Richard Dawkins has long flirted with eugenics. “If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?” he asked back in 2006. “I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons.”
What Dawkins proposes is that there is a big moral difference between negative and positive eugenics. As he explains it, negative eugenics is all about breeding bad things out – for example, certain hereditary diseases – and positive eugenics is all about breeding apparently good things in, such as athletic prowess or blond hair and blue eyes. “Intelligently designed morality would have no problem with negative eugenics,” Dawkins insists, going on to argue that the problem with positive eugenics comes about when it is state directed and government sponsored. According to Dawkins, that’s the bit the Nazis got wrong. But “just because Hitler wanted to do something is not in itself an argument against it”.
Last week, Professor Dawkins was at it again, this time on Twitter. Responding to a woman who said that she would face a real ethical dilemma if she became pregnant with a baby with Down’s syndrome, his advice was thus: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” In the heat of huge public outrage, Dawkins issued one of those non-apology apologies. But the damage was done.
To be absolutely clear: Down’s syndrome is not hereditary. So it cannot be bred out. So the belief that it is immoral to keep a Down’s syndrome child is not strictly a eugenic position. But the moral revulsion that we have at eugenics has little to do with genetics and everything to do with the way it treats the most vulnerable. For the problem with eugenics, like Dawkins’s belief that it is immoral to keep a baby with Down’s syndrome, is that it contains an implicit idea of what a better sort of human being might look like. It may seem obvious to Professor Dawkins that a tall athletic child with straight As at school is to be preferred to, let’s say, a child who has slanted eyes and a flat nasal bridge and is academically less adept, but it is not obvious to me. Morally, the category of the human ought to be entirely indivisible: all being of equal worth, irrespective of wealth, colour, class, ability. Some people are better at sport or sums, but nobody is better at being human, neither are there better sorts of human beings.
The one thing one ought to expect from humanists is that they would be good at protecting the human, at defending human life in its own terms and for its own sake. The humanist attack on religion is that religion often places human flourishing second in its cosmological order of importance, and that this leads to human beings losing out to divine command. It’s a perfectly respectable argument. But, ironically, it doesn’t seem that the human is any safer in the hands of humanists.
Being so obsessed with attacking religion, people such as Dawkins have lost sight of what they are supposed to be defending. And this may be because too many humanists also place the category “human” quite a long way down their order of importance, with things such as rationality or choice or the avoidance of pain being deemed of greater significance. Human life can thus be easily traded away in some utilitarian calculation. It so happens that, when it comes to eugenics, religion has a much better track record at defending the human than science or leftwing progressives.
Twitter: @giles_fraser