Books: Issues in Population and Bioethics
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Sam Vaknin >> Issues in Population and Bioethics
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Issues in Population and Bioethics
1st EDITION
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Editing and Design:
Lidija Rangelovska
Lidija Rangelovska
A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2003
Not for Sale! Non-commercial edition.
© 2002 Copyright Lidija Rangelovska.
All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be used
or reproduced in any manner without written permission from:
Lidija Rangelovska - write to:
palma@unet.com.mk or to
vaknin@link.com.mk
Visit the Author Archive of Dr. Sam Vaknin in "Central Europe Review":
http://www.ce-review.org/authorarchives/vaknin_archive/vaknin_main.htm
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Visit Sam Vaknin's United Press International (UPI) Article Archive
-Click HERE!
Philosophical Musings and Essays
http://samvak.tripod.com/culture.html
Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited
http://samvak.tripod.com/
ISBN: 9989-929-39-4
Created by: LIDIJA RANGELOVSKA
REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA
C O N T E N T S
I. And Then There Were Too Many
II. Eugenics and the Future of the Human Species
III. The Myth of the Right to Life
IV. The Aborted Contract
V. In Our Own Image - The Debate about Cloning
VI. Ethical Relativism and Absolute Taboos
VII. The Author
VIII. About "After the Rain"
And Then There Were Too Many
By: Sam Vaknin
The latest census in Ukraine revealed an apocalyptic drop of 10% in
its population - from 52.5 million a decade ago to a mere 47.5 million
last year. Demographers predict a precipitous decline of one third in
Russia's impoverished, inebriated, disillusioned, and ageing
citizenry. Births in many countries in the rich, industrialized, West
are below the replacement rate. These bastions of conspicuous
affluence are shriveling.
Scholars and decision-makers - once terrified by the Malthusian
dystopia of a "population bomb" - are more sanguine now. Advances in
agricultural technology eradicated hunger even in teeming places like
India and China. And then there is the old idea of progress: birth
rates tend to decline with higher education levels and growing
incomes. Family planning has had resounding successes in places as
diverse as Thailand, China, and western Africa.
In the near past, fecundity used to compensate for infant mortality.
As the latter declined - so did the former. Children are means of
production in many destitute countries. Hence the inordinately large
families of the past - a form of insurance against the economic
outcomes of the inevitable demise of some of one's off-spring.
Yet, despite these trends, the world's populace is augmented by 80
million people annually. All of them are born to the younger
inhabitants of the more penurious corners of the Earth. There were
only 1 billion people alive in 1804. The number doubled a century
later.
But our last billion - the sixth - required only 12 fertile years. The
entire population of Germany is added every half a decade to both
India and China. Clearly, Mankind's growth is out of control, as
affirmed in the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and
Development.
Dozens of millions of people regularly starve - many of them to death.
In only one corner of the Earth - southern Africa - food aid is the
sole subsistence of entire countries. More than 18 million people in
Zambia, Malawi, and Angola survived on charitable donations in 1992.
More than 10 million expect the same this year, among them the
emaciated denizens of erstwhile food exporter, Zimbabwe.
According to Medecins Sans Frontiere, AIDS kills 3 million people a
year, Tuberculosis another 2 million. Malaria decimates 2 people every
minute. More than 14 million people fall prey to parasitic and
infectious diseases every year - 90% of them in the developing
countries.
Millions emigrate every year in search of a better life. These massive
shifts are facilitated by modern modes of transportation. But, despite
these tectonic relocations - and despite famine, disease, and war, the
classic Malthusian regulatory mechanisms - the depletion of natural
resources - from arable land to water - is undeniable and gargantuan.
Our pressing environmental issues - global warming, water stress,
salinization, desertification, deforestation, pollution, loss of
biological diversity - and our ominous social ills - crime at the
forefront - are traceable to one, politically incorrect, truth:
There are too many of us. We are way too numerous. The population load
is unsustainable. We, the survivors, would be better off if others
were to perish. Should population growth continue unabated - we are
all doomed.
Doomed to what?
