Institutions , Beliefs and Ethics : Eugenics as a Case Study

T article uses an examination of the most troubling strand of the eugenics movements—coercive negative eugenics—to challenge the way many philosophers conceive of ethics. It is commonly assumed that to prepare ourselves for the difficult choices thrust upon us by advances in genomic science we must understand what went wrong in eugenics. The term “eugenics” encompasses a diversity of different social movements, patterns of thinking and policies. Historians of eugenics distinguish among racial versus nonracial, conservative versus progressive, coercive versus voluntary and positive versus negative eugenics. While most now condemn eugenics, it is not at all clear that all forms of eugenics involved moral error. There is a broad consensus, however, that coercive negative eugenics—which included forcible sterilization of those deemed to have undesirable genes, and in the case of Nazi racial hygiene, the killing of persons to prevent the propagation of their genes—was deeply wrong. In addition, there is considerable consensus on what was wrong with coercive negative eugenics: the chief failing of those who advocated coercive negative eugenics was that they abandoned rights-based morality in favor of consequentialism. The practical implication is that to guard ourselves against a repetition of eugenic evils, we should focus on the rights of individuals. In slogan form, the take-home message is thought to be: “More Kant, less Bentham!” I argue that this diagnosis of what went wrong in coercive negative eugenics is flawed and that understanding its defects exposes an equally serious shortcoming in the conventional view of ethics. If ethics is to shed light on how we ought to live, it must adopt a richer conceptual framework and a more ambitious methodology. Philosophical ethics as it is commonly understood must be transformed to include a sharper focus on the ethics of believing and, in particular, upon what I have elsewhere called social moral epistemology: a systematic critical investigation of the role of social practices and institutions in