Parti PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICAL THEORY In these first five chapters, I attempt to establish the ground for the critical and metacritical essays to follow in ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern PracticeFrancis A. BeerPrudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. Ed. Robert Hariman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 337. $65.00, cloth."Would it be prudent?" The phrase echoes in memory, linking Dana Carvey from Saturday Night Live to the presidency of the first George Bush. Robert Hariman has been wrestling with prudence for over a decade, and he has now produced a powerful (...) volume that brings together not only his thoughts but also those of a number of other distinguished authors. The result is a book that will become a standard reference for those interested in prudence.The subtitle, Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice, and the title of the first chapter, "Theory without Modernity," give some idea of the subtexts that drive the book. This is a book about prudence, and more. It is about virtue in classical, modern, and postmodern settings. It is about the dynamic complexity of practice—decision, judgment, and action in public and private life.Hariman gives us a definition: "Prudence is a mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action" (5). That would be too easy. He also surrounds prudence with a penumbra of related words to broaden our understanding of the complex lattice of semantic meaning. Our legacy from the Greek and Roman lexicon includes words like phronesis and prudentia. Contemporary nouns involve cautiousness, circumspection, and care. Related adjectives are "careful, judicious, tactful, discerning, sensible, frugal, wise, sage, level-headed, balanced, moderate, politic, practical pragmatic, expedient" (vii). These synonyms, for Hariman, describe a narrow, modern form of prudence, part of the calculative tradition inherited from Aristotle, that ultimately leads to the saddle points of rational choice. They are, however, only a part of the story. Hariman aims to relieve their "stodginess" by recovering the performative tradition of prudence from Cicero. Prudence, from this perspective, is defined not just abstractly as a set of rules but more dynamically as a set of roles. Prudence includes character, and is performed by characters. Pericles in Athens is an iconic example of superb political leadership that blends the honor of the leader with the glory of the state. Prudence combines integrity of the self with respect for others. This is a broad, ambitious interpretation [End Page 176] of prudence. It recuperates not only a classical vision of prudence but also one of politics. It rearranges other virtues to revolve in a constellation around prudence. In this reconstituted form, prudence reemerges to shine as "a crucial element of political leadership," the central political virtue.The book is divided into three parts: "Conceptual Frameworks," "Rhetorical Structures," and "Provisional Networks." All three of the sections are identified in structural terms, which is interesting since Hariman's conception of prudence as a primary political virtue is very agent-centered. The structures, however, provide the settings in which the political observers and actors perform. The first section provides a sample of the rich literature that focuses on philosophical concepts of prudence in earlier times and places. It begins with a chapter by Robert W. Cape Jr. that discusses "Cicero and the Development of Political Practice in Rome." This chapter is critical to the book, since it lays a part of the foundation. It is the first substantive essay and it must also make the case for combining calculative and performative prudence. Cape gives us a fine exposition of prudentia in the Roman context. Interestingly, he suggests that "prudentia is a contraction of providentia, "'foresight.'" (37).The virtue of prudence was typically associated with age and experience. Imprudence, on the other hand, was associated with youth, recklessness, and impropriety (37). Prudence involved knowledge of practical matters, law, and custom as well as proper speech, including rhetoric, and behavior. Prepon mattered. Prudence for Cicero, however, was much more than simply knowing how things work: it was ultimately the extended performance of justice on the public stage. The next chapter, by Eugene Garver, entitled "After Virtù: Rhetoric, Prudence, and Moral Pluralism in Machiavelli," moves the story of prudence from the late classical to the early modern period. As the title indicates, Garver's concern is also with the relation of... (shrink)

Eugenics can be defined as the use of science applied to the qualitative and quantitative improvement of the human genome. The subject was initiated by Francis Galton with considerable support from Charles Darwin in the latter half of the 19th century. Its scope has increased enormously since the recent revolution in molecular genetics. Genetic files can be easily obtained for individuals either antenatally or at birth; somatic gene therapy has been introduced for some rare inborn errors of metabolism; and (...) gene manipulation of human germ-line cells will no doubt occur in the near future to generate organs for transplantation. The past history of eugenics has been appalling, with gross abuses in the USA between 1931 and 1945 when compulsory sterilization was practised; and in Germany between 1933 and 1945 when mass extermination and compulsory sterilization were performed. To prevent such abuses in the future statutory bodies, such as a genetics commission, should be established to provide guidance and rules of conduct for use of the new information and technologies as applied to the human genome. (shrink)

