Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with such enhancements. He goes on to remark that he sees “no differ-
ence between such a ban and a similar ban on parents sending their chil-
dren to computer camps in the summer: both are intended to better
children, both will be done most by people with money, and both are
not the business of government.”
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Perhaps these quotations (which could easily be multiplied) are suffi-
cient to illustrate the interests that are served for genetic engineering
enthusiasts in telling a tale that equates eugenics with compulsion and
Nazis. There are two such interests. First, it allows the enthusiasts to
sharply demarcate human genetic engineering from eugenics—to say that
the appalling practices we associate with eugenics have nothing to do
with the practices they wish to encourage today. Second, it is easily
deployed in support of an antiregulatory agenda. The obvious moral is:
“The state should stay out” of reproductive decision making.
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Critics, on the other hand, have an interest in stressing the continuity
between the practices of genetic engineering and the eugenics of the past.
The standard narratives serve to associate these technologies with people
and practices that we today find odious, in effect denying any rupture
with the past. Commenting on a position paper issued by the Council
on Responsible Genetics, Ted Peters remarks, “The structure of this argu-
ment is that because germline modification can be associated with eugen-
ics, and because eugenics can be associated with Nazism, it follows that
we can associate proponents of germline enhancement with the Nazis
and, on this ground, should reject it.”
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Certainly these histories arouse
strong emotion, which is at least partly their point. So both critics and
enthusiasts have (disparate) interests in constructing a history that iden-
tifies eugenics with brutal coercion.
But except in relation to sterilization and abortion, critics do not draw
a libertarian lesson from the history of eugenics. For those wary of
genetic engineering, the fact that its practices are voluntary does not
imply that they are ipso facto
harmless
. Indeed, they find consumer-
oriented eugenics in some respects especially disturbing. As noted
earlier, the reasons why are not always clearly articulated. But a number
of issues recur with some frequency. Without any attempt to rank or
evaluate them, much less to be exhaustive, some principal areas of
concern are:
