I don't agree with everything you say here. Specifically, I think a sufficiently just and accessible society could disadvantage people far far less than it does now, to the point where it might only be as bad as being genetically short or having skinny arms. And I do worry about gene selection being only available to rich people, if it's sufficiently expensive.
That said, I don't want to come off as a critic. This is a good and thoughtful post, I agree with lots of other parts of it, and I expect I'll be linking it pretty often in future debates. I've long been bothered by vibes-based morality, and you've given a pretty sound case against that. I did want to ask what your take was on some discourse I've seen around the idea of genetically selecting away autism.
I think the strongest case against a crude implementation of genetic reproductive freedom is the possibility of "social dilemmas", where selecting (e.g. neurotypical) traits that would make life easier for the parents might (in some cases, on some margins) be worse for society.
As with general worries about loss of valuable genetic diversity (if too many parents are inclined to optimize in the same narrow ways), my preferred solution would be to have society offer sufficient $ incentives for parents to choose "the path less taken" (when it is judged to be socially valuable), which could help compensate them for the extra challenges they then face.
Technical note: Even if blindness were only as bad as being "genetically short or having skinny arms" that would still technically be a disadvantage. Taller people and stronger armed people have more physical ability and hence they technically have more possibilities to achieve the maximal good life (whatever it is defined as).
More general note: It's also hard to conceive of a way that not seeing could ever be overcome by an even maximally accommodating society. Sight gives one a broadly informative and new domain of sensation. That is empowering. No matter how strong the accommodations for the unseeing are, the unseeing are missing out on this empowerment.
Consider a thought experiment about the disability of not being telepathic. Imagine, for the purpose of this thought experiment, that telepathy is real, at least for some rare individuals. Given that premise, now consider the question: "Is it a disadvantage to not be telepathic?" I see no way that the answer could be anything other than "yes," regardless of how accommodating society is for non-telepathic individuals (as indeed it is). The capability that telepathy affords an individual gives them an advantage which is significantly empowering. Not having that advantage is to be disadvantaged.
It can be helpful to distinguish "pro tanto disadvantages" (which make one worse off *in some respect*) from "all-things-considered disadvantages". Sufficiently radical social responses could turn a pro tanto disadvantage into an overall advantage: e.g. suppose that telepaths would all be tortured to death; you're then overall better off lacking this ability!
The interesting philosophical question, of course, is about what things constitute pro tanto disadvantages, and whether they do so for natural or purely social reasons. (A purely social pro tanto disadvantage is only bad for you because people mistreat you as a result of the condition -- e.g. ginger hair in an anti-ginger society. Some activists claim, implausibly, that all disabilities are like this.)
I find it hard to see how any measure implemented by a society could make blind people only to be disadvantaged so slightly as to be on par with short people. Can you elaborate on how how this could happen?
The idea that there's no such thing as "saving," only prolonging a life, and that interventions that prolong life by more are more valuable than those that prolong a life by less, makes a lot of sense to me.
That said, like children, there are also other categories of people who, statistically, are likely to live longer than others. E.g. women, white people, rich people, etc. This principle would imply that, ceteris paribus, saving the life of a woman is more valuable than saving the life of a man, of a white person more than of a black person, a rich person more than a poor person, a European more than an American, etc. And those would seem to be on some pretty shaky ethical ground. I'm not really sure how to reconcile these ideas.
It seems pretty straightforward to me: They belong to the class of claims that are literally true (all else equal, there's always *some* extra reason to save a person with slightly greater life expectancy), but that if asserted would usually be taken to implicate some much stronger, false claim (e.g. that you should *essentialize* the groups in question, or that you have more reason to save almost *any* person from one demographic over another of the other demographic, or that such rules should be *institutionalized* in harmful stigmatizing ways).
Status quo bias may be one of the biggest marks against my near and dear transhumanist-immortality view. That is, it seems like our main way to fight against status quo bias is simply old people with old status quos dying, and young people with slightly better status quos replacing them. So if down the line people at time t become immortal, the status quo essentially freezes in place with the generation to first get immortality, and we miss out on so many good things down the line. And although over time, the birth of new kids would make the original immortal generation a smaller proportion of the population, the original generation would likely have a vastly disproportionate amount of power, so these effects would likely cancel. And we'd be frozen in the original generation's status quo forever...
"if someone else’s well-meant plan involves empowering individuals to have more control over their own lives and reproductive choices, then —so long as you’re not a complete fucking moron..."
I would think selection of offspring sex is empowering, but I can't imagine what bioethics committee will be questioning parents on whether this is being done for trivial or nontrivial reasons - quite aside from the fact that it is not harmful to the child in any way. This is indeed just one current real "social dilemma". And why, in most species, sex of offspring is genuinely random.
The conservative eugenicist will then say that we should be extremely cautious in selecting for "non-medical" traits - if it's so good to select for high X, why hasn't it become fixed in the population?
You're really taking my quote out of context there!