A prevalent narrative locates the discovery of the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean in the work of Francis Galton. It is claimed that after 1885, Galton came to explain the fact that offspring deviated less from the mean value of the population than their parents did as a population-level statistical phenomenon and not as the result of the processes of inheritance. Arguing against this claim, we show that Galton did not explain regression towards mediocrity statistically, and did (...) not give up on his ideas regarding an inheritance process that caused offspring to revert to the mean. While the common narrative focuses almost exclusively on Galton’s statistics, our arguments emphasize the anthropological and biological questions that Galton addressed. Galton used regression towards mediocrity to support the claim that some biological types were more stable than others and hence were resistant to evolutionary change. This view had implications concerning both natural selection and eugenics. The statistical explanation attributed to Galton appeared later, during the biometrician-mutationist debate in the early 1900s. It was in the context of this debate and specifically by the biometricians, that the development of the statistical explanation was originally attributed to Galton. (shrink)

The relationship of eugenics to science is intricate and many-layered, starting with Sir Francis Galton’s original definition of eugenics as “the science of improving stock”. Eugenics was originally conceived of not only as a science by many of its proponents, but as a new, meliorative science emerging from findings of a range of nascent sciences, including anthropology and criminology in the late 19th-century, and genetics and psychiatry in the early 20th-century. Although during the years between the two World Wars (...) many central claims made by eugenicists were critiqued by scientists in these disciplines, in more recent years forms of eugenics (e.g., liberal eugenics”) have been defended as an inevitable outcome of biotechnologies and respect for autonomous choice. Understanding the shifting and varied roles that science has played in eugenics requires an appreciation of the ways in which science and values are intertwined. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:EugenicsMary Carrington Coutts (bio) and Pat Milmoe McCarrick (bio)The word eugenics (from the Greek eugenes or well-born) was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, an Englishman and cousin of Charles Darwin, who applied Darwinian science to develop theories about heredity and good or noble birth (I, Kevles 1985, p. x).The entry under "eugenics" in the Encyclopedia of Bioethics notes that the term has had different meanings in different (...) eras: "a science that investigates methods to ameliorate the genetic composition of the human race; a program to foster such betterment; a social movement; and in its perverted form, a pseudo-scientific retreat for bigots and racists" (V, Ludmerer 1978, p. 457). Kevles, who places a stronger emphasis than Ludmerer on the degeneration of eugenics, says that by 1935 it "had become 'hopelessly perverted' into a pseudoscientific facade for 'advocates of race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally'" (I, Kevles 1985, p. 164).Phrases such as "survival of the fittest" and "struggle for existence" came into use at the end of the nineteenth century when eugenics societies were created throughout the world to popularize genetic science. "Negative eugenics" utilized marriage restriction, sterilization, or custodial commitment of those thought to have unwanted characteristics. "Positive eugenics" tried to encourage the population perceived as "superior" to have more offspring (V, Ludmerer 1978, p. 459).In the United States, after World War I, new information, such as the importance of environmental influences and the more complex concept of multi-gene effects in inheritance, diminished the scientific justification for eugenics, but this knowledge did not decrease the pressure for legislation, judicial action, or immigration controls. The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 favored immigration from northern Europe and greatly restricted the entry of persons from other areas referred to as "biologically inferior." Between 1907 and 1937, 32 [End Page 163] states required sterilization of various citizens viewed as undesirable: the mentally ill or handicapped; those convicted of sexual, drug, or alcohol crimes; and others viewed as "degenerate" (V, Larson 1991).In Germany, interest in eugenics flourished after the turn of the century when Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded the Archives of Race-Theory and Social Biology in 1904 and the German Society of Racial Hygiene in 1905. The German term Rassenhygiene or race hygiene encompassed more than the word "eugenics;" it included all attempts to improve hereditary qualities as well as measures directed at population increase (III, Weiss 1987). By the 1920s, various German textbooks incorporated ideas of heredity and racial hygiene, and German professors were participating in the international eugenics movement. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927; by 1933 a sterilization law, the Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, which originally was entitled "Eugenics in the Service of Public Welfare," indicated compulsory sterilization "for the prevention of progeny with hereditary defects" in cases of "congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy... and severe alcoholism." (III, Müller-Hill 1988, p. 10).The co-mingling of science, politics, and Weltanschauung (ideological or religious world view) caused the darkest period for eugenics when Nazi Germans embarked on their "final solution" to the Jewish "problem", or the Holocaust. The Nazi racial-hygiene program began with involuntary sterilizations and ended with genocide. Beginning with the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, 350,000 schizophrenic and other mentally ill persons were involuntarily sterilized, and marriage or sexual contact between Jews and other Germans was banned. Several hundred black children and 30,000 German Gypsies were sterilized. By 1945, when the allies liberated those remaining in Nazi concentration camps, six million Jews, 750,000 Gypsies, and 70,000 German psychiatric patients had been killed by the Nazis (III, Müller-Hill 1992, p. 47). As a result of the German experience, eugenic thought dropped to its nadir, and to the present day, the term "eugenics" invokes a sense of horror in some people.Great Britain, the United States, and Germany were the countries most involved with eugenic science in the first half of this century, but interest was present in Europe and other... (shrink)

