Monash Bioeth. Rev. (2018) 35:24–35
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-018-0081-2
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Defending eugenics

From cryptic choice to conscious selection
Jonathan Anomaly1

Published online: 26 May 2018
© The Author(s) 2018

Abstract For most of human history children have been a byproduct of sex rather
than a conscious choice by parents to create people with traits that they care about.
As our understanding of genetics advances along with our ability to control reproduction and manipulate genes, prospective parents have stronger moral reasons to
consider how their choices are likely to affect their children, and how their children
are likely to affect other people. With the advent of cheap and effective contraception, and the emergence of new technologies for in vitro fertilization, embryo selection, and genetic engineering, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify rolling
the genetic dice by having children without thinking about the traits they will have.
It is time to face up to the awesome responsibilities that accompany our reproductive
choices.
Keywords

Eugenics · Embryo Selection · Genetic Engineering · Liberal Eugenics

1 Introduction
The title of this essay is deliberately provocative. Eugenics can be thought of as any
attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that enable them to thrive. Nearly everyone agrees that parents should provide an environment that promotes the welfare of their children. Advocates of eugenics add that
we should also manipulate biology to promote well-being, provided we can do so
without imposing undue risk on our children or on other people with whom they
will share the planet.

* Jonathan Anomaly
jonathan.anomaly@duke.edu
1

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

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In defending eugenics, I want to reclaim the spirit of authors like Francis Galton
and Charles Darwin, who believed that our reproductive obligations change with our
understanding of biology and our capacity to control it. Defending eugenics does not
commit us to endorsing state-sponsored coercion, nor to the parochial views held
by some advocates of eugenics in the early twentieth century. Likewise, defending eugenics does not commit us to genetic determinism, according to which genes
determine every important aspect of our personality. No credible scientist believes
this (Sesardic 2005). Rather, the scientific consensus is that virtually every trait that
influences our personality and our likelihood of living a good life—including intelligence, health, empathy, and impulse control—has a substantial genetic component
(Bouchard 2004; Polderman et al. 2015; Plomin et al. 2016).
I’ll begin with an overview of the problem that motivates eugenics, then describe
the widely shared moral principles to which eugenicists have appealed. I’ll end with
tentative policy proposals that aim to reverse current dysgenic trends, and increase
the extent to which our reproductive choices produce future people who thrive.

2 Demographic trends
Reproductive choices constitute a massive intergenerational collective action problem.1 In nearly every developed country in the world people who are well-suited to
have children have relatively low birth rates, yet future people would be better off if
people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children. The
collective action problem that reproductive choices create is much harder to solve
than anthropogenic climate change, antibiotic resistance, and other problems with a
similar structure. It is also much more dangerous to try to solve. Charles Darwin recognized the problem of dysgenic reproductive trends and the perils of possible solutions.2 His cousin Francis Galton, a polymath who founded the eugenics movement,
shared Darwin’s diagnosis but was more optimistic about solutions.3
Darwin argued that social welfare programs for the poor and sick are a natural
expression of our sympathy, but also a danger to future populations if they encourage people with serious congenital diseases and heritable traits like low levels of
impulse control, intelligence, or empathy to reproduce at higher rates than other
people in the population.4 Darwin feared that in developed nations “the reckless,

1

I elaborate on this claim in an earlier essay (Anomaly 2014).
By “dysgenic” I mean the proliferation of people with traits that are detrimental to human welfare. An
example would be a trait like sadism, psychopathy, or extremely low intelligence.
3
Though Galton’s project was not new. In the Republic, Socrates asks Glaucon “if care was not taken
in their breeding, your dogs and birds would greatly deteriorate, right?” Glaucon agrees, and Socrates
continues, “the best men must have intercourse with the best women as frequently as possible, and the
opposite is true of the very inferior.” Republic, 459e, first published around 380 BCE.
4
A similar worry that Darwin could not have understood is the problem of “mutational meltdown” first
explored by Hermann Muller, and discussed by evolutionary biologist John Tooby (2016). The problem
is that without the brutal checks of natural selection, mutation load tends to increase across generations.
2

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degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate
than the provident and generally virtuous members” (Darwin 1882, p. 138).5
While Darwin’s language is shocking to contemporary readers, we should take
him seriously. The eugenics programs implemented in Nazi Germany are probably
the main reason most people no longer acknowledge that there might be some truth
to Darwin’s worries. Indeed, because of the racist direction the eugenics movement
took in the United States and Germany, many academics after World War II began
to deny that races exist, that genes matter, and that intelligence or impulse control
are heritable traits that help predict the relative success of different people or groups
(Pinker 2002; Cofnas 2016).
As Steven Pinker argues in the context of individual and group differences in
intelligence, “in recent decades, the standard response to claims of genetic differences has been to deny the existence of intelligence, to deny the existence of races
and other genetic groupings, and to subject proponents to vilification, censorship,
and at times physical intimidation” (2006). These are understandable over-reactions
to the morally abhorrent policies and pseudo-scientific claims—often couched in the
language of eugenics—that led to the Holocaust.
It is striking that in addition to being racist and cruel, Nazi policies had dysgenic
effects. Hitler’s attempt to exterminate Ashkenazi Jews—arguably among the most
intelligent and productive people of the twentieth century6—was not only morally
outrageous, but contrary to what any reasonable eugenics program would hope to
achieve: to produce future people with qualities that we value, including intelligence
and creativity. A truly eugenic program might have encouraged Jews to breed more,
not less. Hitler’s own vision seems to come from the scientifically erroneous view
that there is a “struggle for existence” between races (a frequently misused phrase
borrowed from Darwin), and that by virtue of their relative success, European Jews
threatened the existence or prosperity of Germans. Hitler’s rise to power came not
because of his scientific acumen, but in part because of his ability to scapegoat an
especially successful group, and because of the tragic human tendency to commit
the zero-sum fallacy (according to which, if one group has more wealth or success,
they must have taken it from other groups, rather than adding to the stock of social