Numerous Cassandras and countless Jeremiads have been falsified by
history. With proper governance, scientific research, education,
affordable medicines, effective family planning, and economic growth -
this planet can support even 10-12 billion people. We are not at risk
of physical extinction and never have been.
What is hazarded is not our life - but our quality of life. As any
insurance actuary will attest, we are governed by statistical
datasets.
Consider this single fact:
About 1% of the population suffer from the perniciously debilitating
and all-pervasive mental health disorder, schizophrenia. At the
beginning of the 20th century, there were 16.5 million schizophrenics
- nowadays there are 64 million. Their impact on friends, family, and
colleagues is exponential - and incalculable. This is not a merely
quantitative leap. It is a qualitative phase transition.
Or this:
Large populations lead to the emergence of high density urban centers.
It is inefficient to cultivate ever smaller plots of land. Surplus
manpower moves to centers of industrial production. A second wave of
internal migrants caters to their needs, thus spawning a service
sector. Network effects generate excess capital and a virtuous cycle
of investment, employment, and consumption ensues.
But over-crowding breeds violence (as has been demonstrated in
experiments with mice). The sheer numbers involved serve to magnify
and amplify social anomies, deviate behaviour, and antisocial traits.
In the city, there are more criminals, more perverts, more victims,
more immigrants, and more racists per square mile.
Moreover, only a planned and orderly urbanization is desirable. The
blights that pass for cities in most third world countries are the
outgrowth of neither premeditation nor method. These mega-cities are
infested with non-disposed of waste and prone to natural catastrophes
and epidemics.
No one can vouchsafe for a "critical mass" of humans, a threshold
beyond which the species will implode and vanish.
Luckily, the ebb and flow of human numbers is subject to three
regulatory demographic mechanisms, the combined action of which gives
hope.
The Malthusian Mechanism
Limited resources lead to wars, famine, and diseases and, thus, to a
decrease in human numbers. Mankind has done well to check famine, fend
off disease, and staunch war. But to have done so without a
commensurate policy of population control was irresponsible.
The Assimilative Mechanism
Mankind is not divorced from nature. Humanity is destined to be
impacted by its choices and by the reverberations of its actions.
Damage caused to the environment haunts - in a complex feedback loop -
the perpetrators.
Examples:
Immoderate use of antibiotics leads to the eruption of drug-resistant
strains of pathogens. A myriad types of cancer are caused by human
pollution. Man is the victim of its own destructive excesses.
The Cognitive Mechanism
Humans intentionally limit the propagation of their race through
family planning, abortion, and contraceptives. Genetic engineering
will likely intermesh with these to produce "enhanced" or "designed"
progeny to specifications.
We must stop procreating. Or, else, pray for a reduction in our
numbers.
This could be achieved benignly, for instance by colonizing space, or
the ocean depths - both remote and technologically unfeasible
possibilities.
Yet, the alternative is cataclysmic. Unintended wars, rampant disease,
and lethal famines will ultimately trim our numbers - no matter how
noble our intentions and how diligent our efforts to curb them.
Is this a bad thing?
Not necessarily. To my mind, even a Malthusian resolution is
preferable to the alternative of slow decay, uniform impecuniosity,
and perdition in instalments - an alternative made inexorable by our
collective irresponsibility and denial.
Racing Down
Eugenics and the Future of the Human Species
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
"It is clear that modern medicine has created a serious dilemma ... In
the past, there were many children who never survived - they succumbed
to various diseases ... But in a sense modern medicine has put natural
selection out of commission. Something that has helped one individual
over a serious illness can in the long run contribute to weakening the
resistance of the whole human race to certain diseases. If we pay
absolutely no attention to what is called hereditary hygiene, we could
find ourselves facing a degeneration of the human race. Mankind's
hereditary potential for resisting serious disease will be weakened."
(Jostein Gaarder in "Sophie's World", a bestselling philosophy
textbook for adolescents published in Oslo, Norway, in 1991 and,
afterwards, throughout the world, having been translated to dozens of
languages)
The Nazis regarded the murder of the feeble-minded and the mentally
insane - intended to purify the race and maintain hereditary hygiene -
as a form of euthanasia.
