I think I agree with everything you said, but it skips over one problem: that most alterations you can make to a person are best made before they are born or when they're a kid. So we're in the position of asking ourselves what a hypothetical child would want, or more commonly whether an embryo with Downs is more or less worth gestating than an embryo without. There is no way to give that embryo agency. So we *do* have to ask if there are generally better ways of being than others. And our society has pretty strong opinions about which ways those are.
But you always have to make that kind of choice -- choosing not to enhance is no less making a permanent choice about that child's life it's just privleging what's normal.
And parents already do this all the time. Most horribly when a child (or fetus) has some kind of condition that can be treated now but not later. And we generally trust parents to make the right choices for their children and they generally do -- every choice about chemo or having surgery or even prenatal vitamins is a choice parents make for their child.
PS I did write a post about this myself, which basically concluded that if society weren't ableist, genetic engineering would be fine, but—obviously that hypothetical is planet-sized so it's not a terribly useful conclusion.
I do agree that Transhumanism is different from Eugenics. I don't agree with your implicit definition of Eugenics (which you seem to imply is bad by definition): Eugenics is breeding humans. Screening embryos for genetic disorders is eugenics. Dor Yeshorim is eugenics.
This seems like an unhelpful way to discuss this issue. A substantial component of the argument being criticized in this article is, essentially, that transhumanism involves improving humans' genes, which is eugenics, which is bad.* Thus its effect is based in large part on showing that the thing it's attacking fits into a rather broad definition of a word that most people associate with negative connotations. This is a sophistic trick commonly used in political rhetoric (cf. 'abortion is murder', 'taxation is theft', 'mass immigration is genocide', 'silence on [some issue] is violence', '[any of various Democratic policies] is socialism', &c.), & here, as elsewhere, it is unworthy of consideration in discussion between reasonable people. It would be better for rational thought to restrict the word that everyone agrees is bad to describing a category of unambiguously bad things (e.g. only use 'murder' to mean intentionally killing a real person outside of the few legal exceptions such as war or capital punishment, or 'genocide' to mean trying to exterminate a demographic group, or 'eugenics' to mean selective breeding of humans through large-scale coercion of their reproductive decisions), & to discuss the actual topic of discussion by evaluating its substance rather than by trying to attach derogatory labels to it. Continuing the discussion using the derogatory label as though its connotation didn't exist just helps its effect on people's judgment persist & thus sabotages your own argument. (See https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics , which I mostly agree with, for further discussion of this specific case.)
* Torres's claims that specific things about transhumanism are bad are addressed either at ideas which are, in fact, true (e.g., that the sort of general intelligence that IQ tests are meant to measure exists, or that it is substantially affected by genes), or at ideas which are not necessary parts of transhumanism & which many transhumanists strongly disagree with (e.g., that the differences in average intelligence between racial groups are caused by their genes, or that severely disabled babies should be killed); thus he fails to show anything bad about transhumanism in general, as opposed to certain specific proponents thereof. Moreover, parts of the criticism of specific people depend on taking thought experiments & distant hypotheticals out of context (e.g. "if you had to design a eugenics program..." or "moral bioenhancement should be mandatory" or "the main problem with the Holocaust was that there weren't enough Nazis") & so are unconvincing.
I find the abstract debate about genetic screening and eugenics rather misguided. Let me describe how it works as someone currently going through it, and see if it contribute to the discussion.
It should be noted that the most common way a person in Israel a person in Israel will get genetic test is not Dor Yesharim, it's the public health system, after you are already trying to have a baby and with no expectationat all you'll divorce if somethingbad will be discovered. Pretty much everyone are eligible for some genetic screening, with the specifics testing provided (or subsidied) depending on the person's specific origins. As far as I understand it, the original motivation was indeed to prevent Jewish diseases like tsacs, which are frighteningly common ans deadly. But as the health system is universal (all hail the national health law of 1994!) tests are also developed and provided to Arabs, which are often classified as genetic units by the village. That is, you might be at very high risk for serious diseases unless you marry outside your village, and if the do - the public health system will help you try multiple times until the embryo is not likely to express the diseases.