To be clear, I think there are reasonable arguments for being cautious of genetic reproductive freedom. What I was responding to in the passage you quote was a very specific, very *unreasonable* argument (namely, that aiming at a better future makes one morally indistinguishable from Nazis).
I should have read that sentence a bit more closely, but I still think there is a thesis somewhere here that impersonal harms occurring by the grace of god or nature are more acceptable than harms arising from well-intended interventions.
But the social dilemmas are really quite widespread once one goes beyond the more medical (though even there there are peculiarities in defining dis-ease). Consider genetic manipulation to increase a child's adult height. We know there is a real correlation between height and salary, and I suspect this will be a zero-sum game. Sure diet is definitely important, so there are height differences by social class even in developed societies - perhaps driven by mate selection or social homogamy. But the latter status quo seems somehow more acceptable...
As to age versus eligibility for life extending interventions such as organ transplantation - these arguments have been done to death re fairness, equity, luck. The idea that an individual might improve their overall lifetime cumulative quality including past misfortune versus a purely forward looking consequentialism is attractive to many. Kind of a relativistic utility monster ie they will live more intensely for a shorter time into the future ;)
"if it's so good to select for high X, why hasn't it become fixed in the population?"
Putting evolutionary issues like difficulty escaping local maxima to the side, it seems pretty clear that the morally relevant traits good people would tend to select for are substantially (perhaps even profoundly) different from the traits that maximize reproductive fitness.
To some extent. But the kind of nonexistent conservative I am positing (an informed Social Darwinist, if you will), might take a long-termist like viewpoint ie those traits that have lead to historical success of modern humans are (cautiously) more worthwhile to improve upon given the uncertainties of our future. So they will select intelligence, sociability coupled with a flexible willingness to use violence (!) etc.
I'm not ready to take these surveys themselves as marks of incompetence. I disagree with people who think that every life-extension is equally important irrespective of duration, or who say that being unable to see would not be disadvantaging in a just society, but I'd want to see the actual arguments made for those positions before judging incompetent the people who held them.
I did not take the survey, but if I had read question 7, I might've imagined the question implicitly included a clause like "holding fixed every other feature about the person," where every other feature includes likely future years of life. One reason not to read it my way is that intuitively one thinks that the main reason to save the younger person is that they will live longer, so, why ask the question if we hold fixed likely future years of life? But one reason to read it my way is that if you don't hold fixed every other feature, the question is unanswerable, and if you only hold fixed some features rather than others, it's not obvious which to hold fixed. One might reply "you should hold fixed everything except the salient feature: likely future years of life!" But it's just not obvious to me that this is how everyone read the question.
With respect to question 6, if disadvantaging means "it's a net loss for your well-being" or something similar, then the 59% obviously have the right answer, don't they? If society were such that it gave $50 million to everyone who can't see, then it'd be a net advantage not to be able to see. It strikes me as unhinged from reality to deny the possibility of compensating people for being unable to see with enough other stuff so as to make that inability an advantage, on balance.
I don't think it's reasonable to read Q6 as asking whether the pro tanto disadvantage is impossible to compensate, since literally nobody holds that view. It's clearly getting at the question of whether it's a natural pro tanto disadvantage at all (in contrast to something -- e.g. ginger hair in an anti-ginger society -- that is pro tanto disadvantageous *only* because of unjust discrimination).
If someone merely holds the trivial view (that disadvantages can be compensated), but was motivated to answered misleadingly because they want to *sound* like they hold the radical disability-activist view (that blindness is like ginger hair, not a natural disadvantage at all), then I think the underlying intellectual dishonesty is its own problem.
On Q7: it's always possible that *someone* may have been honestly confused by the question. But I seriously doubt that that explains *most* of the answers. (It isn't *that* hard to work out what substantive issue the question is trying to get at.)
If people had read it in the way you suggest, wouldn't there have been nonzero responses of 50yo and 75yo? It seems to me that when you remove the absurd virtue-signaling response, the remaining distribution reflects a reasonable range of opinions. 1-year-olds (in a country with advanced medical care, and not having substantial birth defects) have the longest expected remaining life; 10-year-olds have passed most of the extreme investment of parental time and are able to act pro-socially in many ways; 25-year-olds are typically contributing economically. Personally, I would have placed a peak around 16-18, and think an extra choice in that range would have been useful.
Thank you for bringing to my attention the issue of the preponderance of unreflective bioethicists on the issues of selecting embryos on medical traits. I was similarly altered to this concern when I learned about bioethicists' reactions to Project Prevention, a project which seeks to lower the incidence of drug impaired babies by offering cash to drug users to use birth control or temporarily sterilize themselves. The bioethics community (as reported in the news) opposed this program on the grounds that it was "eugenics," even though it involved no authoritarian coercion and enormous benefit to future children who would otherwise suffer from drug injuries. There, as well as here, the bioethicists' reactions seemed like political virtue signaling.
