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

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher specializing in political and social theory, epistemology, and pragmatics. He was born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, in what is now Germany. His father, Ernst Habermas, was a Nazi sympathizer, and Habermas himself was a Hitler Youth leader. In the early 1950s, Habermas attended the universities of Göttingen, Zurich, and Bonn, eventually completing a doctorate in philosophy in 1954. In 1962, he published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, which tackled the development of the public sphere throughout history and looked at how it has been transformed by the introduction of mass media and capitalism. It was published in English in 1989. Habermas’ most notable work, The Theory of Communicative Action, was published in 1981. Habermas has debated with other notable philosophers like Michel Foucault, John Rawls, and Jacques Derrida about a variety of subjects. He also heavily criticized German historians Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgruber for trying to erase the rise of the Nazi party from broader German history, and he has accused these historians of being Nazi apologists. He takes particular offense at Nolte, Stürmer, Hildebrand, and Hillgruber’s attempts to justify the rise of the Nazi party as a response to Bolshevism and to glorify the actions of the German army on the Eastern Front in Russia. 

Sandel cites Habermas’ The Future of Human Nature, published in 2003, on Nazi eugenics in the Holocaust. Like Sandel, Habermas explicitly opposes “liberal eugenics,” just as he opposes “old eugenics.” His objections largely stem from the fact that liberal eugenics, or voluntary genetic intervention to select or improve children, “violates the liberal principles of autonomy and equality” (80). Sandel finds this reasoning somewhat wanting but concedes that there is a connection between the “the contingency of a life’s beginning that is not at our disposal and the freedom to give one’s life an ethical shape” (82). Genetically modifying children flies in the face of this connection and threatens the ability of humans to act ethically.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a British polymath. He wrote over 340 papers and books in his lifetime on a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, medicine, cartography, psychology, and eugenics. Born in Birmingham, England, Galton was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Like Darwin, Galton was fascinated with the origin and development of the human species, and he drew from Darwin’s On the Origins of Species and The Descent of Man for his own research into human variation. Galton was especially interested in discovering if human ability was heritable. He coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” to describe the interplay between the influences of genetics and experience in human development. His work Hereditary Genius, published in 1869, examines this question in detail and concludes that nature rather than nurture has the bigger impact. Galton developed the theory that families of “merit” should intermarry to produce superior offspring, while those who were poor or otherwise “unfit” should be discouraged from reproducing entirely. He coined the term “eugenics” to describe this process of improving the human gene pool through selective breeding. Interestingly, Galton and his wife never had any children. 

Galton has been criticized for his views on eugenics and for constructing and upholding a racial hierarchy that viewed white people as superior to all others and called for the eventual eradication of so-called inferior races. His work has been used as the basis for scientific racism since the 1800s. Sandel examines the impact of Galton’s eugenics on the world of bioethics, particularly how eugenics has impacted the desire for human genetic enhancements and the pursuit of perfection. The popularization of Galton’s eugenics created a desire for superiority and control among certain populations. It resulted in legislation that prevented “those with undesirable genes from reproducing” through programs of mass sterilization of “mental patients, prisoners, and paupers” (65) in the US. Nazi Germany adopted eugenicist policies that were inspired by the sterilization efforts in the US. They went beyond “steriliz[ing] the unfit” (67) and eventually attempted to create a genetically “pure” race of Aryan Germans by exterminating 6 million Jewish people (and Romani people, and others) who were deemed to be racially inferior threats to the German people. The legacy of Galton’s eugenics cannot be overstated in the development of Nazi eugenics, though the ideas do not come from Galton alone.