Washington Post Columnist "Gets" The Growing Problem with Liberalism
In "The Eugenics Temptation," Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson hits some nails on the head about the odious James Watson and the new eugenics. He surveys some of the obnoxious, racist, and anti-disabled statements Watson has made over the years, and then connects some dots. (He also includes some wise quotes from my friend Yuval Levin.) From his column:
Watson is not typical of the scientific community when it comes to his extreme social application of genetics. But this controversy illustrates a temptation within science--and a tension between some scientific views and liberalism.The temptation is eugenics. Watson is correct that "we already accept" genetic screening and selective breeding when it comes to disabled children. About 90 percent of fetuses found to have Down syndrome are aborted in America. According to a recent study, about 40 percent of unborn children in Europe with one of 11 congenital defects don't make it to birth.
No one should underestimate the wrenching challenge of having a disabled child. But we also should not ignore the social consequences of widespread screening of children for "desirable" traits. This kind of "choice" is actually a form of absolute power of one generation over the next--the power to forever define what is "normal," "straight" and "beautiful." And it leads inevitably to discrimination. British scientist Robert Edwards has argued, "Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease." A sin. Which leaves disabled children who escape the net of screening -- the result of parental sin--to be born into a new form of bastardy and prejudice...Watson and many scientists assert a kind of reductionism--a belief that human beings are the sum of their chemical processes and have no value beyond their achievements and attributes. But progressives, at their best, have a special concern for the different, the struggling and the weak. When it comes to eugenics, they face not only a tension but a choice -- and they should choose human equality over the pursuit of human perfection.
As a man once firmly ensconced in the political Left, who grew disillusioned by the devolution of liberalism away from protecting the vulnerable and toward hedonistic solipsism, I hope people pay heed to Gerson's prudent warning. Science is not the be all and end all. Being is more important that function. Human exceptionalism and equal moral worth are the preconditions to universal human rights.
Gerson has it right: If "liberalism" (which too often ain't anymore) continues down its current path it will be like the snake that ate its tail and become the very evil that it once so proudly opposed.
Labels: New Eugenics.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:27 PM
34 Comments
34 Comments:
We are concerned with equal access to germinal choice technologies. Our fears do not stem from the use of the technology itself, although Catholic and evangelic bioluddite will argue that it goes against family values and it is intrinsic evil, but inequality of access. James Hughes-sensei argues that we should not become left-wing bioluddites and simply ban the technology, but we need to make sure that everyone can benefit from it. It is possible that germinal choice technology can be used for egalitarian ends, but there are many obstacles against this magnanimious goal, and I am not referring to the luddites. We have to get it right our a stratified society will form. Hopefully, Hughes' work would encourage a techno-progressive uprising within the left to fight the rather inegalitarian economic libertarian faction within transhumanism.
Maybe we can use it to eliminate human greed and selfishness... Hughes says we might use technology to become virtuous people too in this talk. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughestv06virtue/
From Hughes:
"Another theorist who argues that egalitarians should embrace subsidized germinal choice technology, including enhancement, is the Princeton University Bioethicist Peter Singer. In Singer's 2001 A Darwin Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, he argues that the Left has ignored and denied the sociobiological constraints on politics to its down detriment. Singer contends that there is a biologically rooted tendency towards selfishness and hierarchy in human nature that undermines egalitarian social reforms. If ambitious egalitarian programs of social reform and democratic cooperation are to succeed, Singer argues, we must employ the new genetic and neurological sciences to identify and modify the aspects of of human nature that cause conflict and competition. "In a more distant future we can still barely glimpse, it may turn out to be a prerequisite for a new kind of freedom: the freedom to shape our genes, we can build the kind of society we judge best." Toward that end Singer advocates a program of volutary, socially subsidized genetic enhancement." - CC 198
I hate to tell you, but those on the right are just as prone to racist, eugenics sentiment than the so-called "left."
Heck, they are MORE prone to it.
Eugenics is NOT a partisan issue.
Eugenics is not about Democrat and Republican, which is what partisan means. Rather, it is about values and the question of belief in the value of being human simply because one is human. Racism is a denial of human exceptionalism, but that isn't necessarily eugenics because it doesn't seek to manipulate the human race.