This is not seen in Israel as a case of "positive eugenics" or some nonsense like that. It is basically viewed as simple part of preventative medicine, and the choice if to stop the pregnancy is only the parent's, and often depend on their religious affiliation, though the doctors do provide medical advice regarding the severity of the diagnosis, sometimes recommending abortion. Those recommendations are not without problems, but the procedure, as far as I understand it, seem reasonable. As Judaism is relatively permissive regarding abortions (at least next to the crazy ideas Americans have) most who receive fatal diagnosis (like tsacs) indeed choose to end the pregnancy, with more grey areas depending on the couple's beliefs.
If this process sounds to you like eugenics, I guess it is the closest any country policy is to it, but I want to emphasize the motivations and practice are very very different, and that we don't call it that. We call it genetic screening, and are not about to change the name because of some stupid intellectual turf wars between transhumanist and wokedom.
Yeah, the vibes of the two things are pretty different. Eugenics is specifically about genetics, whereas I think of transhumanism as being more about artificial enhancement. Gene editing and biohacking are in there too of course, but they're not really the central example.
Historical eugenicists always concerned themselves with whose genes should be passed on in a population - "increasing the productivity of the best stock" and "repressing the productivity of the worst", in Galton's words. Dor Yeshorim, unless I am mistaken, makes absolutely no attempt to do that; they try to prevent alleles from combining in ways that causes diseases to be expressed. They do not discourage carriers from passing on their recessive copies with non-carriers.
I agree with the sentiment behind this post, but I think this approach is doomed to failure. If you Google the definition of eugenics, you get a much more expansive definition than just "what the Nazis were doing". People seem pretty well-agreed on giving it a definition of "an ideology or set of policies aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human race".
Of course people aren't at all consistent with their thinking in this area. Laws against incest are eugenics under that definition, but nobody gets upset about those. This serves as a very effective motte-and-bailey; if someone is against abortion, they can say "abortion is a form of eugenics", pointing to people who choose to abort babies who have had genetic screening show some disability, and then you're stuck arguing "no, the definitions on Google, Wikipedia, and Merriam-Webster are all wrong", which is not likely to win people over.
This seems like a very challenging issue to fix, since people's language and thinking are so contorted in this area, but personally I think it's probably more effective to just stick with the agreed-upon definition and point out the contradictions in people's views on the matter. Eugenics is inherently fine, it's the killing people that's bad. Just like how playing Call of Duty is not inherently wrong, it's the using racial slurs in chat part that's bad.
The eugenics taboo is not something people arrive at through reason; it's either a genetic revulsion or one that's deeply ingrained in our culture and picked up unconsciously in adolescence. From the perspective of (cultural or biological) evolution it was rational to have the taboo back before birth control existed, but it no longer is. My guess would be that whatever process led to the formation of this taboo was not precise enough to exclude infertile incestuous relations. But when people are asked to justify their beliefs, they generally don't like saying "well I just find it icky", so they try to come up with some rationalization, and for incest the eugenics aspect is the most straightforward one.
Oh, and I think that emphasizing the personal choice aspect is going to be one of the most effective messaging strategies for left-wing people. It's difficult to chant "my body my choice" one day and then turn around and say "it's bad to let people cure their blindness if they want to" the next.
Your ultimate point is compelling but I don't think it's very helpful to talk about eugenics unless you are going to actually define it.
The problem with words like eugenics is that we mostly understand them as a bad thing with only a vague idea as to what they encompass. People therefore naturally turn to what historical eugenicists believed but the problem there is that they believed alot of things only some of which were morally objectionable but there is a tendency to use the word to engage in bad analogical reasoning (same way finding out that historical Nazis were deeply concerned about protecting nature shouldn't make us suspect that idea).
For instance, I think some people are going to define eugenics as any kind of desire to improve the genetic quality of the next generation. Sure, the way the historical eugenicists understood that in an extremely racist, classist and invasive form was awful but those moral objections don't at all apply to the view it's important to give everyone the genetic tools to make the lives of their children better,
I think this post presents things as rather neater and cleaner than they are in reality, and I don't think the way you're using your terms is the same as the way other people use those terms.
You're presenting an opposition between, on the one hand, a demand that people be normal, under which you include ableism and eugenics; and, on the other hand, attempts to expand human capability and morphological freedom, under which you include transhumanism.
