We are beings endowed with “personal capacities”—the capacity for reason, for a concept of self, perhaps more. Among ontologically salient views about what else we are, I focus on the “Big Three.” According to animalism, we are animals that have psychological properties only contingently. According to psychologistic materialism, we are material beings; according to substance dualism, we are either immaterial beings or composites of immaterial and material ones; but according to both psychologistic materialism and substance dualism, we essentially have some (...) psychological properties. I argue that—contrary to what has been argued and is natural to think—none of the Big Three yields different assignments of moral status to early fetuses from any of the others, and consequently the moral status of early abortion doesn’t depend on which (if any) of these views of personal ontology is correct. (shrink)

Exploration of immune systems in prokaryotes, such as restriction‐modification or CRISPR‐Cas, shows that both innate and adaptive systems possess programmed cell death (PCD) potential. The key outstanding question is how the immune systems sense and “predict” infection outcomes to “decide” whether to fight the pathogen or induce PCD. There is a striking parallel between this life‐or‐death decision faced by the cell and the decision by temperate viruses to protect or kill their hosts, epitomized by the lysis‐lysogeny switch of bacteriophage Lambda. (...) Immune systems and temperate phages sense the same molecular inputs, primarily, DNA damage, that determine whether the cell lives or dies. Because temperate (pro)phages are themselves components of prokaryotic genomes, their shared “interests” with the hosts result in coregulation of the lysis‐lysogeny switch and immune systems that jointly provide the cell with the decision machinery to probe and predict infection outcomes, answering the life‐or‐death question. (shrink)

The proliferation of prenatal genetic testing likely to follow from advances in genetic science invites reconsideration of the moral status of abortion. In this article I examine arguments surrounding the moral status of the fetus. I conclude that secular philosophy should ultimately admit that the moral status of the fetus is uncertain, and that this uncertainty itself makes abortion morally problematic. While this does not imply that abortion is always morally wrong or that it should be legally prohibited, it does (...) recommend a presumption in favor of preserving fetal life except in special circumstances. A relevant worry is that the rise of eugenic abortion gives new force to slippery slope arguments that we will be led down a path to a situation where more fetuses are terminated for relatively trivial reasons and that this will promote other bad social consequences. This might justify legislative discouragement of certain genetic interventions. (shrink)

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on (...) through the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons. (shrink)

Savulescu J. Is current practice around late termination of pregnancy eugenic and discriminatory? Maternal interests and abortion. J Med Ethics 2001;27:165–71. Lachlan de Crespigny contributed in a major way to the conceptualisation, design, administration of surveys, ….

The attitudes of Australian practitioners working in clinical genetics and obstetrical ultrasound were surveyed on whether termination of pregnancy (TOP) should be available for conditions ranging from mild to severe fetal abnormality and for non-medical reasons.These were compared for terminations at 13 weeks and 24 weeks. It was found that some practitioners would not facilitate TOP at 24 weeks even for lethal or major abnormalities, fewer practitioners support TOP at 24 weeks compared with 13 weeks for any condition, and the (...) difference in attitudes to TOP between 13 weeks and 24 weeks is most marked for pregnancies which are normal or involve a mild disorder. It is argued that a fetal abnormality criterion for late TOP is inconsistently applied, discriminatory and eugenic. Four possible moral justifications for current practice are examined, each of which would require significant changes to current practice. I argue in favour of a maternal interests criterion for any TOP. (shrink)

In the intersection between eugenics past and present, disability has never been far beneath the surface. Perceived and ascribed disabilities of body and mind were one of the core sets of eugenics traits that provided the basis for institutionalized and sterilization on eugenic grounds for the first 75 years of the 20th-century. Since that time, the eugenic preoccupation with the character of future generations has seeped into what have become everyday practices in the realm of reproductive choice. As (...) Marsha Saxton (2000) and Adrienne Asch (2000, 2003) have forcefully argued, the use of prenatal screening technologies to facilitate the selective abortion of fetuses with features that signify disabling traits—the paradigm here being trisomy 21 in a fetus indicating Down Syndrome in the child—express a negative view of such disabilities sufficient to warrant terminating an otherwise wanted pregnancy. The eliminative structure of what Rosemary Garland Thompson (2012) has called eugenic logic persists in contemporary practices governing reproductive choice, social inclusion, and democratic participation and their relationship to disability. The tie between eugenics and contemporary disability studies suggests that eugenics and reflection on its history can also play a more positive role in disability politics. After focusing on eugenics in the first half of the paper, we will shift in the second half of the paper to eugenic resonances in contemporary thought and practice, concluding with some thoughts about ongoing practices of silencing and the very idea of eradicating disability. (shrink)