This isn't in the interests of the children who would otherwise have been born unless the lives of the children of drug addicts are so bad non-existence is better for them, which seems a dubious assumption to me.
My argument was assuming that future utility is the main moral factor. And your point is valid on that assumption.
In a minute I will challenge this assumption, but even under this assumption, it could still be argued that we need to broadly consider the potential suffering that could result from drug-using moms having children:
Does caring for the children and their injuries (which could last throughout their lifetime depending on how mentally impaired they are by the drugs) cause a strain on the social system and thereby cause indirect suffering to many others? What's the likelihood that due to their drug-related injuries the children will have behavioral issues that cause them to harm others? Combine that potential suffering with the children's inherent loss of utility from impairments and it might tip the scale to the side of net suffering.
But more importantly, we don't necessarily use the utilitarian calculation for questions of creating new users. For example, if you could create the philosopher's "utility monster," does that make it ethical to do so because by doing so you are generating more future utility? I don't think so. Utilitarianism focuses on maximizing the needs of the beings that already exist or that inevitably will exist, but doesn't necessarily say something about creating new users whose needs would otherwise not exist.
If so, then when it comes to questions of procreation, it makes sense here to follow the deontological intuition that says that it's irresponsible to procreate if one can't or won't take responsibility for seeing to it that the needs of one's children will be met. All the more so is it irresponsible to procreate while on drugs since by doing so one is unnecessarily making one's children's lives worse by impairing them with avoidable drug injuries.
Furthermore, even if utilitarianism does have something to say about the question of whether one should create users, you could imagine that from a rule-utilitarian perspective there should be a rule along similar lines to the above deontological principle, saying something like "do not create beings with needs unless you take responsibility to see to it that those beings' needs will be fulfilled."
This is a reasonable rule because if no one in society followed this rule, you could imagine how it would lead to enormous human suffering (like the literal breakdown of society) that would outweigh the value of being alive.
As with any questionnaire there is scope for interpreting these results a bit differently. For example, with the detailed one (lots of questions) you could view it as tracking not so much conventional ethical assumptions as conventional assumptions about the political desirability of permitting or not permitting certain things. That’s different and less obviously philosophically bad (of course my political views reflect my political views!). For instance, you might think something like parental gene selection is fine in principle but likely to lead to problems when put into practice, given the assumptions the person filling out the survey is making about our politicians, medical institutions, and so on. These are conventional assumptions and might be questioned, but I think it takes us into the political realm and out of the narrower ethical realm.
Not so sure about the first two. The second one (seeing) is presumably tracking your views on the social model etc so it may be that respondents are choosing to understand “disadvantage” in such a way that whatever you can’t do due to lack of eyesight doesn’t count as a disadvantage in the relevant sense. Or the more philosophically sophisticated are using Barnes’s equal weight view which imo works by making it basically impossible for any physical trait to be in itself a disadvantage (because you are always in principle able to not view it as such). The first one? Maybe there are a lot more strict Kantians out there than I would have thought.
I think the so-called "liberal eugenicists" themselves must *partly* bare the blame for people not distinguish their views from the bad old eugenics. (I large agree with what you say here about genetic enhancement by parents being very different from coercive sterilization in principle, and in the long term I agree genetic enhancement being available on a voluntary basis is likely net good.) Let's look at some proponents of liberal eugenics that I imagine we are both familiar with (one very famous, one semi-famous and one obscure):
-Peter Singer: believes that parents have right to kill disabled infants because of their disabilities (for many disabilities, including some that he himself agrees do not prevent lives worth living.) Pretty Nazi/bad eugenics-like.
-Nick Bostrom: Wrote about how he enjoyed the blunt honesty of the sentence "black people are stupid".
My vague sense is that these incidents and views are not outliers, but rather relatively par for the course for "liberal eugenics". Combined this with the stigma for openly advocating for coercion, and it's no wonder lots of people suspect that liberal eugenicists might not really be so liberal. Especially as the saner of the original eugenicists lied about not supporting coercion when they actually did: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-longtermists-in-interwar
*In fairness, whilst her post gave off "liberal" vibes, I'm not sure it totally ruled out coercion, so maybe you could argue she doesn't count.
I think it's more worthwhile to assess specific arguments than to play association games about the proponents of the views (whatever sort of activity the latter is, it ain't philosophy). The criticism offered in my post was that the SEP's argument for judging the two *views* to be relevantly similar was a transparently terrible one.
Edited to add: I guess a possible explanation of what's going on with the "non-analytical" approach to applied ethics is that it precisely involves trying to guess at the political virtue of proponents, rather than assessing the accuracy of their claims. I don't think that's a proper academic activity.
