I don’t read much popular
science, but recently in a local bookshop I picked up Adam Rutherford’s A
Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (2016) which is a very
readable introduction to modern genetics and its historical background. At one
point he illustrates the hazards of inbreeding by telling the tragic story of
Charles the Second of Spain who died in 1700 aged thirty nine, but after a lifetime
of painful illness and distressing incapacity. When people marry out of their
family then after six generations they will have sixty-two different ancestors;
after eight the number rises to two hundred and fifty-four. But because of the
marriage of cousins to cousins, uncles to nieces, and disregarding the
possibility of unsanctioned incest, Charles the Second had just thirty-two sixth-generation
ancestors and a mere eighty-two eighth generation ancestors. “This is not
desirable”, comments Rutherford at page 190, notably because the probability of
a recessive congenital disorder being activated dramatically increases.
A few pages later (page 200)
Rutherford tells us that in 2005 one United Kingdom ethnic group produced 3.4%
of all live births but 30% of all babies with recessive congenital disorders.
He then goes on to discuss genetic counselling as a way of reducing such
outcomes which in practice arise largely from repeated first cousin marriages,
which are allowed in English law. But I was shocked by his figures, which I had
never come across before, and felt that genetic counselling sounded like a
feeble response. But how to think through the problem in a dispassionate way?
I imagined using something
like John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. In his major 1971 book A Theory of
Justice, Rawls tries to show what kind of social contract individuals
would agree to if they were obliged to decide not knowing important facts about
themselves as individuals. So, for example, if behind the veil of ignorance you
did not know whether you would turn out to be male or female when the veil is
lifted, then it is most unlikely that you would agree to a public decision
making method which excluded females – or males, for that matter – from any
franchise. You would tend to favour universal suffrage which minimises your
risk of being disadvantaged and maximises the opportunity which others,
thinking along the same lines, would be willing to grant you.
In the case I am trying to
consider, those behind the veil of ignorance have not yet been conceived.
Nonetheless, these potential persons can be imagined as listeners to a genetics
lecture which informs them, among other things, that their risks of being born
severely disabled are greatly multiplied if first cousins are allowed to
conceive children, especially if done repeatedly. They are given figures and
the problem of recessive genes explained. They are told that the risk of being
born disabled is greatly reduced when the law forbids conception between such
closely related individuals. Eventually, they have to decide on the level of
risk they are willing to accept in formulating one of society’s fundamental
laws, the law which sets out with whom you may and may not conceive
children. (So fundamental are
incest laws that we rarely pause to reflect that they are, in fact, always our
foundational eugenic policies).
This kind of risk question
has been posed in other ways for other life and death issues. In a 1785 classic
work on majority voting, the title now usually translated as Essay on
the Application of Mathematics to the Theory of Decision-Making, the Marquis de Condorcet pointed out that
when the death penalty is provided as a possible punishment in any society,
there is always the possibility that an innocent person will be executed – and
that is irreversible. So he asks us to consider the question: What
probability would you accept for an outcome in which you yourself might be
executed though innocent?
From the point of view of the
unconceived, the choice seems fairly straightforward whether you think along
Rawlsian or Condorcetian lines. Though you stand to lose something from
outlawing a host of close relative reproductive relationships – you will never
get to be Philip the Second of Spain - this potential loss of benefit is
minimal compared to the risk of being born to a life of pain and discomfort
which may be very short and may, unfortunately, be quite long. You will listen
to the geneticists and you will outlaw reproductive relationships which carry a
high risk of causing you serious harm if you are born within them.
This calculus done from the
standpoint of the as yet unconceived is quite different from that deployed by
those entering genetic counselling. They are being asked the question, Do
you want to risk having a seriously disabled child? not the
question Do you want to risk being one? Those counselled are
real, existing people. They may be under family pressure to start a family
together. They may be in love. They may be gamblers. They may not believe in
science. They are unlikely to be thinking of the fact that their choices may
well yield very large health care bills, to be paid for out of other people’s
taxes. Overall, they are not well placed to answer the question in terms of the
best interests of an as yet unconceived child.
In other words, though adults
normally think otherwise, their situation in real life is not always one where
they can be assumed to be good judges for children, still less for children who
have not yet been conceived. Both veil of ignorance reasoning and Condorcetian
probabilistic reasoning suggest that our laws about who you can and can’t have
children with are lax, and that the fall-back of genetic counselling
unreasonably favours the interests of the living over those of the unconceived.
Trevor
Pateman explores other gaps and failures
in our moral thinking in essays included in his The
Best I Can Do (2016) and Silence Is
So Accurate (2017)