ArgumentEugenics and race played significant roles in Ukrainian interwar nationalism, yet remain largely unstudied. The Ukrainian nationalists’ understanding of the racial makeup of their imagined community was contradictory as they struggled to reconcile their desire for racial “purity” with the realities of significant variations between the populations inhabiting the enormous territories which they sought to include in their intended state project. The “turn to the right” over the 1930s placed an increased onus on race, and eugenics came to occupy an (...) increasingly prominent place in Ukrainian radical nationalism from around 1936. In 1941, the leading Ukrainian far-right organization, the OUN had developed a project for eugenic engineering, for their aborted state, declared in L’viv on June 30, 1941. Racial conceptualizations of the Ukrainian community figured prominently well into the Cold War era, gaining a new actuality and meaning in an émigré community dispersed across several countries. (shrink)

The ArgumentLittle has been written about religion vis à vis eugenics and, even less on Roman Catholicism and eugenics. A 1930 papal encyclical,Casti connubii, is usually held by historians to have been the official condemnatory view of the Catholic Church on eugenics, and the document is further supposed to have induced the only organized opposition to eugenic legislative efforts in several countries (especially France). In fact, the encyclical was not directly about eugenics but a general statement of the Catholic (...) doctrine on marriage.This article attempts to clarify the issue of a Catholic position on eugenics by re-examining the encyclical itself as well as its contemporaneous reception in Germany and France, where there was a strong Catholic presence.Casti connubiiintroduced a change in the prescribed hierarchy of the aims of marriage when, for the first time, relations between spouses took precedence over procreation. While condemning the means (abortion, sterilization, etc.), the encyclical did not condemn positive eugenics. In the broader context of the history of eugenics, the reception of the encyclical emphasizes the family as the third entity between the individual and society. Eugenics, as a “religious Utopia” of modernity, developed a hegemonic discourse over the family realm. As such it entered into competition with more traditional religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church. (shrink)

The ArgumentPressures to lower health-care costs remain an important stimulus to eugenic approaches. Prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion of affected fetuses has replaced sterilization as the major eugenic technique. Voluntary acceptance has replaced coercion, but subtle pressures undermine personal autonomy. The failure of the old eugenics to accurately predict who will have affected offspring virtually disappears when prenatal diagnosis is used to predict Mendelian disorders. However, when prenatal diagnosis is used to detect inherited susceptibilities to adult-onset, common, complex (...) disorders, considerable uncertainty is inherent in the prediction. Intolerance and the resurgence of genetic determinism are current pressures for a eugenic approach. The increasing use of carrier screening and of prenatal diagnosis could itself generate intolerance for those who refuse the procedures. Genetic determinism deflects society from social action that would reduce the burden of disease far more than even the maximum use of eugenics. (shrink)

John Harris criticises the European Parliament’s ‘waft in the direction of human rights and human dignity’ and rejects its suggestion that ‘human cloning violates the principle of equality since “it permits a eugenic and racist selection of the human race”’. He argues that, by parity of reasoning, so too do ‘pre-natal and pre-implantation screening, not to mention egg donation, sperm donation, surrogacy, abortion and human preference in choice of partner’. Conflating the techniques mentioned (ie, human cloning, egg donation, etc) (...) with human preference in choice of a partner, he holds that reproductive liberty must be the operative principle in determining what ought to be prohibited by law in the realm of human reproduction. This article challenges his two problematic assumptions. (shrink)

The ArgumentWhat are the aims of genetic services? Do any of these aims deserve to be labeled “eugenics”? Answers to these strenuously debated questions depend not just on the facts about genetic testing and screening but also on what is understood by “eugenics,” a term with multiple and contested meanings. This paper explores the impact of efforts to label genetic services “eugenics” and argues that attempts to protect against the charge have seriously distorted discussion about their purpose. Following Ruth Chadwick, (...) I argue that the existence of genetic services presupposes that genetic disease is undesirable and that means should be offered to reduce it. I further argue that the economic cost of such disease is one reason why governments and health care providers deem such services worthwhile. The important question is not whether such cost considerations constitute “eugenics,” but whether they foster practices that are undesirable and, if so, what to do about them. The wielding of the term “eugenics” as a weapon in a war over the expansion of genetic services, conjoined with efforts to dissociate such services from the abortion controversy, has produced a rhetoric about the aims of these services that is increasingly divorced from reality. Candor about these aims is a sine qua non of any useful debate over the legitimacy of the methods used to advance them. (shrink)

