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32 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT January-February 2011 A s Nick Agar noted in the pages of this jour- nal in 2007, there now exists a significant body of work in bioethics that argues in favor of enhancing human beings. 1 Writers includ- ing Gregory Stock, Lee Silver, Nick Bostrom, Julian Savulescu, John Harris, Ronald Green, Jonathan Glover, and Agar himself have suggested that there is little reason to fear the scientific application of ge- netic technologies to human beings, as long as the choice of whether—and how—to use them is left up to individuals. 2 They argue that a “new” or “liberal” eugenics, which would be pluralistic, based on good science, concerned with the welfare of individuals, and would respect the rights of individuals, should be distinguished from the “old” eugenics, which was perfectionist, unscientific, concerned with the health of the “race,” and coercive. 3 According to the advocates of the new eugenics, the horrors associated with the old eugenics should not prevent us from embracing the opportunities offered by recent ad- vances in the biological sciences. Two of these writers in particular, John Harris and Julian Savulescu, have independently advanced the argument for human enhancement with espe- cial fervor in their recent works. In Enhancing Evo- lution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People , Harris takes to conservative critics of enhancement with gusto and argues that a commitment to human enhancement follows naturally from our willing- ness to accept the improvements in our welfare and capacities that other technologies have made pos- sible. 4 Moreover, he suggests, a proper concern for the welfare of future human beings implies that we are morally obligated to pursue enhancements. 5 Simi- larly, in a series of influential and oft-cited articles in prestigious medical and bioethical journals and in A Not-So-New EUGENICS Harris and Savulescu on Human Enhancement BY ROBERT SPARROW John Harris and Julian Savulescu, leading figures in the “new” eugenics, argue that parents are morally obligated to use genetic and other technologies to enhance their children. But the argument they give leads to conclusions even more radical than they acknowledge. ultimately, the world it would lead to is not all that different from that championed by eugenicists one hundred years ago. Robert Sparrow, “A Not-So-New Eugenics: Harris and Savulescu on Human Enhancement,” Hastings Center Report 41, no. 1 (2011): 32- 42.

January-February 2011 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 33 edited collections published by major academic presses, Julian Savulescu has argued that we are morally obli- gated to use genetic (and other) tech- nologies to produce the best children possible —a strong claim indeed! 6 Sa- vulescu has also used his role as direc- tor of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics to promote human enhancement in the popular press. 7 When learned professors at the University of Manchester and Ox- ford start to agitate on behalf of en- hancing human beings, it behooves us to take notice. For reasons that will become obvious below, I hope that Savulescu and Har- ris are wrong about the existence of an obligation to enhance future human beings, but it is not my in- tention to try to establish that here. Rather, my pur- pose is to point out that if we have such an obliga- tion, then its implications are much more radical than Harris or Savulescu admit. Both Harris and Savulescu approach the ethics of human enhancement from a consequentialist perspective. 8 Given the notoriously demanding nature of consequentialism and its lineage as a philosophy of radical social reform, one might expect that their conclu- sions would include a strong role for the state in encouraging or even re- quiring people to meet their obliga- tions to have better babies. Instead, both Harris and Savulescu deny that the state should pursue eugenic goals and insist that the decision about whether to pursue enhancement (and which enhancements to pur- sue) should be left up to individuals. There is, therefore, a tension between their consequentialism and their (ap- parent) libertarianism when it comes to the rights of individuals to use—or not use—enhancement technologies as they see fit. 9 Only through a very particular and not especially plausible negotiation of the uneasy relation- ship between their moral theory and their policy prescriptions can Harris and Savulescu obscure the fact that the gap between the new and the old eugenics is not that large at all, and that their philosophies have impli- cations that most people would find profoundly unattractive. Consequentialism and Enhancement T he two technologies that offer the most realistic prospect of achieving dramatic improvements in the capacities of human beings in the foreseeable future are preimplantation genetic diagnosis (possibly in combi- nation with “embryo splitting”) and somatic cell nuclear transfer. PGD allows parents to learn about the ge- netics of the embryos they have cre- ated through in vitro fertilization, so that they can choose which embryo to implant into a woman’s womb and try to bring to term. It is currently widely used as a powerful technique to prevent the birth of children with severe disabilities. The use of PGD for enhancement would involve se- lecting embryos on the basis of genes for “above-species-typical” capacities. Our rapidly improving knowledge of human genetics, especially since the completion of the human genome program, has greatly increased the potential of using PGD to this end. Employing “embryo splitting” in con- junction with PGD would improve its efficiency as an enhancement tech- nology by allowing the creation of multiple, genetically identical copies of a desirable embryo, increasing the chances of successfully implanting an embryo with those genetics. 10 Should somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning of human beings become possible, then parents could create children with the genome of some existing person who has above-species-typical characteristics. Consequentialism has a distinct theoretical advantage when it comes to discussing the ethics of these tech- nologies. Both PGD and SCNT in- volve choosing which people are born rather than enhancing the traits of existing persons. As Derek Parfit ob- served, such decisions are not “per- son affecting”: there is no particular person who will be better or worse off depending on how the decisions are made, because if the deci- sions are made differently, then a different person is brought into the world. 11 It is difficult for noncon- sequentialist moral theo- ries to gain any purchase on decisions of this sort. Rights-based or Kantian approaches founder be- cause, in the absence of an affected individual, decisions about enhancement are only about how we treat embryos, rather than how we relate to rational agents, and at- tributing “rights” to embryos has extremely counterintuitive implica- tions in other policy areas. 12 More- over, insofar as we are concerned with the rationality of future agents, some enhancements might be desirable be- cause they might facilitate rational agency. Perhaps virtue ethics stands a better chance of generating conclu- sions about the appropriate attitude toward enhancement, 13 or about the impact that altering human nature would have on future human be- ings’ capacity to exercise important virtues. 14 However, it is difficult to develop an uncontroversial account of the virtues that has enough con- tent to motivate definite conclusions about the appropriate attitude toward enhancement. And while altering hu- man nature might have implications for the nature and role of the virtues, T hus, once we adopt a consequentialist perspective, the argument for enhancement follows straightforwardly.