And like, yeah, if that's all there is to it, then certainly the first one is bad and the second one is good. The problem is that not everything respects these boundaries you've drawn.
Like, we can talk about ways of increasing human capability -- enhancing humanity beyond the normal -- that don't necessarily fit in with a program of morphological freedom. As Sheila has already pointed out, an embryo necessarily can't have a say in the matter; its parents have to decide for it. Are taking steps to increase its capability good or bad? (You mention Dor Yeshorim above as an organization you approve of -- Dor Yeshorim isn't asking embryos what they want!) I'd certainly say good, but this doesn't fit in with either of your programs.
Speaking of Dor Yeshorim -- you say that "If you went up to a participant in Dor Yeshorim and called it eugenicist ... they'd punch you in the face and you’d deserve it." I mean, you can say that, but the thing is that people really *do* criticize Dor Yeshorim for being "eugenicist", and if you got in to an argument with one of them, how would you respond? Actually punching them in the face is unlikely to be helpful!
Ideally what you want of course is to get such a person to focus on the concrete situation rather than the words used to describe it. Unfortunately, that doesn't really scale (unless we can get "A Human's Guide to Words" taught in the public schools, or something). Your approach, I suppose, is to narrow the meaning of the term to mean only the bad stuff. That... *might* work? I'm pretty skeptical. You would at the least need to pair it with a new term (*not* including the word "eugenics", because for many people that word is an argument ender) to describe the part you want to promote, so you can say, "no, it's not that, it's this"; create a new concept for people to focus on, otherwise they'll still be thinking about it in terms of "eugenics" and that will color all discussion of it. The unfortunate reality is that lots of people just reason by association, and any attempt to alter human reproductive patterns to increase future people's capabilities is to them automatically evil. Anyway, this restricted use of "eugenics" is not how a lot of other people are using the term, so saying that this is what the word means is an attempt at making it mean that, not an assertion of current fact.
(The other approach, of course, as taken by Diana Fleischman and others, is to argue that actually, no, eugenics isn't inherently bad, it can include bad things like the old eugenics or it can include good things. We, uh, will see how that goes. Although, man, it really bothers me that she starts her essay on the subject saying "See, you ordinary person already support things that fall under 'eugenics'" with an example I *don't* support and *do* consider bad! Surely she could have picked a better example...?)
OK, so I've covered how you're using the word "eugenics" in what seems to be to be a nonstandard way. Now let's consider "ableism". You say that ableism is about disability, not impairment. (Can I take a moment to say just how terrible I think this terminology is? It's taking an ordinary word -- "disability" -- and redefining it to mean something else. Now "disability" no longer means its plain meaning, it instead means the social version of its plain meaning, and a new word has to be used for the old plain meaning. That is stupid and terrible! Let words have their existing plain meaning, coin a new word for your new thing that is the social version.) But from my experience it seems to me that simple statements that, yes, it is better to be more capable than less capable are often referred to as "ableist", regardless of whether the speaker had normality in mind or not.
Or like, what would you call it if someone said "When we make it to the future where people can enhance themselves, to not be at the Pareto frontier would be stupid and I'm going to make fun of anyone who holds themselves back?" That doesn't exactly fit into the morphological freedom program, but it's definitely recognizably transhumanist! Is it ableist? I don't think Torres is the only one who would say it is! Seems it doesn't cleanly fit either of your categories!
Turning the word "ableist" back on the anti-transhumanists is a nice trick, though. :P Unfortunately I don't think that will ever work with "eugenics"... (because in order to notice the similarity, that would still, as a first step, require getting people to focus on what's actually occurring rather than the words used and pre-formed associations, which is, y'know, the hard part! It only seems more likely to work with "ableism" because that's a more obscure term without the same level of preexisting assocation...)
I have to admit, every time you use "alieve" in an article I have a strong reaction of "that is Not a Real Word and it is Very Annoying that you use it with a straight face as if it were a Real Word."
I guess now I understand how people who don't like "cis" feel.
I think I agree with everything you said, but it skips over one problem: that most alterations you can make to a person are best made before they are born or when they're a kid. So we're in the position of asking ourselves what a hypothetical child would want, or more commonly whether an embryo with Downs is more or less worth gestating than an embryo without. There is no way to give that embryo agency. So we *do* have to ask if there are generally better ways of being than others. And our society has pretty strong opinions about which ways those are.
