Abstract
The development of technologies such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, reproductive cloning, and genetic therapy and enhancement have prompted considerable public and scholarly concern about a return to the eugenic projects of the early twentieth century. But while there has been much disagreement on whether new genetic technologies are eugenic or not, with the implication being that their moral acceptability rests on this designation, some contributors to this debate have taken a different approach. They argue that while new genetic technologies may well be eugenic, they constitute a new form of ‘liberal’ or ‘laissez faire’ eugenics, which are morally distinct from the totalitarian eugenics of the twentieth century. The core idea driving the formulation of this notion is that even if genetic practices are considered eugenic, this is not necessarily an indication that they are morally indefensible, since a certain form of eugenic intervention may be compatible with the key moral principles of liberal democratic societies. In apparent opposition to the more familiar form of eugenics, it is argued that this form of eugenic intervention extends individual freedom in reproductive choices and insists upon state neutrality and value pluralism.
We no longer ask, in all seriousness, what is human nature? Instead we talk about normal people. 1
1Hacking, Ian. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 161.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase is Canguilhem’s in, Canguilhem, Georges. 1997. On Histoire de la folie as an event. (trans: Hobart, Ann) In Foucault and his interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, 32. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
- 2.
- 3.
Agar, Nicholas. 1998. Liberal eugenics. Public Affairs Quarterly 12:137–155.
- 4.
- 5.
The right to found a family is especially important in defences of reproductive cloning such as Harris, John. 2004. On cloning. London and New York: Routledge.
- 6.
Buchanan, Allen et al. 2000. From chance to choice: Genetics and justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51. Also see Paul, Diane B. 1994. Is human genetics disguised eugenics? In Genes and human self-knowledge: Historical and philosophical reflections on modern genetics, eds. Robert F. Weir, Susan C. Lawrence, and Evan Fales, 70–73. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
- 7.
Buchanan, et al. From chance to choice, 170–175.
- 8.
Ibid., 167–172. For more on the notion of a ‘right to an open future’, see Feinberg, Joel. 1980. The child’s right to an open future. In Whose child? Children’s rights, parental authority, and state power, eds. William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, 124–153. Totawa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
- 9.
Agar, Liberal eugenics, 139.
- 10.
Agar. Liberal eugenics, 139–140.
- 11.
Agar, Nicholas. 2006. The debate over liberal eugenics. Hastings Center Report 36(2):5.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
See Ibid; Agar. Liberal eugenics; Agar. Liberal eugenics: In defence man.
- 14.
Agar. Liberal eugenics, 141–142.
- 15.
Harris, John. 2007. Enhancing evolution: The ethical case for making better people. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
- 16.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The future of human nature. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity; also see Fukuyama, Francis. 2003. Our posthuman future: Consequences of the biotechnology revolution. London: Profile Books. I will return to a more detailed discussion of Habermas’ claims regarding ethical self-understanding in a later chapter.
- 17.
See Fukuyama. Our posthuman future, 149.
- 18.
- 19.
Agar. Liberal eugenics, 137.
- 20.
See Boorse, Christopher. 1977. Health as a theoretical concept. Philosophy of Science 44(4):542–573.
- 21.
Daniels, Norman. 1985. Just health care. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
- 22.
Brock, Dan W. 1993. Life and death: Philosophical essays in biomedical ethics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
- 23.
Buchanan et al. From chance to choice.
- 24.
Boorse. Health as a theoretical concept, 542.
- 25.
Ibid., 557.
- 26.
Ibid., 554.
- 27.
Buchanan et al. From chance to choice, 72.
- 28.
Though, it should be noted that acceptable interventions are not strictly limited to the treatment of disease, but may also include conditions that do not count as disease. Nevertheless, the treatment of disease conditions provides the primary rationale of just health care. See Buchanan et al. From chance to choice, 74.
- 29.
Ibid., 80. In this, it is less expansive than the ‘brute luck’ view. See the discussion at Ibid., 66–84.
- 30.
Ibid., 82.
- 31.
Ibid., 127, 22. Also see Daniels, Just Health Care.
- 32.
Ibid., 122.
- 33.
This insight is commonplace in science and technology studies, but for especially interesting examples see Latour, Bruno. 1986. Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Rabinow, Paul. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in purgatory. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press; Fox Keller, Evelyn. 2003. Making sense of life: Explaining biological development with models, metaphors and machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- 34.
Hacking. Taming of chance, 163.
- 35.
Amundson, Ron. 2000. Against normal function. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 31(1):33, 51.