I think both the actual facts about views and associations are relevant but to different things. The first is relevant to which view is correct, but the second is relevant to a variety of other things, including how much weight to put on testimony in favour of a view, what the likely other opinions of people with a view are, and how likely it is that people are describing their total views honestly versus lying. In practice, it is hard for most people to assess the philosophical case for and against philosophical views on eugenics or anything else, but they can often assess accurately whether someone has been racist, supports violence, regularly associates with white supremacists etc. so it's not that surprising if the latter have more effect on whether people trust liberal eugenicists when they say their view is fine and not actually scary for philosophical reasons. I think many people (somewhat less reasonably) also operate by a heuristic where they think something like "when someone makes a policy claim, look at the broad movements who support that policy and what they want, and assume that the policy in question probably advances those broad goals, even if it's not obvious why." I don't personally think this is a particularly good way to evaluate the likely impact of policies, but it's not a priori that it's wrong, that is actually basically an empirical claim. It's people who think like that you have to persuade are wrong empirically to move the needle on this subject in my view. Just showing that you can defend liberal eugenics by philosophical argument might move *me*, a former philosophy PhD student, but it's not going to move people who think "I can't really distinguish the good philosophy arguments from the apparently good but misleading ones, but I can predict that policies the far-right likes will advances the goals and interests of the far-right".
I think it's important to distinguish what sort of engagement can reasonably be expected of "people" generically, from what can be reasonably expected of *academic subject-area experts in the course of doing their job producing expert normative assessments for public consumption and/or policy guidance*.
Fair point, I'm not really inclined to defend bioethicists here when they are narrowly stating their in-principle views on genetic enhancement (though I don't think worrying about the indirect effects of allowing it given the actual sociology and politics of the world is *obviously* irrational, and nor do I know for certain how they would justify their views on this topic), and they were the subjects of your critique.
I think I am fairly willing to accept that as a defense of Bostrom as an individual (overall, I am actually pretty positive about Bostrom's work), but I still think it is part of a broader pattern of dodgy attitudes towards race, coercion and the far-right amongst liberal eugenicists. (To be clear, I don't think Bostrom or Singer are well described by the "far-right" label individually.)
I don't think any of these are par for the course. My impression is that these views are pretty unpopular among proponents of reproductive genetic freedom, especially white nationalism.
I don't think that many liberal eugenicists/reproductive genetic freedom people *are* white nationalists (at least, not in analytic philosophy), but I think many of them have at least one controversy of the kind I'm gesturing at. But admittedly, there is a selection effect here where you hear about the controversial people and not the uncontroversial ones for obvious reasons.
“Ethicists are incompetent if they don’t believe that the worth of a life is defined by its length” is the kind of take that needs more justification before it’s anything other than argument by insult.
That's not an accurate statement of my view for a couple of reasons:
(1) "defined by its length" implies that nothing else matters, whereas the sensible view merely claims that *all else equal*, a longer life-extension is better than a shorter one.
(2) Talk of "the worth of a life" invites confusion and muddled thinking. I could think that a 90-year-old has had the greatest life ever, but it doesn't follow that "saving" their life (or extending it by 1 year) is more important than giving 60 more years to a mediocre teenager. If you want to think clearly about this topic you need to understand that we're talking about comparing "life-*extensions*". So the question is simply whether the value of a life-extension depends in part on its length, such that longer life-extensions should generally be preferred to shorter ones.
"worse than worthless". That tone is bad form in my book. There's got to be a more tactful way to make a stern criticism. Perhaps something like, "both unhelpful intellectually and practically harmful to real patients".
Whether tact is called for seems rather situation-specific; I don't think it's an unconditional good. Sometimes it's better to just say what you really think.
Tone-policing seems to assume that others shouldn't be allowed to express negative emotions. There may be special formal contexts where that holds. But to apply it as a universal rule seems bizarrely presumptuous.
If you think my scorn isn't *warranted*, better to argue that on its merits. If the scorn *is* warranted, then it seems prima facie reasonable to clearly communicate this, so that others can also have accurate, warranted attitudes. There are tradeoffs involved -- it may make the targets of the scorn less receptive to what I have to say -- but I'm willing to accept that. I don't think you're in a position to make those communicative tradeoffs for me, or to demand that I resolve them in your preferred direction.
Funnily enough, no, the argument that I'm responding to claimed that the problem with the Nazis, shared by supporters of reprogenetic freedom, was that both groups aim at "what [they] believe is the best world possible". This is why the SEP author claims to find it "difficult to see the differences" between them.
I'm precisely trying to highlight how crazy it is to identify *wanting a better future* as the fundamental problem with fascists. (Of course, you might *also* deny that they really had such noble motivations. But that's a separate issue.)
I don't agree with everything you say here. Specifically, I think a sufficiently just and accessible society could disadvantage people far far less than it does now, to the point where it might only be as bad as being genetically short or having skinny arms. And I do worry about gene selection being only available to rich people, if it's sufficiently expensive.
That said, I don't want to come off as a critic. This is a good and thoughtful post, I agree with lots of other parts of it, and I expect I'll be linking it pretty often in future debates. I've long been bothered by vibes-based morality, and you've given a pretty sound case against that. I did want to ask what your take was on some discourse I've seen around the idea of genetically selecting away autism.
