eugenics

Philosophy

Background and circumstances

Eugenics emerged and became popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of factors affecting science that made it possible and because of the concerns of society at that time. For example, early in the 19th century, many European governments began collecting and aggregating data from institutions, which ended up enabling early studies of criminal behavior using statistics. In the early 20th century, statistical methods aiming to quantify human traits were created, such as Alfred Binet's test for measuring the cognitive ability of schoolchildren, which would later be adapted into the IQ test.

In Britain, the end of the Victorian era brought new anxieties about whether Britain's prosperity would continue as other countries became industrialized. People perceived a threat to the future of the British "race" due to falling birth rates, especially among the upper class. Panic about low fertility among the upper classes of Britain made eugenics explode into a popular social movement, especially among the middle class, which may have been especially attracted to ideas of inborn superiority as a birthright due to its "unsettled" position in society.

Likewise, nearing the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, people were concerned with the impacts of industrialization, urbanization, and high rates of immigration. In the minds of eugenicists, scientific advances provided a new possibility of rational ways to understand human behavior, and therefore build a better world based upon science. Early eugenicists developed their ideas from observing the social problems of their time and explaining them according to the trend in science of the time, which was to attribute human problems to biological causes.

Eugenics emerged from the context of Social Darwinism, which explained inequality as natural and part of the mechanism of "survival of the fittest". The conditions observed in the impoverished and unhealthy industrialized urban centers led people to fear that "inferior" people would not naturally die out, as Social Darwinism suggested, and instead would increase in population at higher rates in a modern, industrialized world. Early centers of eugenicist thought had different focuses due to their unique circumstances. In Germany, eugenics explained "inferiority" through a medicalized framework. In Britian, class was a main concern: the population of poor people was increasing, and eugenics provided a biological explanation for the perceived mental and physical defects of the poor. In the United States, eugenics targeted "feeble-minded" people and immigrants. There was a large anti-immigration movement in the United States starting in the 1880s and peaking in the 1920s, driven by fears that white Anglo-Saxon bloodlines and values were degenerating and that immigrants were causing disease, crime, and poverty. In the United States, the medicalized category of the "feeble-minded" served as a way to incarcerate women who were promiscuous or had sex outside of marriage by defining their behavior as abnormal within a scientific framework.

Scope

Eugenics included in its scope many disciplines, including medicine, public health, psychiatry, sociology, criminology, and anthropology. What united these fields under the philosophy of eugenics was the idea that the causes of social problems were biological and heritable.

Founding eugenicists, such as Francis Galton and Charles Davenport, developed the foundational idea that intellectual, mental, and moral capacities, like physical traits, were heritable according to Mendelian principles. Therefore, eugenicists viewed disability, psychiatric illness, and criminality as being similar, causally connected, overlapping, or interchangeable phenomena. At the end of the 19th century, explanations of crime switched dramatically from social to biological. The concept of "moral insanity" was popular in psychiatry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was part of a movement that sought to explain crime by attributing it to psychiatric illness. Cesare Lombroso, often considered the "father of criminology", argued using the now-debunked science of phrenology that physical traits of the body were correlated to criminal behavior, and argued that these physical abnormalities were signs of atavism, a backward evolutionary regression to an animal-like state. This idea influenced the "positivist" school of criminological thought, which held that “social deviance” was like disease in that it had biological explanations within the person. According to Enrico Ferri, a prominent writer among the "positivists", the only way to stop crime was to identify the subset of people that were innately, biologically predisposed to be criminals, and imprison them before they could harm society. Criminals, people with mental or physical disabilities, and people with mental illnesses were regarded as "degenerates", people whose genetic quality had deteriorated and who posed a threat to society if they were to reproduce and pass down their inferior traits. Adherents of "degeneracy theory" believed that rehabilitation of "degenerates" was pointless, since "degeneration" was biological, but also believed that social conditions like poverty could create "degenerate" traits which could in turn be inherited by offspring.

Goals

Eugenics as a movement arose through the merging of scientific study, philosophical ideas about improving humanity, and politics.

