Institutions, beliefs and ethics: Eugenics as a case study

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 22-45

  Buchanan, Allen ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33846567626     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00250.x     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Allen Buchanan et al., From Chance To Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 28-29. The author of the present paper was not the primary author of the chapter of this volume in which the conventional diagnosis of the evils of eugenics was advanced.
2. This is not to assume that other types of eugenics did not involve moral errors. The focus of this paper, however, is on understanding what was wrong with the type of eugenics that is generally assumed to be most uncontroversially wrong, namely, coercive negative eugenics. It could be argued that some instances of nonracial coercive negative eugenics are not morally wrong - for example, that under certain circumstances it would not be wrong to prevent a couple from having a child whose life would be very short, filled with pain and lacking in compensating good experiences. My purpose here is not to delve into these more complex issues but to assume that at least some instances of coercive eugenic action are morally wrong, to try to understand the nature of the wrong involved, and then to draw out the implications of the analysis for the scope and methodology of ethics.
3. Buchanan et al., From Chance To Choice, p. 52.
4. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 93.
5. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for this point.
6. Carrie Buck was a White woman who was sterilized by medical authorities in the state of Virginia. In Virginia, as in other states in which compulsory sterilization on eugenic grounds was practiced, Whites as well as Blacks were sterilized. This fact is important to keep in mind if we are to avoid the mistaken assumption that coercive negative eugenics was advocated only by racial eugenicists.
7. However, below I argue that it need not be understood in this way. One can consistently hold that individual rights may rightly be infringed in conditions of dire emergency, and war is often thought of in this way.
8. I am indebted to Paul Lombardo (personal communication) for emphasizing the importance of the difference between the understanding of rights current in the U.S. legal system at the time of Buck vs. Bell and today.
9. I have developed the idea of social moral epistemology in two earlier essays. In "Social moral epistemology," Social Philosophy and Policy, 19 (2002), 126-52,
10. I show how social moral epistemology illuminates (1) the nature of applied ethics, (2) the limitations of the method of reflective equilibrium, and (3) the short-comings of meta-ethical communitarianism, the view that we learn our moral obligations by reflecting on our roles within a given community. In "Political Liberalism and Social Moral Epistemology," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32 (2003), 95-130, I argue that liberal institutions are superior from the standpoint of social moral epistemology.
11. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, pp. 72, 91;
12. Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), pp. 50-54.
13. Even Nozick leaves open the possibility that rights as "side constraints" might be rightly infringed to avoid a "moral catastrophe"; Robert A. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 30, note.
14. Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice, p. 53.
15. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, pp. 42, 51-54;
16. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 122.
17. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, pp. 116-17.
18. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 122.
19. Paul Lombardo, "Facing Carrie Buck," Hastings Center Report, 33 (March 1, 2003), 14-17.
20. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, pp. 117-21.
21. Paul Lombardo, "The One Sure Cure: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell" (unpublished manuscript).
22. Buchanan, "Social moral epistemology" and "Political liberalism and social moral epistemology."
23. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, pp. 73, 76.
24. See also Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 53-56, 184).
25. This definition of "social epistemology" is a modification of that offered by Alvin Goldman in his enlightening book, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 5.
26. Buchanan, "Social moral epistemology."
27. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, p. 18.
28. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 93.
29. Ibid., p. 94.
30. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, p. 90.
31. Ibid., p. 43.
32. Allen Buchanan, "Justice as reciprocity versus subject-centered justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19 (1990), 227-52.
33. Claudia Koontz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
34. Ibid., p. 119.
35. Koontz misleadingly refers to Nazi beliefs in natural inferiority of certain groups as knowledge. Here she is typical of social scientists who, when they approach the field of social epistemology generally and social moral epistemology in particular tend to fail to distinguish between belief (which may be true or false) and knowledge, which implies true or at least justified belief. This may betray what Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, p. 7, calls a nonveritistic view of social epistemology. It should be clear from the definitions of "social epistemology" and "social moral epistemology" I have given above that my approach, like Goldman's, is veritistic: I proceed on the assumption that we are able (though not always) to distinguish between truth and falsehood, at least when it comes to factual beliefs.
