Eugenics

The word eugenics (in Greek eu-genes, meaning “of good origin”), defined in Victorian England by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, in Inquires into Human Faculty and its Development (1883) as a science related to the promotion of race applicable to human beings, beasts and plants, almost unavoidably leads to Nazism. In Hitlerian Germany, the execution of eugenic plans reached a paroxysm. Under its premises, recovering the Rassenhygiene thesis, the justification of the role of the State in avoiding the reproduction of “inferior” people was put forward, anticipating the natural selection of the fittest. It was therefore pointless to protect ill, apathetic, unfit and handicapped people who, threatening to multiply faster than the endowed and qualified, challenged the latter in the struggle for life. Thus, medical improvements functioned as a counterbalance whenever the life of the unfit was extended and hence, under the influence of race science, the issue was not only pointed out but also put into action.

Anglo-Saxon eugenics - comprehending American, German and Scandinavian readjustments of the nineteenth century thesis - and Latin eugenics (stemming from people like Nicola Pende, Italian, and Alexis Carrel, French) shared fundamental theorico-practical premises. From a scheme of categories and hierarchies of individuals – in which one must acknowledge differrent degrees of aggressiveness - the exclusion of the “unfit” and the reproduction of the “fittest” were organised, with the help of substantial State interventions in the private sphere and strong restrictions over individual freedom. Although classic historiography often points out the traditional identification of Anglo-Saxon eugenics with “negative” actions towards the reproduction of the “inferior” and of Latin eugenics with “positive” actions encouraging the reproduction of the “fittest”, what concerns us here is the reflection on the most controversial aspect of a field which is, as we have already mentioned, a shared one: the discussion about the legitimacy of the interventions on the human body, either forbidding the pursuit of “life unworthy of life” (Nazi term designing those human beings who, owing to their racial or genetic background, did not deserve to live) through euthanasia, or depriving of their possibility of reproduction those people who, unless they had previously been sterilized or castrated, were considered as prone to spoil the achievement of the mythical prototype.
The difficult symbiosis of biology with politics implies that beyond speculations about the scientific or pseudo-scientific nature of eugenics, it is essential to think over its authoritarian modes of expression, both in the Anglo-Saxon and in the Latin worlds.

Nowadays the problem reappears, even when it is simply restricted to debates concerning pre-implantation diagnosis, to genetic therapy and, generally, to genetic engineering improvements applied to human beings. As a result, the tension lies these days in considering whether an “updated eugenics” exists that could be dissociated from the well-known horrors of “classic eugenics” and, if so, whether it represents a starting point that is apparently different but that leads to the same place. In other words, whether axiological differences between classic eugenics, which aim at modifying populations’ genetic pool under social and political goals, and the current one, which tends to use scientific improvements for private choices about procreation, actually exist. According to the social scientists of the Human Genome Project programme of Ethics, Social and Legal implications, for instance, there are remarkable qualitative differences between them, whereas German philosopher Jürgen Habermas warns us about the dangerous homologies between eugenics developed at the turn of the nineteenth century under the umbrella of the Pax Britannica and current liberal eugenics. From this point of view, it will be crucial to integrate the ideal of the equality of opportunity, which, according to Peter Singer, is threatened by the possibility of going shopping in a global genetic supermarket, with the fallacy of human inequality which is typical of eugenics. Of any eugenics.




Bibliography

Álvarez Peláez, Raquel (translation, introduction and notes) Francis Galton. Herencia y eugenesia, Alianza, Madrid, 1988.
Álvarez Peláez, Raquel y García González, Armando, En busca de la raza perfecta, CSIC, Madrid, 1999.
Buchanan, Allen; Brock, Dan; Daniels, Norman and Wikler, Daniel; From chance to choice: Genetics and Justice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.
Habermas, Jürgen, El futuro de la naturaleza humana, ¿Hacia una eugenesia liberal?, Paidós, Barcelona, 2002.
Kevles, Daniel, In the name of eugenics, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985.
Miranda, Marisa y Vallejo, Gustavo (compiladores), Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 2005.
Stepan, Nancy Leys, The hour of eugenics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1991.