I think the strongest case against a crude implementation of genetic reproductive freedom is the possibility of "social dilemmas", where selecting (e.g. neurotypical) traits that would make life easier for the parents might (in some cases, on some margins) be worse for society.
As with general worries about loss of valuable genetic diversity (if too many parents are inclined to optimize in the same narrow ways), my preferred solution would be to have society offer sufficient $ incentives for parents to choose "the path less taken" (when it is judged to be socially valuable), which could help compensate them for the extra challenges they then face.
Technical note: Even if blindness were only as bad as being "genetically short or having skinny arms" that would still technically be a disadvantage. Taller people and stronger armed people have more physical ability and hence they technically have more possibilities to achieve the maximal good life (whatever it is defined as).
More general note: It's also hard to conceive of a way that not seeing could ever be overcome by an even maximally accommodating society. Sight gives one a broadly informative and new domain of sensation. That is empowering. No matter how strong the accommodations for the unseeing are, the unseeing are missing out on this empowerment.
Consider a thought experiment about the disability of not being telepathic. Imagine, for the purpose of this thought experiment, that telepathy is real, at least for some rare individuals. Given that premise, now consider the question: "Is it a disadvantage to not be telepathic?" I see no way that the answer could be anything other than "yes," regardless of how accommodating society is for non-telepathic individuals (as indeed it is). The capability that telepathy affords an individual gives them an advantage which is significantly empowering. Not having that advantage is to be disadvantaged.
It can be helpful to distinguish "pro tanto disadvantages" (which make one worse off *in some respect*) from "all-things-considered disadvantages". Sufficiently radical social responses could turn a pro tanto disadvantage into an overall advantage: e.g. suppose that telepaths would all be tortured to death; you're then overall better off lacking this ability!
The interesting philosophical question, of course, is about what things constitute pro tanto disadvantages, and whether they do so for natural or purely social reasons. (A purely social pro tanto disadvantage is only bad for you because people mistreat you as a result of the condition -- e.g. ginger hair in an anti-ginger society. Some activists claim, implausibly, that all disabilities are like this.)
I find it hard to see how any measure implemented by a society could make blind people only to be disadvantaged so slightly as to be on par with short people. Can you elaborate on how how this could happen?
The idea that there's no such thing as "saving," only prolonging a life, and that interventions that prolong life by more are more valuable than those that prolong a life by less, makes a lot of sense to me.
That said, like children, there are also other categories of people who, statistically, are likely to live longer than others. E.g. women, white people, rich people, etc. This principle would imply that, ceteris paribus, saving the life of a woman is more valuable than saving the life of a man, of a white person more than of a black person, a rich person more than a poor person, a European more than an American, etc. And those would seem to be on some pretty shaky ethical ground. I'm not really sure how to reconcile these ideas.
It seems pretty straightforward to me: They belong to the class of claims that are literally true (all else equal, there's always *some* extra reason to save a person with slightly greater life expectancy), but that if asserted would usually be taken to implicate some much stronger, false claim (e.g. that you should *essentialize* the groups in question, or that you have more reason to save almost *any* person from one demographic over another of the other demographic, or that such rules should be *institutionalized* in harmful stigmatizing ways).
Status quo bias may be one of the biggest marks against my near and dear transhumanist-immortality view. That is, it seems like our main way to fight against status quo bias is simply old people with old status quos dying, and young people with slightly better status quos replacing them. So if down the line people at time t become immortal, the status quo essentially freezes in place with the generation to first get immortality, and we miss out on so many good things down the line. And although over time, the birth of new kids would make the original immortal generation a smaller proportion of the population, the original generation would likely have a vastly disproportionate amount of power, so these effects would likely cancel. And we'd be frozen in the original generation's status quo forever...
I'm not usually one to say I have nothing to add, but bravo! You are a light in the darkness, Richard.
"if someone else’s well-meant plan involves empowering individuals to have more control over their own lives and reproductive choices, then —so long as you’re not a complete fucking moron..."
I would think selection of offspring sex is empowering, but I can't imagine what bioethics committee will be questioning parents on whether this is being done for trivial or nontrivial reasons - quite aside from the fact that it is not harmful to the child in any way. This is indeed just one current real "social dilemma". And why, in most species, sex of offspring is genuinely random.
The conservative eugenicist will then say that we should be extremely cautious in selecting for "non-medical" traits - if it's so good to select for high X, why hasn't it become fixed in the population?
You're really taking my quote out of context there!
To be clear, I think there are reasonable arguments for being cautious of genetic reproductive freedom. What I was responding to in the passage you quote was a very specific, very *unreasonable* argument (namely, that aiming at a better future makes one morally indistinguishable from Nazis).
I should have read that sentence a bit more closely, but I still think there is a thesis somewhere here that impersonal harms occurring by the grace of god or nature are more acceptable than harms arising from well-intended interventions.
