The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering

Sandel gives an example of what he considers a non-coercive eugenics policy: in Singapore in the 1980s, educated women received government incentives to have children, while uneducated women received incentives to undergo sterilization. Everyone was free to accept or refuse these incentives. Some people, Singaporean women not least among them, still found this system to be coercive. Sandel believes that coercion aside, there is something else wrong with eugenics. James Watson, one of the scientists who first described the structure of DNA, generated controversy when he said that parents should be able to terminate a pregnancy if they learned that the fetus would grow up to be gay. He later clarified that he was not singling gay people out; he believed parents should have the right to end a pregnancy on the basis of anything they perceived to be a genetic defect. That his position remained unpopular suggests that many people object to eugenic decisions about one’s own children, even when coercion is not part of the conversation.

The egg and sperm market is not wholly disconnected from eugenics. It is already possible for parents to seek out sperm or egg donors who have certain genetic traits that they deem desirable and, implicitly, to reject potential donors who do not have those traits. Some early sperm and egg banks, like The Repository for Germinal Choice, had explicitly eugenicist goals. Most contemporary sperm and egg repositories deliberately distance themselves from eugenicist thought. However, they still tend to favor sperm and eggs from donors whose genetic traits are deemed desirable. The only difference is that they are trying to cater to their customers’ demands, not to a rigid eugenic ideal. Sandel sees no difference between the two, arguing that “both practices are eugenic insofar as both make children into products of deliberate design” (75).

Today, some people argue for a new kind of eugenics. They believe that parents should be able to choose their children’s genetic characteristics, provided that their choices do not impinge on the children’s autonomy. This is more morally acceptable than the old eugenics, they argue, because parents’ preferences need not follow a strict mandate of what constitutes “fitness.” It is acceptable, and perhaps even obligatory, for parents to genetically engineer their children if their actions “make the lives of future generations of human beings longer and more full of talent and hence achievement” (76), argues philosopher Ronald Dworkin. While the old eugenics movement was, at least theoretically, interested in improving the human race, liberal eugenics is all about individual choice.

If genetic enhancements could be made entirely safe and could benefit all children—that is, could avoid biasing children toward a particular life path—some bioethicists believe they could become morally obligatory. Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, offers an argument against this view. He believes that it curtails people’s autonomy as they are no longer “the sole authors of their own life history” (80), and that it gives parents too much control over their children’s lives. Sandel rebuts this: Nobody is free to choose their genetic background, and parents can exert undue control over their children in lots of other ways. However, he agrees that genetic intervention “corrupts parenting as a social practice governed by norms of unconditional love” (83), gives parents too much control over children, and erases what makes children naturally unique.