But you always have to make that kind of choice -- choosing not to enhance is no less making a permanent choice about that child's life it's just privleging what's normal.
And parents already do this all the time. Most horribly when a child (or fetus) has some kind of condition that can be treated now but not later. And we generally trust parents to make the right choices for their children and they generally do -- every choice about chemo or having surgery or even prenatal vitamins is a choice parents make for their child.
PS I did write a post about this myself, which basically concluded that if society weren't ableist, genetic engineering would be fine, but—obviously that hypothetical is planet-sized so it's not a terribly useful conclusion.
https://sheilajenne.com/2024/05/02/eugenics-in-the-star-trek-universe/
I do agree that Transhumanism is different from Eugenics. I don't agree with your implicit definition of Eugenics (which you seem to imply is bad by definition): Eugenics is breeding humans. Screening embryos for genetic disorders is eugenics. Dor Yeshorim is eugenics.
This seems like an unhelpful way to discuss this issue. A substantial component of the argument being criticized in this article is, essentially, that transhumanism involves improving humans' genes, which is eugenics, which is bad.* Thus its effect is based in large part on showing that the thing it's attacking fits into a rather broad definition of a word that most people associate with negative connotations. This is a sophistic trick commonly used in political rhetoric (cf. 'abortion is murder', 'taxation is theft', 'mass immigration is genocide', 'silence on [some issue] is violence', '[any of various Democratic policies] is socialism', &c.), & here, as elsewhere, it is unworthy of consideration in discussion between reasonable people. It would be better for rational thought to restrict the word that everyone agrees is bad to describing a category of unambiguously bad things (e.g. only use 'murder' to mean intentionally killing a real person outside of the few legal exceptions such as war or capital punishment, or 'genocide' to mean trying to exterminate a demographic group, or 'eugenics' to mean selective breeding of humans through large-scale coercion of their reproductive decisions), & to discuss the actual topic of discussion by evaluating its substance rather than by trying to attach derogatory labels to it. Continuing the discussion using the derogatory label as though its connotation didn't exist just helps its effect on people's judgment persist & thus sabotages your own argument. (See https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics , which I mostly agree with, for further discussion of this specific case.)
* Torres's claims that specific things about transhumanism are bad are addressed either at ideas which are, in fact, true (e.g., that the sort of general intelligence that IQ tests are meant to measure exists, or that it is substantially affected by genes), or at ideas which are not necessary parts of transhumanism & which many transhumanists strongly disagree with (e.g., that the differences in average intelligence between racial groups are caused by their genes, or that severely disabled babies should be killed); thus he fails to show anything bad about transhumanism in general, as opposed to certain specific proponents thereof. Moreover, parts of the criticism of specific people depend on taking thought experiments & distant hypotheticals out of context (e.g. "if you had to design a eugenics program..." or "moral bioenhancement should be mandatory" or "the main problem with the Holocaust was that there weren't enough Nazis") & so are unconvincing.
I find the abstract debate about genetic screening and eugenics rather misguided. Let me describe how it works as someone currently going through it, and see if it contribute to the discussion.
It should be noted that the most common way a person in Israel a person in Israel will get genetic test is not Dor Yesharim, it's the public health system, after you are already trying to have a baby and with no expectationat all you'll divorce if somethingbad will be discovered. Pretty much everyone are eligible for some genetic screening, with the specifics testing provided (or subsidied) depending on the person's specific origins. As far as I understand it, the original motivation was indeed to prevent Jewish diseases like tsacs, which are frighteningly common ans deadly. But as the health system is universal (all hail the national health law of 1994!) tests are also developed and provided to Arabs, which are often classified as genetic units by the village. That is, you might be at very high risk for serious diseases unless you marry outside your village, and if the do - the public health system will help you try multiple times until the embryo is not likely to express the diseases.