Currently, abortion can be lawfully performed in China at any gestational stage for a wide range of social and medical reasons. I critically explore the Chinese regulatory model of abortion in order to examine its practical effects on women. Although I focus on the post-Maoist abortion law, I also analyse the imperial Confucianism-dominated regulation and the Maoist ban on abortion in order to scrutinise the emergence of the notion of ‘glorious motherhood’. By examining how ‘glorious motherhood’ is constructed and reinforced (...) in the Chinese family planning context, I argue that the post-Maoist government intentionally made abortion ‘law in the books’ unrestrictive in order to impose its control over female fertility. As a result of this, women are persuaded and even forced to lead a ‘glorious’ maternal life, which means sacrificing themselves for the purpose of achieving the state’s Malthusian and eugenic demographic goals. Furthermore, I argue that, in addition to exacerbating gender oppression, abortion law’s embrace of the idea of ‘glorious motherhood’ also produces ‘group oppression’ of unmarried women and working-class women. (shrink)

In the context of abortion stigma, most abortion stories remain untold. The stories we do tell of abortion are often told to morally recuperate the status of the woman who has an abortion through a recourse to tragedy. Tragedy frames experiences where every choice produces some suffering, so decisions are geared toward maintaining individual integrity rather than adherence to absolute moral truths. This article argues that one dominant tragic abortion narrative, that of the disabled fetus, works to recuperate the moral (...) status of “fit” mothers while actively constructing disabled lives as unlivable and undesirable. The option to stigmatize disability in recuperating the moral status of the woman who has an abortion relies on eugenic logics that also construct a variety of women as illegitimate reproductive subjects. The article analyzes narratives of Sherri Finkbine's 1962 abortion in relation to contemporary narratives of late‐term abortions involving nonviable fetuses to expose how investment in medical judgments of good births enables particular women to make use of tragic narratives to maintain their status as moral mothers without disturbing broader abortion stigma or eugenic logics. (shrink)

ArgumentThis study contributes to the discussion on the development of eugenics in Central-Eastern Europe by tracing the way that eugenic ideas entered into medical decision-making in Hungary. Through a case study that reviews the professional argumentation of the gynecological management of tuberculosis pregnancies, this paper shows that the subordination of individual reproductive rights to state interests was influenced by the ideas of eugenics, which had begun to enter into the professional public health discourse. A eugenically informed morality was envisioned, (...) to guide decision-making in the interest of the Hungarian “race.” This biopolitically important morality can be viewed as an early influence on the formulation of biological citizenship. Leading figures were divided on how to ensure such morality: some scholars argued that education is the key, others thought that the state, and state actors, should act radically in the interest of the population and decide on behalf of the individual. Radical methods, such as the termination of pregnancies and sterilization of women, were among the practices of gynecologists. Although abortion and sterilization were not widespread and never became official therapeutic solutions for tuberculosis pregnancies, they were nonetheless part of a discourse that preceded the eugenic institutions of the interwar years. (shrink)

The Japanese disability movement in the 1970s posed an important question about our inner eugenic thought. Their arguments should be one of the focuses of attention for bioethics and philosophy of life in the 21st century. Their philosophy is comparable with DPI’s declaration, “The Right to Live and be Different,” published in 2000. They thought that technology of selective abortion was dangerous because it systematically deprives us of a sense of security (=the fundamental sense of security) that our existence (...) is being accepted unconditionally. They were considered to be seeking “life studies,” which has broader and deeper meanings than contemporary bioethics. (shrink)

Eugenic thinking divides people into groups according to real or perceived genetic traits, identifies some groups as unwanted, and then promotes the elimination of the unwanted groups. Some American medical professionals are pursuing a eugenic agenda that pressures and misleads parents to abort unborn children with Down syndrome. These counselors have a strong, unwar­ranted bias that influences parents’ decisions significantly. The use of prenatal genetic testing and in vitro fertilization increases the number of deaths of unborn children with (...) Down syndrome. The widespread practice of identifying and aborting children with Down syndrome is properly called eugenics. (shrink)

Suppose we accept prenatal diagnosis and the selective abortion of fetuses that test positive for severe genetic disorders to be both morally and socially acceptable. Should we consider prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion (or other genetic interventions such as preimplantation diagnosis, genetic therapy, cloning, etc.) for nontherapeutic purposes to be acceptable as well? On the one hand, the social aims to promote liberty in general, and reproductive liberty in particular, provide reason for thinking that individuals should be free to make (...) their own decisions about whether or not to employ whatever genetic services might be developed and offered by private enterprise. On the other hand, interventions aimed at enhancement would (in many cases) presumably only be available to those who are financially fortunate. A worry is that unequal access to enhancements that provide competitive advantages to offspring will further and more permanently increase existing unjust disparities between the haves and have-nots. The aim to promote liberty might thus conflict with the social aim of equality. An additional worry is that the development and provision of nontherapeutic genetic interventions would drain limited medical resources away from therapeutic purposes which would ultimately be more fruitful. The promotion of liberty might also thus conflict with the aim to promote aggregate utility. Assuming there is no reason to think that the promotion of liberty should be given absolute priority over both equality and aggregate utility, we need to think more about how to make trade-offs between these three legitimate social aims. (shrink)

