Introduction - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 12

1930s as J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and H. J. Muller. She notes that
Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Three
Enemies of the Human Soul , which envisioned a sci-fi future of the
human race divided into the masses and their scientific masters, antici-
pates a recent raft of similar prophecies—for example, one by German
philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who even employs Bernal's metaphor of a
“human zoo,” and another by U.S. biologist Lee Silver, who predicts an
ultimate splitting of humanity into the “normals” and the “gen-rich.”
Paul looks in particular detail at Haldane's 1923 Daedalus , which pre-
figures almost every aspect of the contemporary debate over human
genetic engineering, including the famous “wisdom of repugnance”
argument associated with bioethicist Leon Kass. She also notes that as
Marxists, Haldane, Bernal, Muller, and Trotsky emphasized the human
capacity for self-transformation, rejecting the idea that there was an
immutable human nature exempt in its sacredness from genetic inter-
vention. Paul extends the analysis of arguments about improving human
nature through the 1960s and 1970s, when the morality of genetic engi-
neering was first hotly contested.
Given the rich history of projects to redesign humanity, why do both
the celebrants of human genetic engineering and those more impressed
by its dangers constantly invoke a history of eugenics told as a story of
brutal state action to cull the unfit, and thus maintain the status quo?
Paul argues that enthusiasts savor the evident libertarian moral: If a
central wrong of eugenics was the use of coercion, then leaving people
free to make their own reproductive decisions seems an obvious way to
avoid the mistakes of the past. But the nightmare of those who worry
about where human genetic engineering may lead is hardly an authori-
tarian state intent on forcing parents to design their offspring. Quite to
the contrary, it is a world in which those parents demand the right
to use the available reproductive technologies. Thus it is a privatized,
consumer-oriented eugenics they fear, a eugenics directed by the market
and not by the state. Given the perceived source of danger, the solution
cannot be a laissez-faire approach toward the new technologies. Yet this
is the direction in which the standard narratives point.
Critics favor oversight of human genetic engineering because they
believe that even libertarian eugenics has consequences that should
concern us all. Invoking Nazis lends an emotional charge to their claims,