Today, I hate to tell you, but those who believe that the human race is manipulable, those who support eugenic actions, be it aborting Down fetuses, infanticide of the "defective," genetic engineering, etc, tend to be on the Left. This is a general view, with many Leftists resisting vociferous, such as Jeremy Rifkin. But note, the transhumanists--who are very much on the Left (generally)--call Rifkin a bioconservative.
As long as leftists remain adamant that an embryo is just a "clump of cells" or that a foetus is merely a part of a woman's body, than I fear the new eugenics movement will continue, and in fact, eventually be promoted under the guise of "progressivism"
So, are you proposing to ban genetic screening and forbid women carrying a fetus with a grave defect from obtaining an abortion?
The liberal, pro-choice position is that the parents get to make such decisions. The conservative position is that the government does. That's really the only issue. Human beings will continue to be equal in some respects and unequal in others, no matter what policy is followed. And humans will exert control over their own biological reproduction -- we can't help it, we are consicous beings. The only question is who gets the control.
"The left," Levin continues, "finds itself increasingly disarmed against this challenge, as it grows increasingly uncomfortable with the necessarily transcendent basis of human equality."
What a load of crap. Who is "the left" that he's talking about? The left, for instance, argues for equal access to health care, whereas Levin's right-wing think tank argues against it. The left was almost unanimous in its opposition to Watson (probably an overreaction actually), so they are fully in the camp of equality. If there's a "transcendent basis of human equality", then manipulating the genome won't change that, and its the left who promotes the values that support that equality. The right would cast us all into a hypercompetitive market economy with no base of social welfare that might soften the unescapable fact that humans have unequal abilities, and will do so whether or not we actively meddle with the reproductive process.
Here, put this in concrete terms: lets say you are a pregnant couple who has just gotten the news that your fetus has Down's syndrome, and you have to decide whether or not to abort or carry it to term (let's say you still have that option). Are you more likely to do that if you have guaranteed health care, parental leave, and other forms of social welfare, or if you are in conservative land and have no insulation from the economic demands of a hypercompetitve market?
Either health care approach in a society with a cultural paradigm safely embracing universal human equality would result in the birth of the precious child.
It isn't the health care system that is determinative. It is the culture. For example, under the UK's NHS health care rationing is growing, doctor shortages are rife, (people are having to pull their own teeth for goodness sake!), futile care theory, discrimination against elderly patients, hospital -acquired infection, etc. ad nauseum are rampant. At the same time, I know of an HMO that told a couple with a Down baby to abort on their dime or they wouldn't cover the kid when born.
Like I said, it's the culture. Eugenics thinking is a growing part of the problem.
"safely embracing universal human equality" is vacuous nonsense.
People are biologically variable, but are equal before the law. Exactly what that means is a matter of law and politics, including just what counts as a person in the first place.
I fail to see what the failings of national health care has to do with the point I was making (like we don't get iatrogenic infections in the US?). Your point about the HMO supports my argument. Universalized national health care can have abuses too, but presumably it can't threaten to withhold coverage from a child.
mtraven: I love it when you post here because you so vividly prove my points. Under personhood theory and the new eugenics, universal human rights are indeed demeaned as "vacuous nonsense." At that point, the same old oppression starts again--the only difference being new victims.
"I fail to see what the failings of national health care has to do with the point I was making (like we don't get iatrogenic infections in the US?). Your point about the HMO supports my argument. Universalized national health care can have abuses too, but presumably it can't threaten to withhold coverage from a child."
I could image that a universal healthcare program would also encourage the abortion of Down's babies too much like the system in China. One could base this on the QALY system though: Most people assume that the quality of life for people with Down syndrome is lower and they live less. The integral of the function (quality of life vs. year of their life) of a person with Down syndrome would be would cover less area than one without trisomy 21.
What is needed is a cure for these disorders. Unfortunately, they do not exist yet.
"As long as leftists remain adamant that an embryo is just a "clump of cells" or that a foetus is merely a part of a woman's body, than I fear the new eugenics movement will continue, and in fact, eventually be promoted under the guise of "progressivism"
I believe these technologies can be used to support an egalitarian agenda, and James Hughes eloquently argues for such a position.