Central to eugenics was the concept of race. Up until the late twentieth century, "race" was seen as a scientific term for differentiating people based upon belonging to different ethnic groups or sharing certain characteristics. "Racial" betterment or improvement of the "race" was seen as the goal of eugenics. However, eugenicists used the term "race" inconsistently, using "race" to refer to both the entire human race and to individual "ethnic groups" thought to share traits. In the early twentieth century, many eugenicists envisioned a white "Anglo-Saxon" or "Nordic" race that was superior to all other groups, and feared that this superior race would be threatened.

All eugenicists agreed that some people were inferior and others superior, but different strains of eugenicist thinking were differentiated by what their idea of "race improvement" meant.

Viewpoints

Perspectives on heredity

Though the founders of eugenicist thought broadly shared the idea that humankind could improve itself by influencing which people reproduced and passed down their traits to subsequent generations, early eugenicists were unclear on how heredity worked. Proponents of the idea of degeneracy, such as Bénédict Augustin Morel, believed that non-inherited traits acquired by people due to bad living conditions or unhealthy habits could become hereditary and be passed down to offspring. This concept of heredity has now been largely disproven. By 1915, geneticists knew that Mendelian inheritance governed heredity, but among other fields of biology such as ecology, paleontology, systematics, and embryology, the notion of acquired traits being heritable persisted into the 1930s and 1940s.

Effects of war

Eugenicists disagreed on whether war had eugenic or dysgenic effects. Charles Darwin thought that war had a positive effect on humanity, allowing supposedly superior people to destroy supposedly inferior people through conquest. Some eugenicists conceived of the possibility of a "eugenic war", in which members of the population judged as mentally and physically inferior could be sent to the front lines as "cannon fodder" to be killed.

After World War I, perspectives on war became much more negative. Many eugenicists discussed the negative impacts of war upon the genetic quality of a population, since the fittest and most able young men were sent to war, and many were either killed or returned with disabilities and "wartime neuropsychoses". Some eugenicists perceived the dysgenic impact of the First World War to be so devastating, in fact, that they expressed despair over the future of eugenics. Some noted that military service seemed to correlate with increased family sizes, and argued that war and the associated spread of disease could eliminate the weak from a population. Ignaz Kaup and Alfred Ploetz saw the mass starvation in Germany during the first World War as eugenic. However, World War I broadly dashed eugenicist hopes of war as a humanity-improving force, and sparked a new wave of popularity for eugenics as people became more concerned about the damaging impacts of war on populations.

Positive and negative eugenics

Eugenic programmes included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilisation of people deemed unfit for reproduction.

Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged, for example, the intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilisation, egg transplants, and cloning. Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilisation or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally undesirable. This includes abortions, sterilisation, and other methods of family planning. Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; in Nazi Germany, for example, abortion was illegal for women deemed by the state to be superior.

Historical eugenics

Ancient and medieval origins

In ancient Sparta, according to Plutarch (c. 50 – c. 120), the council of elders (the Gerousia) inspected every proper citizen's child and determined whether or not the child was fit to live. A child deemed unfit was allegedly thrown into a chasm. Plutarch's account is the sole historical source for the Spartan practice of infanticide motivated by eugenics. While ancient Greeks practiced infanticide, no contemporary sources support Plutarch's claims of infanticide on eugenic grounds. In 2007, the tradition of dumping infants near Mount Taygete was called into question due to a lack of physical evidence: anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios' research of the site found only bodies ranging in age from 18 to 35 years.

Plato's political philosophy included the belief that the state should cautiously monitor and control human reproduction through selective breeding.

According to Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120), a Roman of the Imperial Period, the Germanic tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, un-warlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps. Modern historians regard Tacitus' ethnographic writing as unreliable in such details.

Academic origins

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883, directly drawing on the recent work delineating natural selection by his half-cousin Charles Darwin. He published his observations and conclusions chiefly in his influential book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton himself defined it as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations". The first to systematically apply Darwinism theory to human relations, Galton believed that various desirable human qualities were also hereditary ones, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from various sources. Organisations were formed to win public support for and to sway opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, including the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907 and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen and modified their message to meet religious ideals. In 1909, the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes.

Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists, with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies in the United States were first implemented by state-level legislators in the early 1900s. Eugenic policies also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilising certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Japan and Sweden.

Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed eugenics as a social philosophy—a philosophy with implications for social order. That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits ("positive eugenics") or reduced rates of sexual reproduction or sterilisation of people with less-desired or undesired traits ("negative eugenics").

In addition to being practiced in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organised through the International Federation of Eugenics Organisations. Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilisation laws. In its moral dimension, eugenics rejected the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefined moral worth purely in terms of genetic fitness. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "unfit" races.

Nazism and the decline of eugenics

The reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilisation of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power. Some common early 20th century eugenics methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families. This included racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany), the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, and homosexuals as "degenerate" or "unfit". This led to segregation, institutionalisation, sterilisation, and mass murder. The Nazi policy of identifying German citizens deemed unfit and then systematically murdering them with poison gas, referred to as the Aktion T4 campaign, paved the way for the Holocaust.

By the end of World War II, many eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany. H. G. Wells, who had called for "the sterilisation of failures" in 1904, stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? that among the human rights, which he believed should be available to all people, was "a prohibition on mutilation, sterilisation, torture, and any bodily punishment". After World War II, the practice of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group" fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons".

In Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, actively promoted eugenics as late as 1983. In 1984, Singapore began providing financial incentives to highly educated women to encourage them to have more children. For this purpose was introduced the "Graduate Mother Scheme" that incentivised graduate women to get married as much as the rest of their populace. The incentives were extremely unpopular and regarded as eugenic, and were seen as discriminatory towards Singapore's non-Chinese ethnic population. In 1985, the incentives were partly abandoned as ineffective, while the government matchmaking agency, the Social Development Network, remained active until 2023.

Modern eugenics

Liberal eugenics, also called new eugenics, aims to make genetic interventions morally acceptable by rejecting coercive state programmes and relying on parental choice. Bioethicist Nicholas Agar, who coined the term, argues that the state should intervene only to forbid interventions that excessively limit a child’s ability to shape their own future. Unlike "authoritarian" or "old" eugenics, liberal eugenics draws on modern scientific knowledge of genomics to enable informed choices aimed at improving well-being. Julien Savulescu further argues that some eugenic practices, like prenatal screening for Down syndrome and disability-selective abortion, are already widely practiced, without being labelled "eugenics", as they are seen as enhancing freedom rather than restricting it. Others such as Lucy Burke argue that much of this is connected to ableist and other devaluing views of people with disabilities.

UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster argued that modern genetics is a "back door to eugenics". This view was shared by then-White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Programme at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a "new era of eugenics", and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, "where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products". The United Nations' International Bioethics Committee also noted that while human genetic engineering should not be confused with the 20th century eugenics movements, it nonetheless challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatisation for those who do not want or cannot afford the technology.

In 2025, geneticist Peter Visscher published a paper in Nature, arguing genome editing of human embryos and germ cells may become feasible in the 21st century, and raising ethical considerations in the context of previous eugenics movements. A response argued that human embryo genetic editing is "unsafe and unproven". Nature also published an editorial, stating: "The fear that polygenic gene editing could be used for eugenics looms large among them, and is, in part, why no country currently allows genome editing in a human embryo, even for single variants".

Contested scientific status

One general concern is that the reduced genetic diversity that may be a feature of long-term, species-wide eugenics plans could eventually result in inbreeding depression, increased spread of infectious disease, and decreased resilience to changes in the environment.

Arguments for scientific validity

In his original lecture "Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics", Karl Pearson claimed that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine. Anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička said in 1918 that "[t]he growing science of eugenics will essentially become applied anthropology." The economist John Maynard Keynes was a lifelong proponent of eugenics and described it as a branch of sociology.

In a 2006 newspaper article, Richard Dawkins said that discussion regarding eugenics was inhibited by the shadow of Nazi misuse, to the extent that some scientists would not admit that breeding humans for certain abilities is at all possible. He believes that it is not physically different from breeding domestic animals for traits such as speed or herding skill. Dawkins felt that enough time had elapsed to at least ask just what the ethical differences were between breeding for ability versus training athletes or forcing children to take music lessons, though he could think of persuasive reasons to draw the distinction.