With the recent developments in the Human Genome Mapping Project and the new technologies that are developing from it there is a renewal of concern about eugenic applications. Francis Galton (b1822, d1911), who developed the subject of eugenics, suggested that the ancient Greeks had contributed very little to social theories of eugenics. In fact the Greeks had a profound interest in methods of supplying their city states with the finest possible progeny. This paper therefore reviews the works of Plato (...) (The Republic and Politics) and Aristotle (The Politics and The Athenian Constitution) which have a direct bearing on eugenic techniques and relates them to methods used in the present century. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary ‘taints’ were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the ‘father’ of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin and other naturalists supported a blending view of inheritance whereby offspring possess a middling mix of their parents' traits. Many of these naturalists also argued that individuals pass at least some of their acquired characteristics to their descendants. Darwin proposed that acquired characteristics and other environmentally induced changes in a parent's hereditary material account in large part for the inheritable variations that drove evolution. Inspired by the evolutionary theories of his first cousin, Darwin, (...) class='Hi'>Francis Galton developed hereditarian notions that helped to lay the foundation for both genetics and eugenics. Eugenics was endorsed by evolutionary geneticists such as August Weismann, Karl Pearson, W. F. R. Weldon, William Bateson, and Hugo de Vries, which, as a result, gave it enormous scientific credibility in America and Europe. This chapter explores the role of biology in the emergence of the eugenics movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary 'taints' were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the 'father' of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

Uma das características do movimento eugênico foi a formação de uma estrutura institucionalizada. Tal característica inicia-se com Francis Galton, mas é nos Estados Unidos que adquire a formatação institucional que servirá de modelo para as várias iniciativas eugênicas em outras partes do mundo. Neste texto, pretendemos analisar algumas condições que contribuíram para a eugenia ser apresentada como uma proposta científica de controle social de traços ou características consideradas geneticamente determinadas. One of the characteristics of the eugenic movement was the (...) formation of an institutionalized structure. This was initiated with Francis Galton, but it is in the United States that eugenics acquires institutional formatting that would serve as model for various eugenics initiatives in other parts of the world. In this text we intend to analyze some of the conditions that contributed for eugenics to be presented as a scientific proposal of social control of traces or characteristics considered genetically determined. (shrink)

Data increasingly drive our lives. Often presented as a new trajectory, the deep immersion of our lives in data has a history that is well over a century old. By revisiting the work of early pioneers of what would today be called data science, we can bring into view both assumptions that fund our data-driven moment as well as alternative relations to data. I here excavate insights by contrasting a seemingly unlikely pair of early data technologists, Francis Galton and (...) W.E.B. Du Bois. Galton, well known for his contributions to eugenics, was first and foremost a tinkering technician of measure. There are numerous domains of science over which Galtonian conceptions retain considerable influence, presumably without his pride in racial inequality. A more viable, because more egalitarian, alternative for the present can be found in the early data work of Du Bois. (shrink)