German doctors were enthusiastic proponents of an eugenics movements
rooted in 19th century social Darwinism. Luke Gormally writes, in his
essay "Walton, Davies, and Boyd" (published in "Euthanasia Examined -
Ethical, Clinical, and Legal Perspectives", ed. John Keown, Cambridge
University Press, 1995):
"When the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche
published their tract The Permission to Destroy Life that is Not Worth
Living in 1920 ... their motive was to rid society of the 'human
ballast and enormous economic burden' of care for the mentally ill,
the handicapped, retarded and deformed children, and the incurably
ill. But the reason they invoked to justify the killing of human
beings who fell into these categories was that the lives of such human
beings were 'not worth living', were 'devoid of value'"
It is this association with the hideous Nazi regime that gave eugenics
- a term coined by a relative of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton,
in 1883 - its bad name. Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster of
North Ireland, thinks that this recoil resulted in "Dysgenics - the
genetic deterioration of modern (human) population", as the title of
his controversial tome puts it.
The crux of the argument for eugenics is that a host of technological,
cultural, and social developments conspired to give rise to negative
selection of the weakest, least intelligent, sickest, the habitually
criminal, the sexually deviant, the mentally-ill, and the least
adapted.
Contraception is more widely used by the affluent and the
well-educated than by the destitute and dull. Birth control as
practiced in places like China distorted both the sex distribution in
the cities - and increased the weight of the rural population (rural
couples in China are allowed to have two children rather than the
urban one).
Modern medicine and the welfare state collaborate in sustaining alive
individuals - mainly the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the
sick, and the genetically defective - who would otherwise have been
culled by natural selection to the betterment of the entire species.
Eugenics may be based on a literal understanding of Darwin's metaphor.
The 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say:
"Darwin's description of the process of natural selection as the
survival of the fittest in the struggle for life is a metaphor.
"Struggle" does not necessarily mean contention, strife, or combat;
"survival" does not mean that ravages of death are needed to make the
selection effective; and "fittest" is virtually never a single optimal
genotype but rather an array of genotypes that collectively enhance
population survival rather than extinction. All these considerations
are most apposite to consideration of natural selection in humans.
Decreasing infant and childhood mortality rates do not necessarily
mean that natural selection in the human species no longer operates.
Theoretically, natural selection could be very effective if all the
children born reached maturity.
Two conditions are needed to make this theoretical possibility
realized: first, variation in the number of children per family and,
second, variation correlated with the genetic properties of the
parents. Neither of these conditions is farfetched."
The eugenics debate is only the visible extremity of the Man vs.
Nature conundrum. Have we truly conquered nature and extracted
ourselves from its determinism? Have we graduated from natural to
cultural evolution, from natural to artificial selection, and from
genes to memes?
Does the evolutionary process culminate in a being that transcends its
genetic baggage, that programs and charts its future, and that allows
its weakest and sickest to survive? Supplanting the imperative of the
survival of the fittest with a culturally-sensitive principle may be
the hallmark of a successful evolution, rather than the beginning of
an inexorable decline.
The eugenics movement turns this argument on its head. They accept the
premise that the contribution of natural selection to the makeup of
future human generations is glacial and negligible. But they reject
the conclusion that, having ridden ourselves of its tyranny, we can
now let the weak and sick among us survive and multiply. Rather, they
propose to replace natural selection with eugenics.
But who, by which authority, and according to what guidelines will
administer this man-made culling and decide who is to live and who is
to die, who is to breed and who may not? Why select by intelligence
and not by courtesy or altruism or church-going - or al of them
together? It is here that eugenics fails miserably.
Should the criterion be physical, like in ancient Sparta? Should it be
mental? Should IQ determine one's fate - or social status or wealth?
Different answers yield disparate eugenic programs and target
dissimilar groups in the population.
Aren't eugenic criteria liable to be unduly influenced by fashion and
cultural bias? Can we agree on a universal eugenic agenda in a world
as ethnically and culturally diverse as ours? If we do get it wrong -
and the chances are overwhelming - will we not damage our gene pool
irreparably and, with it, the future of our species?