36. For an insightful and lucid instance of this approach, see Helen E. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
37. In Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Philip Kitcher explores the implications of a social approach to epistemology for the interaction of science and democratic institutions.
38. Here it might be objected that my understanding of the conventional philosophical conception of ethics is overdrawn because many philosophical ethicists would admit that progress toward improved conduct requires not only the scrutiny of arguments and principles but also attention to social institutions. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that most philosophical ethicists tend to exaggerate the efficacy of scrutinizing arguments and principles in improving conduct and consequently overestimate the efficacy of their own distinctive contribution. They also tend to underemphasize the ethics of believing, the role of false belief in moral wrongdoing and the ways in which institutions influence belief. A case in point is the analysis of the evils of eugenics in chapter 2 of From Chance to Choice: The author of that chapter says that the point of performing an ethical autopsy on eugenics is to provide insights that will help us avoid a repetition of the evils of eugenics, but then proceeds as if the key to doing so is to focus exclusively on the arguments and principles espoused by eugenicists. My assumption is that the conventional conception of ethics is best inferred from what ethicists generally do, not by what they would acknowledge if pressed.
39. Buchanan, "Political liberalism and social epistemology."
40. Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, pp. 93-106.
41. Thomas F. Gossett's classic book Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), provides ample evidence of pervasive epistemic asymmetries regarding beliefs in racial differences during the period in which eugenics flourished, not just in America but in Britain and Europe as well.
42. Ibid., p. 107.
43. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, pp. 263-67.
44. For a clear critical discussion of such inferences, see Elliot Sober, "The meaning of genetic causation," appendix 1, in Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice, pp. 347-70.
45. Science and Nature, two premier scientific journals based in the U.S. and Great Britain, respectively, both require disclosure of funding sources that pose potential conflicts of interest. Many journals have similar policies.
46. Charles Lane, "The tainted sources of The Bell Curve," New York Review of Books, 41 (Dec. 1, 1994), 14-19;
47. Adolph Reed, Jr., "Looking backward," The Nation, 259 (Nov. 28, 1994), 654-61.
48. Some prominent eugenicists had scientific credentials that were as respectable as any available at the time. Others, some of whom the public believed were experts, were far less qualified. This raises an interesting question: to what extent should those charged with scientific or scholarly credentialing not only help to devise institutions to certify the expertise of genuine experts but also take an active role in making public the lack of qualifications of some who seek to be identified as experts? More generally: how might changes in the institutions through which the professional identities of scientists are formed encourage them to take responsibility for helping the public distinguish between genuine experts and pseudo-experts or misleading popularizers. For an interesting examination of the successes and failures of scientists in criticizing the scientific errors of racial views in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, see Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Barkan shows that only a very small minority of scientists took it on themselves to try to combat what I have described as misplaced epistemic deference, by publicly exposing the scientific errors of racist thinking, including racial eugenics. One possible conclusion to draw is that false racial eugenic beliefs and false eugenic beliefs more generally persisted as long as they did in part due to an institutional failure in the scientific community. In other words, Barkan's work suggests that it is an oversimplification to say that the public's tendency to misidentify experts or to fail to distinguish between experts and popularizers, was simply, or even primarily a failure of credentialing, narrowly understood.
49. I thank Alex Rosenberg for suggesting that I consider this objection.
50. In my judgment, the assumption that there are facts of the matter about biological inheritance, about the cognitive abilities of Blacks, about whether crime and poverty are strongly determined by genes, etc., is hardly an extravagant one. This paper therefore does not attempt to refute skeptics or nihilists regarding the existence of facts about human beings and human societies. For a concise and compelling refutation of some of the main contemporary arguments in favor of skepticism or nihilism regarding scientific and social scientific facts, see Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, ch. 2.