Liberal Eugenics - Nicholas Agar

 

La première phrase de cet ouvrage au sujet sensible : 

Many of my friends and colleagues were somewhat incredulous when I told them that I was writing a book defending eugenics. 

La thèse est très simple : l'eugénisme a mauvaise réputation à cause du nazisme, mais l'eugénisme libéral, lui, a un fort potentiel positif. Evidemment, il y a un tas de problèmes éthiques qui se posent, et l'auteur fait de son mieux pour les explorer. 

Je le dirais ainsi : il est facile a postériori de voir d'un bon oeil les progrès techniques qui ont amélioré le sort humain. Il est également naturel d'avoir peur de changements technologiques dont les effets délétaires potentiels sont évidents. La technique met entre les mains de l'humanité des outils à double tranchant. L'ingéniérie génique est un de ces outils. Il est tout à fait possible que dans un futur indéterminé il soit faisable, à peu de frais, de modifier le génome de sa progéniture. Il est pertinent de réfléchir aux implications de cette possibilité.

Comme j'aime le dire, la sélection d'un(e) partenaire sexuel dans le but d'avoir d'avoir des enfants est une forme d'eugénisme à échelle individuelle. On choisit quelqu'un dont on valorise les caractéristiques dans le but de reproduire ces caractéristiques (que ce soit conscient ou non). C'est la liberté reproductive, un principe très commun :

Reproductive freedom as it is currently recognized in liberal societies encompasses the choice of whether or not to reproduce, with whom to reproduce, when to reproduce, and how many times to reproduce. What I call liberal eugenics adds the choice of certain of your children’s characteristics to this list of freedoms. At the book’s centre are powerful genetic technologies that will enable prospective parents to make such a choice

We would be rejecting authoritarian eugenics, the idea that the state should have sole responsibility for determining what counts as a good human life, in favour of what I will call liberal eugenics. On the liberal  approach to human improvement, the state would not presume to make  any eugenic choices. Rather it would foster the development of a wide range of technologies of enhancement ensuring that prospective parents were fully informed about what kinds of people these technologies would 
make. Parents’ particular conceptions of the good life would guide them in their selection of enhancements for their children.

Cette perspective libérale part du principe qu'il y a une infinité de façons d'être humain, et que les individus sont libres de choisir quels traits ils veulent développer chez eux et quels traits ils peuvent désirer chez leur descendance. 

The freedoms that define liberal eugenics will be defended in the same fashion as other liberal freedoms. Liberal societies are founded on the insight that there are many different, often incompatible ideas about the good life. Some seek huge wealth, others enlightenment; some devote themselves to their families, others to their careers; some commit to political causes, others to football teams; some worship God(s), others would rather go fishing. And this is only to begin to describe the variation in the kinds of lives that people choose for themselves. Living well in a liberal society involves acknowledging the right of others to make choices that do not appeal to us.

Prospective parents may ask genetic engineers to introduce into their embryos combinations of genes that correspond with their particular conception of good life. Yet they will acknowledge the right of their fellow citizens to make completely different eugenic choices.

We might think of diversity as a purely instrumental good, something to be sought because it promotes the interests of individuals. Or we may count diversity an intrinsic good, something to be valued regardless of its relationship with the interests of individuals.  

Évidemment, il y aurait des limites à ce droit étendu de liberté reproductive : l'établissement de ces limites, de ces régulations, occupe une bonne partie du livre. J’apprécie par exemple le problème éthique suivant : deux lesbiennes sourdes qui veulent du sperme d'un donneur sourd pour avoir un enfant sourd. Acceptable ou pas ? L'auteur, comme moi, tend vers le non.

J’apprécie particulièrement le développement suivant, critique d'un certain utilitarisme :

The notion that we must genetically engineer every human being to be as emotionally upbeat as possible is absurd. A personality that behavioural geneticists may describe as anxious, depressed, angry and hostile, others might consider cautious, sombre, sceptical and intolerant of fools. We all know people leading perfectly worthwhile lives, but whose characters correspond with the second list, and it is hard to believe that their very existence would be immoral in the era of human enhancement. The abandonment of a hedonistic conception of human ends offers one way to escape this implication. Preference utilitarians think that instead of maximizing the number of pleasant sensations and minimizing the number of unpleasant ones we should be trying to maximize the satisfaction of preferences and minimize their frustration.’ This theory comports better with our intuitions about the way we should live. Most of us do not set the accumulation of units of pleasure as life’s single aim; rather we pursue goals involving family, careers and friends and we consider a good life to be one in which many of these significant goals are achieved. Preference utilitarians can readily grant that being naturally sombre does not stand in the way of a satisfactory existence; many people who have sunny temperaments nonetheless fail to satisfy their most important desires, something that many of the less temperamentally buoyant achieve. This variant of utilitarianism also gives strongly counterintuitive answers to questions about human genetic engineering. For example, Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer wonder whether it would be ‘possible — and desirable? — to attempt to genetically engineer people whose capacities and goals, while possibly truncated, are in harmony with their limited passions?” The goal of designing humans who are both limited to easily satisfiable preferences and meet the criteria for personhood is likely to pose technological difficulties for enhancers. But the claim that if feasible it should be mandatory seems even more absurd than the idea of compulsory 5-HTTLPR therapy. 