And even if many will avoid a slippery slope leading from eugenics to
active extermination of "inferior" groups in the general population -
can we guarantee that everyone will? How to prevent eugenics from
being appropriated by an intrusive, authoritarian, or even murderous
state?
Modern eugenicists distance themselves from the crude methods adopted
at the beginning of the last century by 29 countries, including
Germany, The United States, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela,
Estonia, Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Sweden (until 1976), Brazil,
Italy, Greece, and Spain.
They talk about free contraceptives for low-IQ women, vasectomies or
tubal ligations for criminals, sperm banks with contributions from
high achievers, and incentives for college students to procreate.
Modern genetic engineering and biotechnology are readily applicable to
eugenic projects. Cloning can serve to preserve the genes of the
fittest. Embryo selection and prenatal diagnosis of genetically
diseased embryos can reduce the number of the unfit.
But even these innocuous variants of eugenics fly in the face of
liberalism. Inequality, claim the proponents of hereditary
amelioration, is genetic, not environmental. All men are created
unequal and as much subject to the natural laws of heredity as are
cows and bees. Inferior people give birth to inferior offspring and,
thus, propagate their inferiority.
Even if this were true - which is at best debatable - the question is
whether the inferior specimen of our species possess the inalienable
right to reproduce? If society is to bear the costs of over-population
- social welfare, medical care, daycare centers - then society has the
right to regulate procreation. But does it have the right to act
discriminately in doing so?
Another dilemma is whether we have the moral right - let alone the
necessary knowledge - to interfere with natural as well as social and
demographic trends. Eugenicists counter that contraception and
indiscriminate medicine already do just that. Yet, studies show that
the more affluent and educated a population becomes - the less fecund
it is. Birth rates throughout the world have dropped dramatically
already.
Instead of culling the great unwashed and the unworthy - wouldn't it
be a better idea to educate them (or their off-spring) and provide
them with economic opportunities (euthenics rather than eugenics)?
Human populations seem to self-regulate. A gentle and persistent nudge
in the right direction - of increased affluence and better schooling -
might achieve more than a hundred eugenic programs, voluntary or
compulsory.
That eugenics presents itself not merely as a biological-social
agenda, but as a panacea, ought to arouse suspicion. The typical
eugenics text reads more like a catechism than a reasoned argument.
Previous all-encompassing and omnicompetent plans tended to end
traumatically - especially when they contrasted a human elite with a
dispensable underclass of persons.
Above all, eugenics is about human hubris. To presume to know better
than the lottery of life is haughty. Modern medicine largely obviates
the need for eugenics in that it allows even genetically defective
people to lead pretty normal lives. Of course, Man himself - being
part of Nature - may be regarded as nothing more than an agent of
natural selection. Still, many of the arguments advanced in favor of
eugenics can be turned against it with embarrassing ease.
Consider sick children. True, they are a burden to society and a
probable menace to the gene pool of the species. But they also inhibit
further reproduction in their family by consuming the financial and
mental resources of the parents. Their genes - however flawed -
contribute to genetic diversity. Even a badly mutated phenotype
sometimes yields precious scientific knowledge and an interesting
genotype.
The implicit Weltbild of eugenics is static - but the real world is
dynamic. There is no such thing as a "correct" genetic makeup towards
which we must all strive. A combination of genes may be perfectly
adaptable to one environment - but woefully inadequate in another. It
is therefore prudent to encourage genetic diversity or polymorphism.
The more rapidly the world changes, the greater the value of mutations
of all sorts. One never knows whether today's maladaptation will not
prove to be tomorrow's winner. Ecosystems are invariably comprised of
niches and different genes - even mutated ones - may fit different
niches.
In the 18th century most peppered moths in Britain were silvery gray,
indistinguishable from lichen-covered trunks of silver birches - their
habitat. Darker moths were gobbled up by rapacious birds. Their
mutated genes proved to be lethal. As soot from sprouting factories
blackened these trunks - the very same genes, hitherto fatal, became
an unmitigated blessing. The blacker specimen survived while their
hitherto perfectly adapted fairer brethren perished ("industrial
melanism"). This mode of natural selection is called directional.