- 36.
Tremain, Shelley. 2006. Reproductive freedom, self-regulation and the government of impairment in utero. Hypatia 21(1):43.
- 37.
Harris. Enhancing evolution, 54.
- 38.
Ibid., 46
- 39.
Ibid., 91, 92–93.
- 40.
Ibid., 92.
- 41.
Ibid., 91; my emphasis. See Harris, John. 2001. One principle and three fallacies of disability studies. Journal of Medical Ethics 27:387. Also see the alternative formulation of this definition in Bortolotti, Lisa and John Harris. 2006. Disability, enhancement and the harm-benefit continuum. In Freedom and responsibility in reproductive choice, eds. J.R. Spencer and Antje Du Bois-Pedain, 32. Oxford: Hart Publishing; where it is argued that, ‘conditions are disabling if they are physical or mental conditions that constitute a harm to the individual which a rational person would wish to be without’ (32).
- 42.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York and London: Routledge, xi.
- 43.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975, eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (trans: Burchell, Graham), 50. New York, NY: Picador.
- 44.
Hacking. Taming of chance, 105–114. I draw extensively on Hacking’s history of the concept of the normal in this paragraph. Also see Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing normalcy: Disability, deafness and the body. London: Verso, 23–49.
- 45.
Ibid., 160–169; 180–184.
- 46.
Ibid., 169.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Foucault, Abnormal, 317. Also see, Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (trans: Macey, David), 254–263. London: Allen Lane.
- 49.
Ibid., 248.
- 50.
Also see Waldschmidt, Anne. 2005. Who is normal? Who is deviant? ‘Normality’ and ‘risk’ in genetic diagnostics and counselling. In Foucault and the government of disability, ed. Shelley Tremain. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press; especially the distinction she suggests between laws as ‘normative norms’ and ‘normalistic norms’, which require the comparison of people against each other and in relation to a standard such as statistical averages (193–194).
- 51.
- 52.
See Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
- 53.
Cover, Robert. 1992. Nomos and narrative. In Narrative, violence and the law: The essays of Robert Cover, eds. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat, 95. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
- 54.
See Butler, Bodies that matter; Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing gender. New York, NY: Routledge, 40–56.
- 55.
Taussig, Karen-Sue, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath. 2005. Flexible eugenics: Technologies of the self in the age of genetics. In Anthropologies of modernity: Foucault, governmentality and life politics, ed. Jonathon Xavier Inda. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
- 56.
Ibid., 196.
- 57.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart (trans: Burchell, Graham), New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 57.
- 58.
Ibid. There is then an empirico-theoretical question about whether contemporary configurations of power, including biomedical power, can rightly be described as disciplinary and thus normalising. I do not take up this question here, but see Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; and Diprose, Rosalyn et al. 2008. Governing the future: The paradigm of prudence in political technologies of risk management. Security Dialogue 39(2–3):267–288.
- 59.
Wilson, Elizabeth A. 2004. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the neurological body. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 5. To be clear, I do not mean to imply that liberal bioethics does better in terms of talking about biology. In fact, correlative to the obfuscation of the operation of norms in this literature is a tendency toward genetic reductionism, in which a gene is isolated as the causal origin of complex traits such as intelligence. This is evident in the rhetoric that genetic therapy or enhancement simply requires the identification and modification of a ‘gene for’ a desirable or undesirable condition or trait. But this reductionism ignores the complexity of the interaction between biological (including genetic), environmental and other factors in human variation. Rich, non-reductionist approaches to molecular biology can and should be used to offset this tendency within bioethics. For a sophisticated critique of the ‘gene for’ rhetoric, see Oyama, Susan. 2000. The ontogeny of information: Developmental systems and evolution. 2nd edn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- 60.
Goldstein, Kurt. 2000. The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man. New York, NY: Zone Books.
- 61.
Ibid., 329.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid., 326.
- 64.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The normal and the pathological (trans: Fawcett, Carolyn). New York, NY: Zone Books, 144.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Ibid., 239–240.
- 67.
Ewald. Norms, discipline and the law, 157.
- 68.
Canguilhem, Normal and Pathological, 269.
- 69.
Ibid., 250.
- 70.
Ibid., 137.
- 71.
Zylinska, Joanna. 2010. Playing God, playing Adam: The politics and ethics of enhancement. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 7(2), 155, 158.
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Mills, C. (2011). Normal Life: Liberal Eugenics, Value Pluralism and Normalisation. In: Futures of Reproduction. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1427-4_2
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