Objections to scientific validity

Amanda Caleb, Professor of Medical Humanities at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, says "Eugenic laws and policies are now understood as part of a specious devotion to a pseudoscience that actively dehumanises to support political agendas and not true science or medicine."

The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based on genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan. He demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family with red eyes, demonstrating that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance. Morgan criticised the view that traits such as intelligence or criminality were hereditary, because these traits were subjective.

Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect. Andrzej Pękalski, from the University of Wroclaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics programme selects a pleiotropic gene that could possibly be associated with a positive trait. Pękalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics programme that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two were associated.

While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology, at this point there is no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some conditions such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual, so eliminating these genes is undesirable in places where such diseases are common.

Edwin Black, journalist, historian, and author of War Against the Weak, argues that eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry. This aspect of eugenics is often considered to be tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience.

Contested ethical status

Contemporary ethical opposition

In a book directly addressed at socialist eugenicist J.B.S. Haldane and his once-influential Daedalus, Bertrand Russell had one serious objection of his own: eugenic policies might simply end up being used to reproduce existing power relations "rather than to make men happy".

Environmental ethicist Bill McKibben argued against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span and biological constraints on physical and cognitive ability. Attempts to "improve" themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem meaningful in a world where such limitations could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished, he argues, since it would inevitably produce temptations to tamper with such things as cognitive capacities. He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish as examples.

Contemporary ethical advocacy

Bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson has said that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral.

Historian Nathaniel C. Comfort has claimed that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making process from the state to patients and their families.

In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible (so long as such policies do not infringe on individuals' reproductive rights or exert undue pressures on prospective parents to use these technologies) in order to maximise public health and minimise the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements.

In popular culture

The novel Brave New World (1931) by the English author Aldous Huxley is a dystopian social science fiction novel which is set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy.

Various works by the author Robert A. Heinlein mention the Howard Foundation, a group which attempts to improve human longevity through selective breeding.

Among Frank Herbert's works, the Dune series, starting with the eponymous 1965 novel, describes selective breeding by a powerful sisterhood, the Bene Gesserit, to produce a supernormal male being, the Kwisatz Haderach.

The Star Trek franchise features a race of genetically engineered humans which is known as "Augments", the most notable of them being Khan Noonien Singh. These "supermen" were the cause of the Eugenics Wars, a dark period in Earth's fictional history, before they were deposed and exiled. Spin-offs like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds present the Eugenics Wars as the main reason why genetic enhancement is illegal in the United Federation of Planets.

Naoki Urasawa's manga Monster and its anime adaptation of the same name mention "The Eugenics Experiment" conducted in the premises of 511 Kinderheim, a clandestine East German orphanage where the main antagonist Johan Liebert grew up into a psychopathic serial killer.

The film Gattaca (1997) provides a fictional example of a dystopian society that uses eugenics to decide what people are capable of and their place in the world. The title alludes to the letters G, A, T and C, the four nucleobases of DNA, and depicts the possible consequences of genetic discrimination in the present societal framework. Relegated to the role of a cleaner owing to his genetically projected death at age 32 due to a heart condition (being told: "The only way you'll see the inside of a spaceship is if you were cleaning it"), the protagonist observes enhanced astronauts as they are demonstrating their superhuman athleticism. Although it was not a box office success, it was critically acclaimed and influenced the debate over human genetic engineering in the public consciousness. As to its accuracy, its production company, Sony Pictures, consulted with a gene therapy researcher and prominent critic of eugenics known to have stated that "[w]e should not step over the line that delineates treatment from enhancement", W. French Anderson, to ensure that the portrayal of science was realistic. Disputing their success in this mission, Philim Yam of Scientific American called the film "science bashing" and Nature's Kevin Davies called it a "surprisingly pedestrian affair", while molecular biologist Lee Silver described its extreme determinism as "a straw man".