I'm glad you love my comments, but I don't love your replies since you are implying I said the opposite of what I actually aaid. "Universal human equality" as you constantly spew it is vacuous, because there are many different meanings of "equality" and you blur them for your rhetorical purposes.
"Universal human rights" is a fine idea, but such rights are determined by law and custom. And law and custom do not treat fetuses as full human persons, and never have.
And BTW, in my experience transhumanists are hardly leftist, but lean heavily libertarian, which puts them on the right though they like to pretend they are off on a different axis entirely.
You did it again. Thanks. If equality is determined by law and custom, then it isn't really equality. Who matters and who doesn't depends on who has the power to decide.
I thought our mutual purpose, whether conservative or liberal, was to expand the moral community to include all human beings. That's what King and RFK were about. True, our reach in these matters has, so far, exceeded our grasp. But we must keep striving.
But under the new eugenics and personhood theory, we turn away from the goal itself and institute a neo human caste system, in which some human beings, but not others, are entitled to legal protection and highest moral value.
As to born and unborn: With the exception of abortion, which uniquely involves a conflict between the liberty interests of life and autonomy--we do often treat the unborn as having equal value, e.g. the laws that punish as murder the killing of a fetus by a third party.
We should expand our embrace of human intrinsic moral worth to prevent the instrumentalization of any human being, whether slavery, harvesting organs from patients diagnosed in PVS, or therapeutic cloning.
"And BTW, in my experience transhumanists are hardly leftist, but lean heavily libertarian, which puts them on the right though they like to pretend they are off on a different axis entirely."
People such as James Hughes and George Dvorsky are leftists, and Hughes, aside from economics, is staunchly libertarian too.
I fear neocon transhumanism more than evangelical-motivated bioluddism.
There's a few transhumanist leftists, but trust me, the vast majority of them are libertarians of one sort or another. Not that that has anything to do witht he main argument.
Wesley said If equality is determined by law and custom, then it isn't really equality.
What else is going to determine it? People vary in all sorts of ways -- I'm smarter than George Bush, but he has more power and money than I could ever dream of. Are we "equal"? It depends on what you mean, and it depends on the law.
If there's something about persons that transcends this, then it has to be the property of being aware and self-conscious. That's what makes an organism a person, more than having a particular kind of genome.
And who decides if a human individual is a "person" and therefore transcendent of debates about equality? (Which is code for simply "equal.") You? A committee of bioethicists? Congress? Who gave any of those, anyone at all, the right to stand in such high judgment over another human being?
I think a lot of this debate hinges on whether one believes in human nature per se. If you think that the human condition is absolutely pliable, and amenable to such improvements as you could give it, given the resources and the time, then you might tend toward thinking that your worthy cause justifies the pruning, culling, or maiming of various sets of individuals. You improve the stock, as it were, so that the fruit will be better. If you think that there is nothing new under the sun, and that human beings have been thinking up ways to justify the harming and killing of each other as long as we have existed, and that any philosophy that demands the exclusion of some from the human family is, as defined by its results, old hat, regardless of frills -- then, well, I don't have to say much else, do I?
In the twentieth century, lovers of humanity were responsible for death on a scale never before imagined. How is it that so many of us go on trying to justify the reasonableness of such death?
"In the twentieth century, lovers of humanity were responsible for death on a scale never before imagined. How is it that so many of us go on trying to justify the reasonableness of such death?"
What are you talking about? Are you refering to the Holocaust?
Wesley, I do believe that germinal choice technologies can be used in an ethical way. Of course, I do not advocate mass sterilization. Oh wait, I do: our right to life trumps the right to procreate. It might be necessary to initiate such a program after the elimination of aging, but that is different from eugenic sterilization. Aubrey de Grey, of course, agrees with me. See this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6526709231920433808
(39:30 de Grey advocates sterilization)
To segue I am scared that germinal choice technologies will not achieve its desired goals: formation of an egalitarian world. A nobler goal, instead of advocating germinal choice tech, is to currently increase access to health care for all. This requires increasing the amount of QALYs per dollar spent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/business/15drug.html?ex=1297659600&en=62aabaec5acffa8c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Read that. I am rather ambivalent towards the notion of "eugenics". Germinal choice, however, is not inherently evil in my view as a utilitarian, as the ends justify the means in a utilitarian ethic. I am gravitating against using certain means that might be considered "eugenics" in our society. I am starting to re-appreciate the prominent "left-wing bioluddite" arguments against it; although these arguments do not acknowledge the genetically engineering an embryo is morally wrong. In the aforementioned article that I linked, we have to remind ourselves that inequality is rife in our world, and it is unlikely that such technology would be distributed in an equable fashion. Despite a renascent opposition of eugenics within me, I will always consider myself a "eugenicist" at heart; in my view it is virtuous to yen for control of evolution to alleviate human suffering.
