct a social policy platform
that would avert any tendencies of society to use reprogenetics in
abusive ways in the vein of historical eugenics.
That’s a big project that isn’t completed. But from the investigation
in this essay, we can take away some ideas. Simply writing down these
ideas doesn’t solve anything. My hope is that stating an ideology for
beneficial reprogenetics will help that ideology be socially and
politically implemented: as society builds a consensus ideology, that
ideology can turn into concrete norms and shared goals that protect and
uphold what we care about in the domain of reprogenetics. Thus, even
relatively obvious ideas are worth stating because, beyond just
explaining the idea, the statement plays the additional role of putting
the idea into common
knowledge, or at least proposing to do so.
The following list is focused on the anti-eugenics aspect of genomic
emancipation; see also “Genomic
Emancipation” for other aspects. Some
takeaways:
This domain is complex, and we’ll learn more as we go—e.g. we’ll
learn what the technology can and can’t do, we’ll learn how parents
choose to use reprogenetics, and we’ll learn downstream consequences.
So, it is an ongoing project to work out an ideology
for a good future with reprogenetics, and in particular a future that
avoids eugenic abuses.
Four pillars. The distinctions listed above in
“Comparison
of eugenics vs. genomic emancipation” can be converted into
anti-eugenics norms. In particular, beyond general liberalism (which is
also key), these four ideals seem important:
- (1) Pluralism—about different visions of the good
life and beneficial traits or genes. (See “The
vision of Bill Thurston”.)
- (2) Respect for the sacredness of reproduction—as a
private familial activity.
- (3) Emancipation of the child—through genomic
liberty and empowerment for the parents, community self-regulation,
multi-generational feedback, and encouragement of parents to empower
their children.
- (4) Distrust of the state—disinterested parties
shouldn’t be allowed to impose reproductive choices on people, and the
state is among the most disinterested parties. That’s not a power anyone
should wield.
- See “The
principle of genomic liberty”.
- To elaborate, reproduction and reprogenetics have these
characteristics:
- They’re cutting edge science, and therefore complicated and hard to
get a clear, comprehensive, accurate grasp on.
- They’re quite varied—there are many different ways to use
reprogenetics, many different people using it, many different genomic
choices, and many different tools and information involved.
- They involve genuine tradeoffs.
- They’re intensely personal—different people have different values,
different beliefs, different decision processes, and different moral
stances, and people want privacy and autonomy.
- They’re very high-valence—people care about reproduction a lot.
- They’re sacred—reproduction tends to be surprisingly
important and surprisingly bad to mess with.
- They’ve been messed with by the state previously in history, with
bad results.
- They’d be hard to enforce laws about, without a lot of messy state
intervention and judgements.
- For these reasons, it’s best to keep the state out of reproduction,
especially reproductive choices, as much as possible.
The
principle of genomic liberty.
- Undue restrictions or other influence on people’s reproduction
shouldn’t be enacted.
- If a person or organization enacts such restrictions, then they
should be punished as violating norms of genomic emancipation.
Minimizing soft eugenics. In line with the
principle of genomic liberty, generally, parents shouldn’t have undue
pressure on them about genomic choices. It’s fine and often good for
there to be some pressure (just like it’s fine for there to be some
pressure about other private choices); but the soft eugenics of societal
pressure is a significant risk, in that the collective can gain too much
power over future children if parents are too much a slave to
consensus.
- Genetic counseling. Genetic counselors should aim
to inform, explain, encourage reflection, and discourage rushed or
unserious decision-making. But, they should usually steer clear of
encouraging or discouraging specific choices too strongly.
- Social stigma.
- Specific genomic choices should be treated as very private. Nothing
is absolute, but it should be perhaps similar to questions of what
religion to be or who to love; you can have opinions but you generally
keep them to yourself, unless speaking in the abstract, or speaking to a
very close friend, or in extreme cases.
- If there’s stigma, it should mainly be directed in a way that’s more
agnostic about specific genomic choices. For example, it would be more
okay to stigmatize parents for not caring about the wellbeing or
empowerment of their child.
- Most justifications about effects on the collective should be kept
out of social stigma. (An exception might be that it’s okay to
stigmatize negative-sum choices such as super-tall sons.)
- Neutral subsidies. Subsidies (government or other)
for reprogenetics should be broadly neutral to genomic choices. E.g. the
state giving all parents vouchers for reprogenetics clinics would be
fine; giving vouchers for making non-autistic children would not be
fine.