34 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT January-February 2011 it is extremely unlikely to make virtue itself impossible. In any case, it is not clear that we have any good reason to prefer the virtues associated with existing human character traits over the virtues enhanced human beings might have. 15 However, insofar as decisions about embryo selection are about worlds containing different sorts of people—and different amounts of happiness—consequentialism can deal with them with ease. For in- stance, a consequentialist approach quickly generates what is—for most people—intuitively the right answer when we are considering decisions about whether to use PGD to pre- vent the birth of children with severe disabilities. 16 It is difficult indeed not to think that parents who are at risk of conceiving a child with a serious genetic disorder, and who are offered a choice to use PGD to identify and select against embryos suffering from this disorder, do something wrong if they fail to make use of the technol- ogy. A compelling analogy can be made between this case and a case where parents could remedy an en- vironmental hazard that would have the same effect on their child. In both cases, the outcome of parental inac- tion is a child born with a serious dis- ability. Yet the latter case is “person affecting,” whereas the former is not. Because decisions about whether to use PGD (and about which embryo to select if we choose to use it) do not harm or benefit any individual, non- consequentialist approaches struggle to explain why we have any reason to select the healthy embryo using PGD. Consequentialism, on the oth- er hand, implies that we should select a healthy child for the same reason we would act to prevent harm to an existing child—in order to minimize the amount of unnecessary suffering in the world. If we think parents have strong reasons to avoid the birth of children with severe disabilities, this suggests that consequentialism has a crucial role to play in determining the ethics of decisions about what sort of people there should be. However, as both Harris and Sa- vulescu have pointed out, a concern with the amount of happiness in the world suggests that we should not be content with reducing suffering and unhappiness. 17 Instead, consequen- tialism suggests that we should act so as to increase the amount of hap- piness—or perhaps welfare—in the world. Thus, once we adopt a consequen- tialist perspective, the argument for enhancement follows straightfor- wardly. As Harris puts it, if something is an enhancement, that means that it benefits individuals. We should act so as to promote the well-being of individuals. Therefore, we should pursue enhancements. 18 There is, perhaps, some room to argue about the possibility that certain enhance- ments, despite being good for those who enjoy them, will generate “nega- tive externalities” and will impose a cost on the rest of society, especially if these enhancements are available only to those able to pay for them. Indeed, I will suggest below that this is both much more likely and much more significant than either Harris or Savulescu acknowledge. However, such concerns will at most establish a case against particular enhancements; they are unlikely to rule out en- hancements altogether. Thus, while there may be reasons to be cautious about some sorts of enhancements, the distinction between therapy and enhancement itself is morally irrel- evant, and we should, for the same reason as we pursue therapies, pursue enhancements. 19 In a moment I will turn to ex- amine the question of the means we should adopt to bring about a world of enhanced human beings. How- ever, it is worth pausing to highlight some of the more outré features of what it is, precisely, that we might be obligated to bring about. Many of the implications of the new eugenics are genetic interventions that in sub- stance—if not in motivation—look very much like those advocated by the “old” eugenics. To begin with, it is worth not- ing that genetic technologies might provide a new way of increasing the amount of happiness in the world: they might allow us to simply en- gineer happier people. If happiness is a subjective state—a warm inner glow, as it were—then we may well be able to make future generations happier by manipulating the base level of various neurotransmitters in their brains. The existence of ge- netic risk factors for depression sug- gests that genes may play a role in determining the “base mood” of individuals. Selecting for—or ma- nipulating—these genes might allow us to greatly improve the prospects of future individuals feeling happy. Even if happiness is defined as having one’s preferences satisfied, then it may be possible to promote happiness by shaping people (again, perhaps by al- tering their brain chemistry) so that they have lower ambitions and more easily satisfied preferences. 20 The only way Savulescu and Harris could avoid the implication that we are obligated to ensure that future generations are engineered for contentment and go through life suffused in a warm bath of serotonin, dopamine, and opioids would be to retreat to a more substan- tive account of well-being. If human flourishing consists in the satisfaction of those preferences that an ideal ob- server would rationally endorse, or in the achievement of various objective goods, then there will be less impe- tus to try to engineer people for hap- piness by manipulating their brain chemistry. However, any resort to a more objectivist account of well- being would require consequential- ists to justify that account and would make their conclusions much more controversial; it would also open up the possibility that the value of these goods might ground an argument against enhancement. Yet in the ab- sence of a richer and more plausible account of well-being than either Sa- vulescu or Harris has yet provided, the genetic interventions required by consequentialism look very “Brave New World” indeed. 21