The past incarnations eugenics are correctly castigated for the various injustices and suffering it has caused. Unfortunately, some (usually libertarians) will reproach eugenics for being part of government program, and apparently, eugenics can be justified by when it is introduced in the free-market. However, this would only create more suffering, more injustice, and more misery. There is no categorical imperative against the manipulation of the human genome as it is justified when it reduces inequality and suffering.
Health care is a primary objective for egalitarian transhumanists, such as myself and Hughes. We need to formulate a system that can efficiently appropriate resources. This will require much work, though. But when this rather quixotic goal is accomplished, the only ethically legitimate argument (i.e. not an invocation of the “wisdom of repugnance”) against germinal choice technologies, that is inequality, would be sundered.
“Universal health care and basic economic systems are essential as we make the transhuman transition, to ensure equal access to benefits not only between the rich and the poor, but between the young and the old.” – CC 215-216
Instead of prohibiting technology, we need to work towards making it available for everyone.
mtraven -
Hi again!
"I'm smarter than George Bush, but he has more power and money than I could ever dream of. Are we 'equal?' It depends on what you mean, and it depends on the law."
The fact that you are both human beings, with human DNA, makes you equal, as you both have intrinsic human worth. Culture and tradition only describe who has more material value - who has more money, who moves on to be president, etc. - and with tradition and culture, there are always revolutions, with massive shifts in POV due to one explosive event after another that will eventually rock the boat, turn the ship over, and dump us all out.
But your inherent human qualities will always be the same. You've got the same DNA makeup no matter who becomes president, who gets voted out of Congress, or who starts an underground campaign.
The only way to ensure that your intrinsic human worth is consistantly respected is to force tradition and custom - and the law - to alter, which it can. It has to change to meet the needs of the non-changing - our human selves. And that protection *must* be granted to everyone, from babes in the womb to dying elderly, in order to ensure that nobody is left unprotected. Otherwise, people like the extreme Right (like one of my cousins, ick) will not only be allowed to think it's "sinful" for a black man to marry a white woman, but eventually may convince society that it *is* okay to force that white woman to abort her unborn child because it's a "mulatto."
Allow me to insert the eye-rolling here.
Likewise, people on the extreme Left may decide that it's not only okay to force people to abort their unborn with Downs, but to force them to give up the aborted fetuses to scientists who may try to keep their brains alive for study on the human nervous system, with or without the woman's permission.
Nobody on either extreme is to be trusted, and yet those are the people with the power and the wealth. They're the ones who need to be watched, and the only way to protect against them is to ensure the definition of "person" is so firm that they can't get around it - anything that has complete DNA, reproduces, feeds, eliminates, and eventually passes from natural causes.
Frankly, MTRaven, I haven't seen any evidence that your smarter than George Bush, or for that matter, that he is smarter than you. It is irrelevant.
The point is that once we reject intrinsic worth based on being human, and require that to be part of the moral community individuals pass muster based on capacities, then we explicitly open the door to terrible exploitation and premeditated eradication of the weak-which is precisely what we are seeing, for example, in the Netherlands infanticide of disabled babies. And here I thought we were trying to rise above such brutality. But this reflects the consequences that flow when we adopt a view that moral value comes from one's utility. And I have noticed those expressing such values never believe that their own category are the ones who should be granted lesser value and worth.
The fact that you are both human beings, with human DNA, makes you equal, as you both have intrinsic human worth.
First off, humans, like any other organism, have variable DNA. We aren't identical. We vary in skin color, susceptibility to various diseases, athletic ability, intellectual ability, ability to metabolize certain foods, and many other dimensions.