- Genetic nondiscrimination. I haven’t thought enough
about this, but it’s plausible that many, most, or all cases of genetic
discrimination (conditioning some personal treatment on a person’s
genes) should be heavily discouraged or even banned. See for example the
Genetic
Information Nondiscrimination Act. I like free markets, but prima
facie there’s not that good of a reason to discriminate based on genes
(rather than just testing merit); and the “soft eugenic” effects of
discrimination for insurance, healthcare, scholarship, employment,
certification, licensing, and so on, seem prima facie fairly bad.
- Provision of services. Clinics can use their
judgement and exercise a right to categorically refuse specific
reprogenetic services. E.g. a clinic might decide to not ever affect
some specific trait, or to not ever increase traits above or below some
trait-value, or something. However, I would urge them to generally err
on the side of providing more services rather than less.
- Modular reprogenetic services. Clinics should
present traits that could be affected in a modular way, so that parents
can pick and choose which traits to affect. If the only products
available are certain comprehensive sets of genomic choices (e.g. a
single “health index” or similar), then in effect the genomic choices
are being made by whoever constructed that prepackaged set. This is
relatively benign, but is some degree of centralized genomic
choice-making, and isn’t necessary. (There’s nothing wrong with offering
the comprehensive choice-sets; but modular choices should also be
offered, and the comprehensive choice-sets should be explained as being
a combination of a bunch of genomic choices, as opposed to being “good
genes” or similar.)
Privacy. Clinics should keep private any
information about the genomic choices that parents make. This should
maybe be a law. That way, parents can make their decision in peace and
privacy, without undue pressure except from the advisors who the parents
trust with that information.
Maintaining recourse. In general, the results of
applying reprogenetics should be monitored, and the policies involved in
applying reprogenetics should be open to reevaluation. In particular,
any genomic choices that someone would want to make, but which are
restricted (de jure or de facto), are a potential point of contention
and a potential point where some degree of eugenic / collectivist
pressure is being exerted. Also, the protection against
eugenics that comes through genomic liberty has potential costs,
e.g. bad outcomes for children or tragedies of the commons. For these
reasons, all voices should be listened to (though of course not
necessarily in a way that changes policies). For example:
- People who keep saying “I want to make this genomic choice but
society isn’t letting me.” should get a public hearing.
- Clinics, and specifically genetic counselors, have a special
responsibility here, as the main point of contact for parents who are
thinking through their own genomic choices. Genetic counselors should
view it as part of their role to help not only parents, but also society
at large, think through whether it makes sense. More specifically:
- When a genetic counselor is faced with parents who want to make a
genomic choice that is considered not acceptable, the counselor should
put extra effort into understanding what the parents are thinking, and
to help the parents think and explain themselves more clearly.
- Ideally, clinics would participate in the public conversation about
various genomic choices. For example, it would be helpful to explain
what their current clinic-wide policies are about whether or not to
provide a given reprogenetic service, and what are the reasons for those
policies.
- This way the conversation can be ongoing, and parents aren’t
silently left without recourse.
- Formal rules that restrict genomic choices (international rules,
state laws, professional norms) should be considered open to debate.
(I’m not sure what this means concretely.)
- Children whose parents made some genomic choices for them should
especially be listened to. (See “Habermas
and multigenerational feedback”.) Those children should speak out
(though of course their privacy is their prerogative).
- Communities of people with some trait should be given a lot of
weight in any questions about that trait. Clinics, regulators, and
scientists should listen to what the community thinks of the trait. As
an example, it might be good to have it be the case that the Deaf
community forms an autonomous self-regulating unit that decides whether
or not reprogenetically making your child deaf should be banned. This is
meant as a better compromise than either the state making centralized
universal decisions, or having individual parents each make their own
potentially abhorrent decision. If a given community reflects a lot and
decides that some reprogenetic intervention involving the trait should
or shouldn’t be banned or offered, then the reasoning behind that
decision would ideally be made public, to help avoid unnecessary tension
around genomic liberty.
Parents resisting eugenic pressures. Parents
should try to make genomic choices that aren’t just controlled by
collective pressures that may not be good for this future child. For
example:
- Don’t make hasty decisions, and try to avoid having your decisions
be overly unconsciously predetermined. Instead, aim to spend more time
and effort reflecting on your values and intuitions, and on what’s best
for your future child. Gather information. If you have some intuition
that you want to make some genomic choice, that’s fine, and you can
ultimately go with that intuition; but try to spend some time to
question that decision, or at least wonder about why it’s there.