Thus declares Francis Hutcheson, expressing a view widespread during the Enlightenment, and throughout the history of philosophy. According to this tradition, we are by nature moral, and ourS concern for good and evil is as natural to us as our capacity to feel pleasure and pain. The link between morality and human nature has been a common theme since ancient times, and, with the rise of modern empirical moral psychology, it remains equally popular today. Evolutionary ethicists, ethologists, developmental psychologists, (...) social neuroscientists, and even some cultural anthropologists tend to agree that morality is part of the bioprogram (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Ruse, 1991; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Turiel, 2002). Recently, researchers have begun to look for moral modules in the brain, and they have been increasingly tempted to speculate about the moral acquisition device, and innate faculty for norm acquisition akin to celebrated language acquisition device, promulgated by Chomsky (Dwyer, 1999; Mikhail, 2000; Hauser, this volume). All this talk of modules and mechanism may make some shudder, especially if they recall that eugenics emerged out of an effort to find the biological sources of evil. Yet the tendency to postulate an innate moral faculty is almost irresistible. For one thing, it makes us appear nobler as a species, and for another, it offers an explanation of the fact that people in every corner of the globe seem to have moral rules. Moral nativism is, in this respect, an optimistic doctrine—one that makes our great big world seem comfortingly smaller. I want to combat this alluring idea. I do not deny that morality is ecumenical, but I think it is not innate—at least that the current state of evidence is unpersuasive. Morality, like all human capacities, depends on having particular biological predispositions, but none of these, I submit, deserves to be called a moral faculty. Morality is a byproduct—accidental or invented—of faculties that evolved for other purposes.. (shrink)

Francis Galton coined the word eugenics in the late nineteenth century in England to characterize the “noble heritage” and the “well-born.” Its statistical approach leads to biometry as the quantitative study of populations. As an organized movement, its main purpose was to apply the available knowledge on inheritance in order to shape the characters of the future generations. Since then, eugenistic studies mingled science with the social values of the ruling classes, distorting scientific practice. The early twentieth century gave (...) rise to human genetics with strong eugenistic roots, assuming the role to prevent the “social degeneration” in modern industrial societies. This negative eugenistic movement developed into mandatory sterilization laws in several European countries and in the United States, and has its most dramatic achievement in the racial cleaning program of National Socialist Germany. (shrink)

Resumen Hace 78 años, en “Un Mundo Feliz”, el escritor Aldous Huxley, en un prodigioso tono satírico, se anticipó con asombrosa precisión a los grandes temas de la agenda científica y política del Siglo XXI: la reproducción controlada, el choque de civilizaciones y la clonación humana, entre otros. Hace unos días, a mediados de mayo de 2010, el J. Craig Venter Institute anunció que había producido la primera célula sin historia genética creada en un laboratorio a partir de un genoma (...) sintetizado químicamente. Hoy, describiendo el estado “posthumano” de la historia, Francis Fukuyama afirma: “Huxley tenía razón”. Palabras clave: bioética; ingeniería genética; democracia; totalitarismo; biotécnica; eugenesia ;utopías; distopias. Huxley’s Prophecy and the Biotech Century: Post-human society is reaching usSeventy-eight years ago, in “A Happy World”, the writer Aldous Huxley, in a prodigious satiric tone, anticipated with astonishing accurateness the big topics of the XXI Century’s scientific and political agenda: controlled reproduction, civilization clash and human cloning, among others. Some days ago, in mid-May 2010, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that it had produced the first genetic history free cell created in a laboratory from a chemically synthesized genome. Today, in describing the “post-human” state of history, Francis Fukuyama asserts: “Huxley was right”. Keywords: Bioethics;Genetic Engineering; Democracy; Totalitarianism; Biotechnology;Eugenics ; Utopias; Dystopias. (shrink)

This short paper, written for a wide audience, introduces "science and values" topics as they have arisen in the context of eugenics. The paper especially focuses on the context of 20th century eugenics in western Canada, where eugenic legislation in two provinces was not repealed until the 1970s and thousands of people were sterilized without their consent. A framework for understanding science-value relationships within this context is discussed, and so too is recent relevant work in philosophy of science.