Eugenics and Libertarianism

Since the full scope of Nazi crimes was revealed, eugenics has fallen deeply out of fashion. Yet if the term has become taboo, some of the practices associated with it have not. Today we are witnessing the emergence of what could be called libertarian eugenics.

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As David Friedman — Milton Friedman’s son and a leading libertarian theorist — once observed, the dream of the “designer kid” runs deep in libertarian thought, dating back to the science fiction of Robert Heinlein. (Quinn Slobodian, “The irresistible rise of libertarian eugenics,” Financial Times)

Libertarian Eugenics

As it happens I did not observe that the dream of the “designer kid” runs deep in libertarian thought; the reference is to a passage in my Future Imperfect, a book about future technology not libertarian thought:

A little further into the future are technologies to give us control over our children’s genetic heritage. My favorite is the libertarian eugenics sketched decades ago by science fiction author Robert Heinlein — technologies that permit each couple to choose, from among the children they might have, which ones they do have, selecting the egg that does not carry the mother’s tendency to nearsightedness to combine with the sperm that does not carry the father’s heritage of a bad heart.

I referred to Heinlein’s fictional technology as libertarian because, unlike forms of eugenics imposed on some people by others, it was consistent with libertarian principles. Slobodian’s article describes forms of eugenics in the modern world that are in the same sense libertarian, decisions by parents related to the genes of their own offspring. The article manages to imply that there is something wrong with them without ever saying what.

My conclusion from correspondence with Slobodian — I emailed him to complain about his misrepresentation of what I had written — is that he is not sure he is opposed to libertarian eugenics in my sense, only to policies, such as immigration rules favoring higher IQ populations, that could be seen as eugenic but that he opposes on other grounds. I suspect, from the title and tone of the article, that that was not the message his editor wanted.

Two versions of libertarian eugenics in my sense are also discussed in Matt Ridley’s very interesting book Genome. One is represented by the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Disease, an organization that uses blood tests of school children to identify the carriers of genes for Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis.

When matchmakers are later considering a marriage between two young people, they can call a hotline and quote the anonymous numbers they were each assigned at the testing. If the are both carriers of the same mutation … the committee advises against the marriage. (Genome)

The other is the increasingly common practice of parents using amniocentesis to identify embryos carrying the extra chromosome that leads to Downs syndrome and aborting them. A more recent version in the direction of Heinlein’s proposal fertilizes multiple eggs in vitro, lets them develop to the point where a cell can be removed for genetic analysis, and implants the one considered genetically best.¹

Libertarians and Coercive Eugenics

Genome also contains a brief history of the eugenics movement. Compulsory eugenics, in the form of sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and similar schemes, is sometimes blamed on Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism, hence on laissez-faire beliefs, hence on libertarianism. Judging by Ridley’s account, that is almost precisely backwards. Spencer was concerned about human eugenics but, as a believer in laissez-faire, he did not propose using government to improve them.

The idea of eugenics originated with Galton, who proposed positive eugenics, policies to encourage the reproduction of the able. The idea of negative eugenics, preventing the reproduction of the unfit, was taken up by the British left, with supporters including Shaw, Wells, Keynes, Laski and the Webbs, and spread across the political spectrum; Winston Churchill was one of many enthusiastic supporters. The result was an attempt, in 1912, to enact compulsory eugenics into law.

It was successfully opposed by Josiah Wedgewood, whom Ridley describes as a radical libertarian. His central argument was not that it was bad science but that it was a striking violation of individual liberty. He made that argument sufficiently persuasive to force the government to withdraw the bill. Another opponent was G.K. Chesterton, best known today as a Catholic apologist and the author of some early mysteries. Chesterton was another radical libertarian, although a somewhat odd one, to whom I devoted a chapter in the second edition of my Machinery of Freedom.

In addition to libertarian politicians such as Wedgewood compulsory eugenics had another important opponent: The Catholic church. Compulsory sterilization was implemented in a number of countries, including the U.S. and Sweden, and almost implemented in Britain. It was not implemented in countries where the Catholic church was powerful. In that case, at least, the Church’s opposition to the latest findings of modern science put it where it belonged, on the side of the angels.

There was a second push for compulsory eugenics in the early 1930’s, successful in some European countries but not in Britain. This time the failure was at least in part due to intellectual changes associated primarily with the left, the shift from belief in genetic determination of human beings to belief in social determination.

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1. It may occur to some readers that analyzing the genetics of egg or sperm would damage it. Heinlein’s solution takes advantage of the fact that each germ cell contains only half the full set of genes: Destructively analyze a random cell to get the full set, repeat with the body thrown off that contains the half not in the sperm, and subtract (slightly more complicated for the egg). If doable it would be a much more powerful technology than we now have both because sperm, unlike eggs, are readily available in quantity and because separately selecting on m eggs and n sperm lets you choose among mn combinations.