- Consider being willing to take a stand. For example, many people
bleach their skin in order to make it lighter so that they incur less
disadvantage due to discrimination based on skin color. Consider placing
the value of propagating your uniqueness to your children, and the value
of avoiding giving in to prejudice, above the value of a temporary
material advantage.
- Don’t burn the commons of genomic liberty by making genomic choices
that give your child mere positional advantage, at a net societal cost
or neutral outcome. E.g. don’t make your sons be 6’8” tall. If
everyone does that, then everyone is worse off; and furthermore, that
would pressure society to compromise on genomic liberty and partially
roll it back, which opens up more room for state control of
reproduction.
- It makes sense to take into account peer pressure, and the
consequences of stigma, and to partially adopt the values of your
society. But try to consider multiple angles, including genomic choices
that seem to you to be good (e.g. beneficial or empowering for your
future child) even if many people would disagree with those
choices.
Minimizing centralized control.
- In addition to restrictions on state control described by the
principle of genomic liberty, professional bodies should also take a
minimalist stance to self-regulation of specific reprogenetic services
(in terms of what genomic choices they enable). I’m not sure how to draw
these lines, since elsewhere I’ve said that professional self-regulation
is generally good and is more acceptable than state regulation (because
it carries less legal weight).
- Maybe anti-trust rules should be state-enforced for
reprogenetics providers. If the ownership of reprogenetics providers
were very centralized, then population-level control over genomic
choices would be feasible by a bad actor (e.g. by the owner or by
executive leadership). The ability of the free market to produce
competitors that provide marginalized services might have to be
protected by the state.
- Scientists and technologists should aim to support a reprogenetics
sector that, in the long run, has many different providers rather than a
small number of providers. That way, there’s less risk of centralized
control over a small number of providers. For example:
- Technological roadmaps should be aimed at eventually producing
inexpensive (and effective) reprotech. That increases the market, which
makes more room for different providers. (I’m not sure about this point;
it could also lead to winner-takes-all dynamics.)
- Scientific research should be made open whenever possible. That way,
there’s less unnecessary barrier to entry for new providers.
- Likewise, tech should if possible be licensed rather than keeping it
proprietary.
Don’t dismiss concerns.
- In general, people involved in developing reprogenetics should keep
an open mind about various concerns around the nature and consequences
of reprogenetics. That doesn’t mean everyone has to become a
bioethicist. It just means that workers should be open to finding out
whether and how they have to course-correct in some respects.
Reprogenetics is potentially very beneficial because it’s potentially
powerful, so it also naturally comes with perils; see “Potential
perils of germline genomic engineering”.
- In particular, don’t be dismissive about concerns about eugenics.
Even if you really don’t harbor any desires of controlling other
people’s reproduction and would be horrified to see that happen, there
can still be good reasons for people to be worried about eugenics
specifically.
- For one thing, reprogenetics may unintentionally promote eugenic
ideologies; see the previous subsection “Avoiding the
ideological engines of eugenics”.
- For another thing, people may be wondering about something other
than whether you specifically are secretly a eugenicist. (See the
subsection “Aside: When
people have different discourse goals”.) For example:
- Other people don’t know what your motives are.
- It’s good for people to be checking whether people developing
reprogenetics have bad motives.
- Other people developing reprogenetics might have bad motives.
- Other people or organizations might misuse reprogenetics.
No teamism.
- As a matter of general ideological health, people supporting
reprogenetics and genomic emancipation shouldn’t take a partisan stance;
they shouldn’t support someone or something just because it’s “on their
side”. For example:
- Don’t cover up for fraud in order to make the field “seem
respectable”.
- Don’t propagate bad explanations or arguments just because “the
point that such-and-such is heritable is directionally correct” or
similar.
- Don’t excuse poor behavior because “they’re on our team”.
- Don’t leave important ambiguity about what goals are acceptable and
unacceptable. For example, if I talk about how genes do affect traits
and reprogenetics is good, I would want to clarify that this is not some
cryptic move in some ideological direction that would end up with racist
policies like “remigration”; I oppose those policies, and advocating
those policies is no more acceptable in some social space related to
reprogenetics than it would be in any other social space in polite
society.
Meditations. Meditate on the goodness of
pluralism, privacy, sacredness, moral egalitarianism, legal
egalitarianism, and positive-sum plans; and meditate on the badness of
contempt, domination, power-seeking, judginess, racism,
hyper-collectivism, and zero-sum thinking. If you’re advocating to
exercise some control over someone else’s reproduction, ask yourself,
would I want the government / the average citizen / my ideological
enemies to be making this kind of decision for my reproduction?