This is not seen in Israel as a case of "positive eugenics" or some nonsense like that. It is basically viewed as simple part of preventative medicine, and the choice if to stop the pregnancy is only the parent's, and often depend on their religious affiliation, though the doctors do provide medical advice regarding the severity of the diagnosis, sometimes recommending abortion. Those recommendations are not without problems, but the procedure, as far as I understand it, seem reasonable. As Judaism is relatively permissive regarding abortions (at least next to the crazy ideas Americans have) most who receive fatal diagnosis (like tsacs) indeed choose to end the pregnancy, with more grey areas depending on the couple's beliefs.
If this process sounds to you like eugenics, I guess it is the closest any country policy is to it, but I want to emphasize the motivations and practice are very very different, and that we don't call it that. We call it genetic screening, and are not about to change the name because of some stupid intellectual turf wars between transhumanist and wokedom.
Yeah, the vibes of the two things are pretty different. Eugenics is specifically about genetics, whereas I think of transhumanism as being more about artificial enhancement. Gene editing and biohacking are in there too of course, but they're not really the central example.
Historical eugenicists always concerned themselves with whose genes should be passed on in a population - "increasing the productivity of the best stock" and "repressing the productivity of the worst", in Galton's words. Dor Yeshorim, unless I am mistaken, makes absolutely no attempt to do that; they try to prevent alleles from combining in ways that causes diseases to be expressed. They do not discourage carriers from passing on their recessive copies with non-carriers.
I agree with the sentiment behind this post, but I think this approach is doomed to failure. If you Google the definition of eugenics, you get a much more expansive definition than just "what the Nazis were doing". People seem pretty well-agreed on giving it a definition of "an ideology or set of policies aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human race".
Of course people aren't at all consistent with their thinking in this area. Laws against incest are eugenics under that definition, but nobody gets upset about those. This serves as a very effective motte-and-bailey; if someone is against abortion, they can say "abortion is a form of eugenics", pointing to people who choose to abort babies who have had genetic screening show some disability, and then you're stuck arguing "no, the definitions on Google, Wikipedia, and Merriam-Webster are all wrong", which is not likely to win people over.
This seems like a very challenging issue to fix, since people's language and thinking are so contorted in this area, but personally I think it's probably more effective to just stick with the agreed-upon definition and point out the contradictions in people's views on the matter. Eugenics is inherently fine, it's the killing people that's bad. Just like how playing Call of Duty is not inherently wrong, it's the using racial slurs in chat part that's bad.
This rehabilitation of the word is already well-underway; see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_eugenics
Well, lots of people would support laws against *homosexual* incest as well, so it doesn't seem to be necessarily rooted in eugenics…
The eugenics taboo is not something people arrive at through reason; it's either a genetic revulsion or one that's deeply ingrained in our culture and picked up unconsciously in adolescence. From the perspective of (cultural or biological) evolution it was rational to have the taboo back before birth control existed, but it no longer is. My guess would be that whatever process led to the formation of this taboo was not precise enough to exclude infertile incestuous relations. But when people are asked to justify their beliefs, they generally don't like saying "well I just find it icky", so they try to come up with some rationalization, and for incest the eugenics aspect is the most straightforward one.
Oh, and I think that emphasizing the personal choice aspect is going to be one of the most effective messaging strategies for left-wing people. It's difficult to chant "my body my choice" one day and then turn around and say "it's bad to let people cure their blindness if they want to" the next.
Your ultimate point is compelling but I don't think it's very helpful to talk about eugenics unless you are going to actually define it.
The problem with words like eugenics is that we mostly understand them as a bad thing with only a vague idea as to what they encompass. People therefore naturally turn to what historical eugenicists believed but the problem there is that they believed alot of things only some of which were morally objectionable but there is a tendency to use the word to engage in bad analogical reasoning (same way finding out that historical Nazis were deeply concerned about protecting nature shouldn't make us suspect that idea).
For instance, I think some people are going to define eugenics as any kind of desire to improve the genetic quality of the next generation. Sure, the way the historical eugenicists understood that in an extremely racist, classist and invasive form was awful but those moral objections don't at all apply to the view it's important to give everyone the genetic tools to make the lives of their children better,
I think this post presents things as rather neater and cleaner than they are in reality, and I don't think the way you're using your terms is the same as the way other people use those terms.
You're presenting an opposition between, on the one hand, a demand that people be normal, under which you include ableism and eugenics; and, on the other hand, attempts to expand human capability and morphological freedom, under which you include transhumanism.
