John Glad (1941–2015)

This curious little book attempts to advocate the pursuit of eugenic solutions to many of the problems currently assailing our world, approaching the subject from scientific and ethical standpoints. I found a lot more to like -- or less to dislike -- in it than I'd expected, although I had a sense throughout that the author was ducking the most important perceived flaw in notions of eugenics ever since they were first floated by Francis Galton in the latter half of the 19th century: who gets to decide which are the favorable and which the unfavorable traits in their fellow human beings. It's a flaw that led, so most people would argue, to the horrors of the Holocaust; Glad acknowledges the existence of it to the extent that, even as he (very evidently genuinely) deplores the countless crimes against humanity the Nazis committed in their attempted exterminations, he claims eugenics was not among the Hitler regime's motivations -- it was merely invoked as a phony justification. I have to confess that there seems to me to be only the breadth of the thinnest possible hair between these two portrayals of the circumstance, and I was left unconvinced. I was also unconvinced by Glad's account of another problem faced by any ethical proponent of eugenics: his section on "Possible Abuse of Genetics" (pp91-2) runs to just a paltry three paragraphs -- a paucity of treatment that seems to smack of denial.

Yet there are good things to be found here too. For example, he makes this point: "The question is whether parents have a moral right to bring children into the world who will be disadvantaged by their heredity" (p34). It's a refreshingly thoughtful observation in a society that is all too keen to stress the rights of parents -- as for example in the option to home-school, or to indoctrinate with a particular ideology or religious faith -- while often oblivious to the rights of those parents' children. A child who's brought up brainwashed into Creationist views, say, or racist ones, is likely to be handicapped for life in the evolving society he or she is set to inhabit; yet this goes ignored as we defend the rights of parents to be science deniers or bigots and to pass those values on to their offspring. This is obviously not rational. One could say that Glad is merely taking the matter a step further by saying parents have the responsibility to their offspring to make sure those offspring are born as the best and brightest they can be; one could also say that this further step is an unacceptable one.

There's plenty that's wrong with this short book -- for example, its potted history of the eugenics movements, begun on p62, just sort of peters out a dozen pages later after a longish discussion of WWII -- but, as indicated above, there's also some interesting and useful material in among the rest. The print version, which is the one I read, is full of plugs for the free downloadable-PDF version, available from www.whatwemaybe.org; I've just checked that URL and it's still functioning.… (mehr)