But the social dilemmas are really quite widespread once one goes beyond the more medical (though even there there are peculiarities in defining dis-ease). Consider genetic manipulation to increase a child's adult height. We know there is a real correlation between height and salary, and I suspect this will be a zero-sum game. Sure diet is definitely important, so there are height differences by social class even in developed societies - perhaps driven by mate selection or social homogamy. But the latter status quo seems somehow more acceptable...
As to age versus eligibility for life extending interventions such as organ transplantation - these arguments have been done to death re fairness, equity, luck. The idea that an individual might improve their overall lifetime cumulative quality including past misfortune versus a purely forward looking consequentialism is attractive to many. Kind of a relativistic utility monster ie they will live more intensely for a shorter time into the future ;)
"if it's so good to select for high X, why hasn't it become fixed in the population?"
Putting evolutionary issues like difficulty escaping local maxima to the side, it seems pretty clear that the morally relevant traits good people would tend to select for are substantially (perhaps even profoundly) different from the traits that maximize reproductive fitness.
To some extent. But the kind of nonexistent conservative I am positing (an informed Social Darwinist, if you will), might take a long-termist like viewpoint ie those traits that have lead to historical success of modern humans are (cautiously) more worthwhile to improve upon given the uncertainties of our future. So they will select intelligence, sociability coupled with a flexible willingness to use violence (!) etc.
Interesting. I look forward to your talk at NYU on Friday!
I'm not ready to take these surveys themselves as marks of incompetence. I disagree with people who think that every life-extension is equally important irrespective of duration, or who say that being unable to see would not be disadvantaging in a just society, but I'd want to see the actual arguments made for those positions before judging incompetent the people who held them.
I did not take the survey, but if I had read question 7, I might've imagined the question implicitly included a clause like "holding fixed every other feature about the person," where every other feature includes likely future years of life. One reason not to read it my way is that intuitively one thinks that the main reason to save the younger person is that they will live longer, so, why ask the question if we hold fixed likely future years of life? But one reason to read it my way is that if you don't hold fixed every other feature, the question is unanswerable, and if you only hold fixed some features rather than others, it's not obvious which to hold fixed. One might reply "you should hold fixed everything except the salient feature: likely future years of life!" But it's just not obvious to me that this is how everyone read the question.
With respect to question 6, if disadvantaging means "it's a net loss for your well-being" or something similar, then the 59% obviously have the right answer, don't they? If society were such that it gave $50 million to everyone who can't see, then it'd be a net advantage not to be able to see. It strikes me as unhinged from reality to deny the possibility of compensating people for being unable to see with enough other stuff so as to make that inability an advantage, on balance.
I don't think it's reasonable to read Q6 as asking whether the pro tanto disadvantage is impossible to compensate, since literally nobody holds that view. It's clearly getting at the question of whether it's a natural pro tanto disadvantage at all (in contrast to something -- e.g. ginger hair in an anti-ginger society -- that is pro tanto disadvantageous *only* because of unjust discrimination).
If someone merely holds the trivial view (that disadvantages can be compensated), but was motivated to answered misleadingly because they want to *sound* like they hold the radical disability-activist view (that blindness is like ginger hair, not a natural disadvantage at all), then I think the underlying intellectual dishonesty is its own problem.
On Q7: it's always possible that *someone* may have been honestly confused by the question. But I seriously doubt that that explains *most* of the answers. (It isn't *that* hard to work out what substantive issue the question is trying to get at.)
If people had read it in the way you suggest, wouldn't there have been nonzero responses of 50yo and 75yo? It seems to me that when you remove the absurd virtue-signaling response, the remaining distribution reflects a reasonable range of opinions. 1-year-olds (in a country with advanced medical care, and not having substantial birth defects) have the longest expected remaining life; 10-year-olds have passed most of the extreme investment of parental time and are able to act pro-socially in many ways; 25-year-olds are typically contributing economically. Personally, I would have placed a peak around 16-18, and think an extra choice in that range would have been useful.
Thank you for bringing to my attention the issue of the preponderance of unreflective bioethicists on the issues of selecting embryos on medical traits. I was similarly altered to this concern when I learned about bioethicists' reactions to Project Prevention, a project which seeks to lower the incidence of drug impaired babies by offering cash to drug users to use birth control or temporarily sterilize themselves. The bioethics community (as reported in the news) opposed this program on the grounds that it was "eugenics," even though it involved no authoritarian coercion and enormous benefit to future children who would otherwise suffer from drug injuries. There, as well as here, the bioethicists' reactions seemed like political virtue signaling.
This isn't in the interests of the children who would otherwise have been born unless the lives of the children of drug addicts are so bad non-existence is better for them, which seems a dubious assumption to me.
My argument was assuming that future utility is the main moral factor. And your point is valid on that assumption.
In a minute I will challenge this assumption, but even under this assumption, it could still be argued that we need to broadly consider the potential suffering that could result from drug-using moms having children:
Does caring for the children and their injuries (which could last throughout their lifetime depending on how mentally impaired they are by the drugs) cause a strain on the social system and thereby cause indirect suffering to many others? What's the likelihood that due to their drug-related injuries the children will have behavioral issues that cause them to harm others? Combine that potential suffering with the children's inherent loss of utility from impairments and it might tip the scale to the side of net suffering.