On voit apparaitre la tension classique entre satisfaction et sens. Les progrès techniques, qui détruisent les façons traditionnelles d'envisager le sens, forcent à le réinventer :

Consider the moral image of food finding. Finding, cultivating and preparing food were the most difficult and time-consuming of our distant ancestors’ activities. The hunting of certain animals required teamwork and entailed a risk of death; crops would be planted only to fail. Technology has transformed the significance of food and of the methods historically used to procure it. Although many people fish and hunt recreationally, these activities are travesties of the fishing and hunting of our ancestors.We get food in other ways. But putting a jar of pasta sauce in a supermarket trolley has little of the significance of a successful hunt on the African savannah; it is a comparatively meaningless activity for us. To use Kass’s language, modern supermarkets and fishing rods sever the satisfaction of desires from the activities that have historically been their foundations. The question we must ask is whether their advent has taken meaning from our lives. An affirmative answer to this question ignores the propensity for the human mind to invest things with meaning. Technology has displaced — but not destroyed — the meaning associated with procuring and preparing of food. 

Ces questions me passionnent. Je ressens profondément, intiment, la perte de sens liée au progrès technique. J'ai l'impression que mon cerveau est fait pour évoluer dans une tribu de chasseurs-cueilleurs, pour passer ses journées dans la nature, à interagir avec le monde végétal et animal, à vivre avec quelques dizaines de persones, à se demander ce qu'il y a derrière la colline suivante, et à aller voir... J'ai l'impression que tout ce que je fais, tout ce vers quoi je tends, est un tentative impossible pour retrouver cet état d'être pour lequel je suis fait. Ceci dit, je résiste à la naïve tentation primitiviste. Il n'y pas d'autre option que de vivre avec son temps. Les conditions changent, et changeront encore, inlassablement. L'évolution et ses mécanismes font le reste.

Si les "dons" sont issus d'un hasard génétique et environnemental (où on nait, l'éducation, etc.), en quoi ont-ils plus de valeur que s'ils avaient été favorisés par l'ingénierie génétique ? D'où viendrait la valeur de ce dont on a hérité par hasard ? Pourquoi ne pas chercher à multiplier ces traits positifs ?

Insisting on the preservation of natural advantages sounds a bit like withholding remedial literacy classes on the grounds that those with a natural aptitude for language do not require them. 

Fukuyama seeks to pass different moral judgements on humans genetically engineered to be intelligent or athletically gifted from those he passes on humans who possess these characteristics as the result of nature’s random recombination of genetic material.  

J'aime aussi les implication sur l'idée de liberté. Tous les traits négatifs innés (maladies, handicaps, etc.) imposent des réductions évidentes à la liberté individuelle. On pense moins aisément aux manques d'opportunités à la liberté imposés par le manque de traits positifs. La comparaison avec l'environnement est facile : où l'on nait, dans quel milieu on nait, impose d'énormes contraintes à notre liberté. Plus on nait dans un milieu favorisé, riche, cultivé, connecté, etc., plus on a d'opportunités. Ou au minimum on a des opportunités différentes, qu'on ne choisit pas. Evidemment, on peut se retrouver dans une situation de course à l'armement génétique, d'où les régulations.

We have a good idea of how enhancement technologies might cause suffering. However, more needs to be said about the second kind of harm: the reduction of freedom. 

Theories of positive freedom specify that I am not free to do something unless I am capable of doing it. 

It does not require that parents use enhancement technologies to expand their children’s real freedom, or to have children who have greater real freedom than those they would otherwise have had. Instead, it demands only that they do not, in their pursuit of their eugenic visions, reduce their children’s real freedom, or have children with less real freedom than those they would otherwise have had.

Et l'ingéniérie génique comparée plus directement encore à l'environnement : 

Parents are free to improve their children’s intelligence and physical prowess by selecting their schooling or diet. NURTURE supports a freedom to achieve the same ends by genetic engineering.

If we are permitted to produce certain traits by modifying our children’s environments, then we are also permitted to produce them by modifying their genomes.

Et ci-dessous un point capital : le lien de causalité entre génotype et vie menée est indéniable, mais pourtant extrêmement difficile à contrôler et même à comprendre. On peut très bien modifier des gènes dont on connait le rôle et se retrouver avec un enfant qui ne fera absoluement pas ce qu'on espérait de lui :  

Any society that gives people choices about their lives is bound to make unreliable the link between any particular combination of genes and a particular life plan. This does not reflect any deficit in genomic knowledge. Rather, it reflects facts about how people arrive at their life plans. A wide variety of environmental factors combine with any genetic predispositions to provide us with our life plans. 

The difference between selecting a life plan and raising its probability is a significant one. Were prospective parents to be able to choose their child’s life plan then they could justify equipping her with the specific set of capabilities required for that plan. If they can only raise the probability that a life plan will be chosen, they must make provision for the eventuality of their child’s rejecting their choice. This is to say: they must respect their child’s autonomy, ensuring that he comes into existence able lead a lifestyle founded on values opposed to those of his parents. Herein lies autonomy’s significance for genetic engineers. The inability to select a life plan means that we must be cautious in our attempts to enhance capacities. Parents who pursue ambitious educational strategies risk ignoring choices that their children have already made about their futures. Those who enhance by means of genetic engineering must admit their ignorance of the kind of life their child will lead. Deprived of this information, they should ensure that their use of enhancement technologies equips their child for any choices that he might make.