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more germane to the realm of prenatal diagnosis than to genetic engi-
neering. There are no
economic
pressures to design one's offspring.
In any case, the influence of norms is inescapable. The way the dis-
cussion often goes, the implication is that a choice influenced by social
expectations or trends is not free. To claim that “there is no free choice
and autonomy regarding eugenic practices: the decisions are all embed-
ded in the society surrounding the person,” is to assume the possibility
(and desirability) of a world in which people were
not
influenced by the
views of their family, communities, and the larger society.
88
But all of our
choices are embedded in a social context, which necessarily includes the
attitudes and desires of other people. It will not work to implicitly define
an “autonomous” decision as one somehow detached from social expec-
tations. On this understanding, no important life decision could count
as free.
For those alert to the dangers of the unbridled use of genetic engi-
neering, the crucial point is not that autonomy in reproductive decision
making is always a fiction but that autonomy need not trump every other
value. Acknowledging this is a necessary first step toward a candid dis-
cussion of how best to exercise some kind of social control over tech-
nologies now being developed and used in a regulatory vacuum.
Notes
I am grateful to the participants in the Philosophy and History of Biology Work-
shop, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 2002,
and especially James Tabery and Jim Lennox, who were commentators on my
presentation of an early version of this chapter.
1. See John Maynard Smith, “Eugenics and Utopia,”
Daedalus
94 (1965):
487-505.
2. See Robert L. Sinsheimer, “The Prospect of Designed Genetic Change,”
Engi-
neering and Science
13 (1969): 8-13. See also Daniel J. Kevles,
In the Name of
Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 267-268.
3. See Troy Duster,
Backdoor to Eugenics
(London: Routledge, 1990). The idea
of backdoor eugenics first appeared in an essay by Rollin Hotchkiss, who coined
the term “genetic engineering.” Noting that a eugenics requiring state action was
no longer acceptable, he suggested that interventions made possible by develop-
ments in molecular biology “could be practiced in private and in secret on indi-
vidual genes of individual persons,” and also observed: “It will be much more
difficult to regulate, and legislation
against
it will seem like the same invasion of