But more importantly, we don't necessarily use the utilitarian calculation for questions of creating new users. For example, if you could create the philosopher's "utility monster," does that make it ethical to do so because by doing so you are generating more future utility? I don't think so. Utilitarianism focuses on maximizing the needs of the beings that already exist or that inevitably will exist, but doesn't necessarily say something about creating new users whose needs would otherwise not exist.
If so, then when it comes to questions of procreation, it makes sense here to follow the deontological intuition that says that it's irresponsible to procreate if one can't or won't take responsibility for seeing to it that the needs of one's children will be met. All the more so is it irresponsible to procreate while on drugs since by doing so one is unnecessarily making one's children's lives worse by impairing them with avoidable drug injuries.
Furthermore, even if utilitarianism does have something to say about the question of whether one should create users, you could imagine that from a rule-utilitarian perspective there should be a rule along similar lines to the above deontological principle, saying something like "do not create beings with needs unless you take responsibility to see to it that those beings' needs will be fulfilled."
This is a reasonable rule because if no one in society followed this rule, you could imagine how it would lead to enormous human suffering (like the literal breakdown of society) that would outweigh the value of being alive.
As with any questionnaire there is scope for interpreting these results a bit differently. For example, with the detailed one (lots of questions) you could view it as tracking not so much conventional ethical assumptions as conventional assumptions about the political desirability of permitting or not permitting certain things. That’s different and less obviously philosophically bad (of course my political views reflect my political views!). For instance, you might think something like parental gene selection is fine in principle but likely to lead to problems when put into practice, given the assumptions the person filling out the survey is making about our politicians, medical institutions, and so on. These are conventional assumptions and might be questioned, but I think it takes us into the political realm and out of the narrower ethical realm.
Not so sure about the first two. The second one (seeing) is presumably tracking your views on the social model etc so it may be that respondents are choosing to understand “disadvantage” in such a way that whatever you can’t do due to lack of eyesight doesn’t count as a disadvantage in the relevant sense. Or the more philosophically sophisticated are using Barnes’s equal weight view which imo works by making it basically impossible for any physical trait to be in itself a disadvantage (because you are always in principle able to not view it as such). The first one? Maybe there are a lot more strict Kantians out there than I would have thought.
I think the so-called "liberal eugenicists" themselves must *partly* bare the blame for people not distinguish their views from the bad old eugenics. (I large agree with what you say here about genetic enhancement by parents being very different from coercive sterilization in principle, and in the long term I agree genetic enhancement being available on a voluntary basis is likely net good.) Let's look at some proponents of liberal eugenics that I imagine we are both familiar with (one very famous, one semi-famous and one obscure):
-Peter Singer: believes that parents have right to kill disabled infants because of their disabilities (for many disabilities, including some that he himself agrees do not prevent lives worth living.) Pretty Nazi/bad eugenics-like.
-Nick Bostrom: Wrote about how he enjoyed the blunt honesty of the sentence "black people are stupid".
-Diana Fleishman who defended liberal eugenics on the EA forum*. Seems to work for a magazine that is basically white nationalist learning: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/revealed-international-race-science-network-secretly-funded-by-us-tech-boss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Fleischman#Career
My vague sense is that these incidents and views are not outliers, but rather relatively par for the course for "liberal eugenics". Combined this with the stigma for openly advocating for coercion, and it's no wonder lots of people suspect that liberal eugenicists might not really be so liberal. Especially as the saner of the original eugenicists lied about not supporting coercion when they actually did: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-longtermists-in-interwar
*In fairness, whilst her post gave off "liberal" vibes, I'm not sure it totally ruled out coercion, so maybe you could argue she doesn't count.
I think it's more worthwhile to assess specific arguments than to play association games about the proponents of the views (whatever sort of activity the latter is, it ain't philosophy). The criticism offered in my post was that the SEP's argument for judging the two *views* to be relevantly similar was a transparently terrible one.
Edited to add: I guess a possible explanation of what's going on with the "non-analytical" approach to applied ethics is that it precisely involves trying to guess at the political virtue of proponents, rather than assessing the accuracy of their claims. I don't think that's a proper academic activity.