"Worth" is not something you can derive from biology. It's a social construct. If we choose to value all humans equally, that's fine, but there's nothing "intrinsic" about it.
HKR: If we outlaw procreation because we have a corporeal eternal life (dream on) society will become stale and lose vibrancy. Leon Kass has it right about the beneficial nature of the life cycle. Awareness of our mortality helps us grab the gusto, as it were, and the existence of the energy of youth helps society evolve. I mean, would you want Julius Caesar still alive and influential?
QALYs are a pretext for discrimination, including the imposition of futile care theory. They are bunk.
I know we've discussed it before, but I just don't get it. And yes, I think it's more than semantics as it appears to be glaring flaw in all this high-minded moralism.
If it's OK to genetically screen a couple for recessive deleterious traits (i.e., Down's Syndrome) and make decisions accordingly on whether or not they should have biological children, then:
(1) people with Down's Syndrome have less right to be conceived, and hence, have less moral worth. If anyone doubts the right to be conceived is important, well, I would love to see your logic.
(2) we are controlling the biological direction of the human race, in fact, we are consciously trying to improve it. Hence, as far as moral difference in the GOAL, not METHODS, is precisely the same as eugenics, transhumanism, and Hitler.
Now, before anyone lambasts me, I recognize their is a major difference in the methods thereof. It is plainly obvious that sterilization and euthanasia is vastly different than genetic screening. But as far as the goal of all, which is to consciously improve the human race - I see no moral difference.
Royale: Consciously trying to improve the human race by calling us to heightened levels of love and empathy for each other (Ghandi, King, Mandella) are great. Doing so by deciding which physical or cognitive traits have greater value, is destructive. Down is not genetically passed down the generations. It is a mutation. But Down babies do not have less a right to be conceived. No one has a right to be conceived. But once we are, we should all be equally entitled morally to membership in the moral community.
I deny that wiping Down syndrome people from the face of the earth improves the human race. To the contrary: It harms it, for example, removing from life some of the most gentle, loving people in existence and the impetus they provide for many of us to reach out to them in unconditional love. Indeed, Down children and others with developmental and other disabilities often (but not often enough) bring out the best in the human race. Moreover, the very idea of attempting to intelligently design the human race is not only hubristic, it increases the eugenics impetus that led to catastrophe before and would again, precisely because it denies universal human rights and moral equality.
As I mentioned, there is no right for anyone to be conceived. But once we exist, our capacities and potentials should be irrelevant to moral status.
In the case of genetic screening, it degrades your own moral worth to put yourself through it: what are you, a breeding cow? You and your progeny, whatever your respective genetic quirks, are better than that.
That said, I do not see how it quite amounts to the same thing to decide not to breed and to kill someone you think shouldn't breed. Each is reductive and degrading, true, but the latter case is worse.
"The right to be conceived" has to be the dumbest thing I've heard in some time. Who has this right? There are roughly 10^19 possible matings between a human male and female, do each of the potential offspring from those matings have a right to be conceived? That doesn't even account for all the many differences in sperm and eggs within an individual, but the number of potential offspring when you take that into considiration is sovast I don't even want to give it a rough estimate.
But once we are, we should all be equally entitled morally to membership in the moral community.
I've argued here in the past that this just isn't so. Roughly half of all fertilized zygotes fail to implant and are flushed away. We don't treat these as persons, therefore we do not equate personhood with the point of conception, therefore personhood is not equivalent to being a clump of cells with 46 or so chromosomes.
mtraven: Just to make sure my views are not misrepresented elsewhere, I said there is no right to be conceived.
"First off, humans, like any other organism, have variable DNA. We aren't identical. We vary in skin color, susceptibility to various diseases, athletic ability, intellectual ability, ability to metabolize certain foods, and many other dimensions.
"Worth" is not something you can derive from biology. It's a social construct. If we choose to value all humans equally, that's fine, but there's nothing "intrinsic" about it."
Let's look at that a different way:
Humans are a separate species from any other animals. We have a broad range of variations in our DNA, but all human DNA is compatable with all other human DNA - we can breed amongst ourselves. People with dark pigmintation and albino (no) pigmintation can have children that have the full range of human DNA in them, unlike horses and donkeys who, when they breed, produce steril offspring.
Encoded in our DNA (and yes, it's encoded; DNA works off a four-chemical "alphabet") is the same basic stuff that makes us able to do mathematics, understand art and beauty, and feel empathy for ourselves and other creatures.
Because we are the only creatures able to do all of those things, and because the ability to do so is encoded in our DNA, we have an intrinsic difference.
That difference makes us exceptional from all other creatures. Since *all* of us possess those characteristics, encoded in the very stuff of our life, then we all have the same worth. It's not based on culture or traditon - it's based on the fact that even someone who is born without a brain due to a defect is, at the DNA level, the same as anybody else, just hurt due to unfortunate variations in the genetics all coming together. That child is a dying child the moment he's born, but he is still a child and is as much a human being as you or I, or else what's the point of even mapping our genetic codes?
TE:
- humans are a species (meaning we can interbreed with each other and not with anything else)
- as a species, we are radically different in many ways from other animals
- our DNA has much in common and much that varies
That much is science. "Worth" is not science, nor can it be dictated by science. I seem to recall that Wesley has crusaded against scientism in the past -- this attempt to determine worth based on crude biological facts seems like rank scientism to me.
BTW, I ran into this great summary of the Gerson article that started this thread:
"Liberals like science. Science proves that black people are stupid. Therefore liberals are racists."
I see there that Levin's think tank hired Rick Santorum, which should add to the intellectual lustre.
This comment has been removed by the author.
"Now, before anyone lambasts me, I recognize their is a major difference in the methods thereof. It is plainly obvious that sterilization and euthanasia is vastly different than genetic screening. But as far as the goal of all, which is to consciously improve the human race - I see no moral difference."
What is wrong with trying to improve humans if it does not involve suffering.
We could eliminate the greed, hatred and vanity from humanity.
See this talk:http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughestv06virtue/
"Now, before anyone lambasts me, I recognize their is a major difference in the methods thereof. It is plainly obvious that sterilization and euthanasia is vastly different than genetic screening. But as far as the goal of all, which is to consciously improve the human race - I see no moral difference."
What is wrong with trying to improve humans if it does not involve suffering.
We could eliminate the greed, hatred and vanity from humanity.
See this talk:http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughestv06virtue/
Gerson is hardly an objective observer; he was with the Bush administration, which is perhaps the most extreme right-wing (as opposed to conservative) administration in this country's history. Naturally a guy like this is going to distort the truth to favor "his" side by lying about what liberalism stands for.
The truth of the matter is so-called "end of life" or bioethical issues have nothing whatsoever to do with partisan politics in terms of whether a particular case is "left" or "right." You will discover, as in the Schiavo and Ashley X cases, LOTS of differences of opinion from people on ALL sides of the political spectrum. Many on the "left" were totally against medical killing or mutilation while many of those on the "right" end of the spectrum supported the judicial/medical decisions in those cases.
Susan: Don't come off so stridently. Gerson can have his views and not be lying what liberalism is becoming on this issue.
I just read a book against assisted suicide written by a liberal who worries explicitly that the "choice" ethic is subsuming the
"equality" aspect of liberalism. His name is Robert P. Jones, and he's been with the People for the American Way. The book is Liberalism's Troubled Search for Equality.
Liberalism's emphasis on maximum behavioral freedom is also driving the new eugenics (an issue Jones does not get into). I see it, Gerson sees it. To me, it is destroying the equality mode in liberalism and leading to oppression of the weak and vulnerable. You might disagree, but that doesn't make either one of us liars.
You mean "libertarianism" not "liberalism". James Hughes emphasizes an egalitarian approach. Hughes wants it available for everyone, and I see no problem with that.
I will concede something though...
I do think QALYs could lead to discrimination. I do not advocate a simple formulation of it because it means that one is "disabled" would be preferred to be treated for a hypothetical therapy that would extend life by five years, over a "normal" person.
Hughes acknowledges these problems in his book, but he only covers a few pages about his QALY system. Unfortunately, it is somewhat incoherent and undetailed.
Liberals should return to reading John Stuart Mill so they can appreciate equality and liberty too. He also emphasizes protecting the weak too.
Wesley, you need a "safety" on your blog. I entreat you to prevent people from posting comments until a period of one period has expired.
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