Moreover, "bad" genes are often connected to "desirable genes"
(pleitropy). Sickle cell anemia protects certain African tribes
against malaria. This is called "diversifying or disruptive natural
selection". Artificial selection can thus fast deteriorate into
adverse selection due to ignorance.
Modern eugenics relies on statistics. It is no longer concerned with
causes - but with phenomena and the likely effects of intervention. If
the adverse traits of off-spring and parents are strongly correlated -
then preventing parents with certain undesirable qualities from
multiplying will surely reduce the incidence of said dispositions in
the general population. Yet, correlation does not necessarily imply
causation. The manipulation of one parameter of the correlation does
not inevitably alter it - or the incidence of the outcome.
Eugenicists often hark back to wisdom garnered by generations of
breeders and farmers. But the unequivocal lesson of thousands of years
of artificial selection is that cross-breeding (hybridization) - even
of two lines of inferior genetic stock - yields valuable genotypes.
Inter-marriage between races, groups in the population, ethnic groups,
and clans is thus bound to improve the species' chances of survival
more than any eugenic scheme.
The Myth of the Right to Life
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
I. The Right to Life
Generations of malleable Israeli children are brought up on the story
of the misnamed Jewish settlement Tel-Hai ("Mount of Life"), Israel's
Alamo. There, among the picturesque valleys of the Galilee, a
one-armed hero named Joseph Trumpeldor is said to have died, eight
decades ago, from an Arab stray bullet, mumbling: "It is good to die
for our country." Judaism is dubbed "A Teaching of Life" - but it
would seem that the sanctity of life can and does take a back seat to
some overriding values.
The right to life - at least of human beings - is a rarely questioned
fundamental moral principle. In Western cultures, it is assumed to be
inalienable and indivisible (i.e., monolithic). Yet, it is neither.
Even if we accept the axiomatic - and therefore arbitrary - source of
this right, we are still faced with intractable dilemmas. All said,
the right to life may be nothing more than a cultural construct,
dependent on social mores, historical contexts, and exegetic systems.
Rights - whether moral or legal - impose obligations or duties on
third parties towards the right-holder. One has a right AGAINST other
people and thus can prescribe to them certain obligatory behaviors and
proscribe certain acts or omissions. Rights and duties are two sides
of the same Janus-like ethical coin.
This duality confuses people. They often erroneously identify rights
with their attendant duties or obligations, with the morally decent,
or even with the morally permissible. One's rights inform other people
how they MUST behave towards one - not how they SHOULD or OUGHT to act
morally. Moral behavior is not dependent on the existence of a right.
Obligations are.
To complicate matters further, many apparently simple and
straightforward rights are amalgams of more basic moral or legal
principles. To treat such rights as unities is to mistreat them.
Take the right to life. It is a compendium of no less than eight
distinct rights: the right to be brought to life, the right to be
born, the right to have one's life maintained, the right not to be
killed, the right to have one's life saved, the right to save one's
life (wrongly reduced to the right to self-defense), the right to
terminate one's life, and the right to have one's life terminated.
None of these rights is self-evident, or unambiguous, or universal, or
immutable, or automatically applicable. It is safe to say, therefore,
that these rights are not primary as hitherto believed - but
derivative.
The Right to be Brought to Life
In most moral systems - including all major religions and Western
legal methodologies - it is life that gives rise to rights. The dead
have rights only because of the existence of the living. Where there
is no life - there are no rights. Stones have no rights (though many
animists would find this statement abhorrent).
Hence the vitriolic debate about cloning which involves denuding an
unfertilized egg of its nucleus. Is there life in an egg or a sperm
cell?
That something exists, does not necessarily imply that it harbors
life. Sand exists and it is inanimate. But what about things that
exist and have the potential to develop life? No one disputes the
existence of eggs and sperms - or their capacity to grow alive.
Is the potential to be alive a legitimate source of rights? Does the
egg have any rights, or, at the very least, the right to be brought to
life (the right to become or to be) and thus to acquire rights? The
much trumpeted right to acquire life pertains to an entity which
exists but is not alive - an egg. It is, therefore, an unprecedented
kind of right. Had such a right existed, it would have implied an
obligation or duty to give life to the unborn and the not yet
conceived.