I think both the actual facts about views and associations are relevant but to different things. The first is relevant to which view is correct, but the second is relevant to a variety of other things, including how much weight to put on testimony in favour of a view, what the likely other opinions of people with a view are, and how likely it is that people are describing their total views honestly versus lying. In practice, it is hard for most people to assess the philosophical case for and against philosophical views on eugenics or anything else, but they can often assess accurately whether someone has been racist, supports violence, regularly associates with white supremacists etc. so it's not that surprising if the latter have more effect on whether people trust liberal eugenicists when they say their view is fine and not actually scary for philosophical reasons. I think many people (somewhat less reasonably) also operate by a heuristic where they think something like "when someone makes a policy claim, look at the broad movements who support that policy and what they want, and assume that the policy in question probably advances those broad goals, even if it's not obvious why." I don't personally think this is a particularly good way to evaluate the likely impact of policies, but it's not a priori that it's wrong, that is actually basically an empirical claim. It's people who think like that you have to persuade are wrong empirically to move the needle on this subject in my view. Just showing that you can defend liberal eugenics by philosophical argument might move *me*, a former philosophy PhD student, but it's not going to move people who think "I can't really distinguish the good philosophy arguments from the apparently good but misleading ones, but I can predict that policies the far-right likes will advances the goals and interests of the far-right".
I think it's important to distinguish what sort of engagement can reasonably be expected of "people" generically, from what can be reasonably expected of *academic subject-area experts in the course of doing their job producing expert normative assessments for public consumption and/or policy guidance*.
Fair point, I'm not really inclined to defend bioethicists here when they are narrowly stating their in-principle views on genetic enhancement (though I don't think worrying about the indirect effects of allowing it given the actual sociology and politics of the world is *obviously* irrational, and nor do I know for certain how they would justify their views on this topic), and they were the subjects of your critique.
Note that with Bostrom, literally your only criticism is that once as an edgy 18 year old he said something edgy that he later regretted.
I think I am fairly willing to accept that as a defense of Bostrom as an individual (overall, I am actually pretty positive about Bostrom's work), but I still think it is part of a broader pattern of dodgy attitudes towards race, coercion and the far-right amongst liberal eugenicists. (To be clear, I don't think Bostrom or Singer are well described by the "far-right" label individually.)
I don't think any of these are par for the course. My impression is that these views are pretty unpopular among proponents of reproductive genetic freedom, especially white nationalism.
I don't think that many liberal eugenicists/reproductive genetic freedom people *are* white nationalists (at least, not in analytic philosophy), but I think many of them have at least one controversy of the kind I'm gesturing at. But admittedly, there is a selection effect here where you hear about the controversial people and not the uncontroversial ones for obvious reasons.
Thank you!
That only 15% of bioethicists support legal organ markets is criminal.
“Ethicists are incompetent if they don’t believe that the worth of a life is defined by its length” is the kind of take that needs more justification before it’s anything other than argument by insult.
That's not an accurate statement of my view for a couple of reasons:
(1) "defined by its length" implies that nothing else matters, whereas the sensible view merely claims that *all else equal*, a longer life-extension is better than a shorter one.
(2) Talk of "the worth of a life" invites confusion and muddled thinking. I could think that a 90-year-old has had the greatest life ever, but it doesn't follow that "saving" their life (or extending it by 1 year) is more important than giving 60 more years to a mediocre teenager. If you want to think clearly about this topic you need to understand that we're talking about comparing "life-*extensions*". So the question is simply whether the value of a life-extension depends in part on its length, such that longer life-extensions should generally be preferred to shorter ones.
Regardless, if you want more arguments you can read my paper on the topic here: https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAAQL
I appreciate your arguments, but I don’t think it would be fair to dismiss John Harris (for example) as simply “incompetent” for disagreeing with you.
No, of course, the judgment should be based on the substance of the arguments.
What's his argument?
He's one of the people talked about in the paper that was referenced.
"worse than worthless". That tone is bad form in my book. There's got to be a more tactful way to make a stern criticism. Perhaps something like, "both unhelpful intellectually and practically harmful to real patients".
Whether tact is called for seems rather situation-specific; I don't think it's an unconditional good. Sometimes it's better to just say what you really think.
Tone-policing seems to assume that others shouldn't be allowed to express negative emotions. There may be special formal contexts where that holds. But to apply it as a universal rule seems bizarrely presumptuous.
If you think my scorn isn't *warranted*, better to argue that on its merits. If the scorn *is* warranted, then it seems prima facie reasonable to clearly communicate this, so that others can also have accurate, warranted attitudes. There are tradeoffs involved -- it may make the targets of the scorn less receptive to what I have to say -- but I'm willing to accept that. I don't think you're in a position to make those communicative tradeoffs for me, or to demand that I resolve them in your preferred direction.
I don't know the details, but your strategy of making readers have certain attitudes didn't work on me. Perhaps other readers responded differently.
Is this a typo: "Not because they meant well, but because they violated basic human rights"?
Was this supposed to say "Not because they meant *wrong,* but..."
Funnily enough, no, the argument that I'm responding to claimed that the problem with the Nazis, shared by supporters of reprogenetic freedom, was that both groups aim at "what [they] believe is the best world possible". This is why the SEP author claims to find it "difficult to see the differences" between them.
I'm precisely trying to highlight how crazy it is to identify *wanting a better future* as the fundamental problem with fascists. (Of course, you might *also* deny that they really had such noble motivations. But that's a separate issue.)
Oh, I see. Thank you for the clarification.