And like, yeah, if that's all there is to it, then certainly the first one is bad and the second one is good. The problem is that not everything respects these boundaries you've drawn.
Like, we can talk about ways of increasing human capability -- enhancing humanity beyond the normal -- that don't necessarily fit in with a program of morphological freedom. As Sheila has already pointed out, an embryo necessarily can't have a say in the matter; its parents have to decide for it. Are taking steps to increase its capability good or bad? (You mention Dor Yeshorim above as an organization you approve of -- Dor Yeshorim isn't asking embryos what they want!) I'd certainly say good, but this doesn't fit in with either of your programs.
Speaking of Dor Yeshorim -- you say that "If you went up to a participant in Dor Yeshorim and called it eugenicist ... they'd punch you in the face and you’d deserve it." I mean, you can say that, but the thing is that people really *do* criticize Dor Yeshorim for being "eugenicist", and if you got in to an argument with one of them, how would you respond? Actually punching them in the face is unlikely to be helpful!
Ideally what you want of course is to get such a person to focus on the concrete situation rather than the words used to describe it. Unfortunately, that doesn't really scale (unless we can get "A Human's Guide to Words" taught in the public schools, or something). Your approach, I suppose, is to narrow the meaning of the term to mean only the bad stuff. That... *might* work? I'm pretty skeptical. You would at the least need to pair it with a new term (*not* including the word "eugenics", because for many people that word is an argument ender) to describe the part you want to promote, so you can say, "no, it's not that, it's this"; create a new concept for people to focus on, otherwise they'll still be thinking about it in terms of "eugenics" and that will color all discussion of it. The unfortunate reality is that lots of people just reason by association, and any attempt to alter human reproductive patterns to increase future people's capabilities is to them automatically evil. Anyway, this restricted use of "eugenics" is not how a lot of other people are using the term, so saying that this is what the word means is an attempt at making it mean that, not an assertion of current fact.
(The other approach, of course, as taken by Diana Fleischman and others, is to argue that actually, no, eugenics isn't inherently bad, it can include bad things like the old eugenics or it can include good things. We, uh, will see how that goes. Although, man, it really bothers me that she starts her essay on the subject saying "See, you ordinary person already support things that fall under 'eugenics'" with an example I *don't* support and *do* consider bad! Surely she could have picked a better example...?)
OK, so I've covered how you're using the word "eugenics" in what seems to be to be a nonstandard way. Now let's consider "ableism". You say that ableism is about disability, not impairment. (Can I take a moment to say just how terrible I think this terminology is? It's taking an ordinary word -- "disability" -- and redefining it to mean something else. Now "disability" no longer means its plain meaning, it instead means the social version of its plain meaning, and a new word has to be used for the old plain meaning. That is stupid and terrible! Let words have their existing plain meaning, coin a new word for your new thing that is the social version.) But from my experience it seems to me that simple statements that, yes, it is better to be more capable than less capable are often referred to as "ableist", regardless of whether the speaker had normality in mind or not.
Or like, what would you call it if someone said "When we make it to the future where people can enhance themselves, to not be at the Pareto frontier would be stupid and I'm going to make fun of anyone who holds themselves back?" That doesn't exactly fit into the morphological freedom program, but it's definitely recognizably transhumanist! Is it ableist? I don't think Torres is the only one who would say it is! Seems it doesn't cleanly fit either of your categories!
Turning the word "ableist" back on the anti-transhumanists is a nice trick, though. :P Unfortunately I don't think that will ever work with "eugenics"... (because in order to notice the similarity, that would still, as a first step, require getting people to focus on what's actually occurring rather than the words used and pre-formed associations, which is, y'know, the hard part! It only seems more likely to work with "ableism" because that's a more obscure term without the same level of preexisting assocation...)
I have to admit, every time you use "alieve" in an article I have a strong reaction of "that is Not a Real Word and it is Very Annoying that you use it with a straight face as if it were a Real Word."
I guess now I understand how people who don't like "cis" feel.
Not gonna lie, I'm somewhat interested to see the Transhumanist response to the idea that we simply *Do not* have morphological freedom ethically.
I thought some blind people and a few sighted hobbyists do echolocate.
I have heard that too.