In the 1930s, the two primary goals of the Turkish state were to establish national unity and to modernize the country. The achievement of these goals was linked to the transformation of the human body in line with modern, rational and scientific values. The body politics of the new regime aspired to discipline society in order to create modern, healthy and dutiful citizens by regulating the human body in many spheres of life, including clothing, aesthetics, health, reproduction, childcare and housekeeping. (...) Eugenics emerged as a part of the state’s hygienic and ethical regulation of the human body. The state abolished abortion, mandated pre-marital examinations of couples, established childcare institutions, educated mothers, and aimed to prevent epidemics and alcoholism. The Turkish eugenicists were a small group of medical doctors who were influential in shaping these public policies. In accordance with the general Republican discourse, the eugenicists were critical of both traditional society and the Ottoman regime. The eugenicists founded their criticism on the old regime’s ignorance of modern hygienic and reproductive practices. Although Turkish eugenic discourse was influenced by Western eugenics literature, it was also shaped by the particular concerns of the Kemalist regime such as natalism, childcare and social hygiene policies. The collectivist discourse of the Kemalist regime was so dominant that, in contrast to their European and American counterparts, the Turkish eugenicists were not at all concerned with ethnic and class diversity within society. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PID) is often seen as an improvement upon prenatal testing. I argue that PID may exacerbate the eugenic features of prenatal testing and make possible an expanded form of free-market eugenics. The current practice of prenatal testing is eugenic in that its aim is to reduce the numbers of people with genetic disorders. Due to social pressures and eugenic attitudes held by clinical geneticists in most countries, it results in eugenic outcomes even though (...) no state coercion is involved. I argue that technological advances may soon make PID widely accessible. Because abortion is not involved, and multiple embryos are available, PID is radically more effective as a tool of genetic selection. It will also make possible selection on the basis of non-pathological characteristics, leading, potentially, to a full-blown free-market eugenics. For these reasons, I argue that PID should be strictly regulated. (shrink)

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life II: (...) Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

As a result of the publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP), and an increasing number of private enterprises, a new form of eugenic theory and practice has emerged, differing from previous manifestations. Genetic testing has become a consumer service that may now be purchased at greatly reduced cost. While the old eugenics was pseudoscientific, the new eugenics is firmly based on DNA research. While the old eugenics focused on societal measures against the individual, the new eugenics emphasizes the family (...) as a control agent. Eugenics is now voluntary, with the promise of abortion for those afraid of producing genetically damaged children. The ethical concepts of beneficence, avoidance of maleficence, autonomy, and equity are discussed in terms of aspects of the HGP. One major issue is the need for an ethical system available to health consumers that will empower them and assist in their biogenic decisions. “The concentration on the genes implicated in cancer is only a special case of a general genomania (emphasis added) that surfaces in ... the weekly announcements in The New York Times of the location of yet another gene for another disease. The revealing rhetoric of this publicity is always the same; only the blanks need to be filled in: ‘It was announced today by scientists at [Harvard, Vanderbilt, Stanford] Medical School that a gene responsible for [some, many, a common form of] [schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, arteriosclerosis, prostate cancer] has been located and its DNA sequence determined. This exciting research, say scientists, is the first step in what may eventually turn out to be a possible cure for this disease.’”. (shrink)

The destruction of an embryo must be justified in law. This is to prevent frivolous wastage and to show the respect afforded by the Warnock Report. For example, embryonic destruction during pregnancy is underpinned by the Abortion Act 1967, and embryonic destruction during fertility treatment is regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. However, following the appeal decision in R v Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority [2005] 2 A.C. 561, embryos can now be created for a bone marrow (...) tissue match to a sick sibling under the Human Fertility and Embryology Act 1990 according to the subjective desires of the mother. This opens the door to the first example of embryonic destruction on unique social-eugenic grounds with no clear lawful justification. It is argued that these embryos should be afforded a unique destruction provision under an amended version of section 1 of the Abortion Act 1967 in light of their ‘social-eugenic’ nature. This would protect the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority from accusations of undercover eugenic practices and reinstate the respect shown towards embryos in law. (shrink)