5

Darwin expresses some uncertainty whether this is true in contemporary Britain, but concludes that “If
the various checks [of infectious disease, starvation, and involuntary celibacy] do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must
remember that progress is no invariable rule” (1882, p. 140).
6
Informal evidence for this claim comes from the success of Jews around the world even in the presence
of social and legal discrimination, and from the percentage of Nobel prizes and other scientific accolades Jews were awarded in the twentieth century. More rigorous evidence comes from the heritability
of IQ scores (Ashkenazi IQ is the highest in the world, nearly two standard deviations above the global
average). For more on the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence, See Cochran et al. (2006), Cochran and
Harpending (2009, ch. 7), and Wade (2014, ch. 8).

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27

value).7 We should continue to learn from this episode in history, but stop allowing
it to silence any discussion of the merits of eugenic thinking.
In fact, there is increasingly good evidence that Darwin was right to worry about
demographic trends in developed countries. The evidence is sparse because many
people who pursue this research have a hard time getting it funded or published,
due to common worries that it will resurrect racism, classism, and intolerant forms
of eugenics. But evidence exists. For example, a number of authors have found a
negative correlation between IQ and fertility,8 between education and fertility, and,
independently, between income and fertility—especially in developed countries
with robust welfare states and increased opportunities for ambitious and intelligent
women.9 The problem is exacerbated by the fact that people with more education
and income (correlated with higher intelligence), tend not only to have fewer children but also tend to delay reproduction in the pursuit of other goals.
This is consistent with Hermann Muller’s observation that “it is not the having of
children but the prevention of them which today requires the more active, responsible effort, an effort which makes demands on the participants’ prudence, initiative,
skill, and conscience” (1963, p. 253). By contrast, Muller maintains, “persons possessed of greater foresight, and those with keener regard for their family, usually
aim to have a lower than average number of children, in order that they may obtain
higher benefits for those children that they do have, as well as for themselves and
those near to them.” (1963, p. 254).
The demographic pattern Muller identified is partly explained by the high opportunity cost of having children in societies in which successful parents can pursue
other goals (Becker 1981). Another explanation is that when especially successful
people have fewer children, other ambitious people emulate them (Richerson and
Boyd 2005, ch. 5). For example, it is increasingly common for ambitious and compassionate career women to choose to have pets rather than children, or to adopt children in middle age rather than having their own. This trend may have good effects
on the adopted children in the short run but bad effects on the gene pool over the
long run. Substituting cats for kids, or devoting one’s career to caring for other people’s kids while foregoing reproduction oneself, may be an example of pathological
altruism (Oakley 2012). This occurs when pro-social emotions that were adaptive in

7

As Nicholas Wade points out, “Like Chinese immigrant communities, Jews have brought enormous
benefits to the economies in which they worked. Unfortunately their success, like that of the immigrant
Chinese, has in many cases elicited not gratitude but envy, followed by discrimination or murderous
reprisals, a response that reflects more strongly on the greed than the intelligence of their host populations” (2014, p. 213).
8
Demographers use “fertility” to refer to the number of children people choose to have, not their capacity to have children.
9
See for example Teasdale and Owen (2008), Meisenberg (2009, 2010), and Lynn and Harvey (2008).
Intelligence researchers acknowledge the so-called Flynn effect, which refers to the rise in IQ throughout
the world due to environmental improvements like clean water and nutrition, but argue that in developed countries these are already exhausted or near exhaustion, so that the genetic component of IQ may
be sinking even as the environmental component has risen. I should emphasize that IQ is an imperfect
measure of intelligence, and that intelligence is not the only thing that matters. An intelligent sadist
makes him more dangerous rather than more admirable.

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ancestral environments produce behavior that is either counter-adaptive or leads to
its own long-run reduction in modern environments.
Whatever the evidence for dysgenic trends in developed countries, Francis Galton tried to show in his book Hereditary Genius (1869) that qualities we care about
tend to run in families, and that changing the norms surrounding reproduction could
dramatically improve the human population in the same way artificial selection can
improve domesticated animals.10 Galton’s followers included playwright George
Bernard Shaw, novelist HG Wells, and the evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane.11
At the turn of the twentieth century, an increasing number of influential intellectuals
sought to promote education about heredity and shape social norms so that women
would be encouraged to carefully choose the fathers of their children. Some of the
more fervent eugenicists, many of whom overestimated their understanding of the
relevant science, began to promote statutes that would allow states to involuntarily
sterilize citizens deemed unfit for reproduction. The first eugenic sterilization law
was passed in Indiana in 1907. By the time Virginia passed a similar law in 1924, it
was following the lead of 15 other American states.

3 Moral Principles
In 1927 the United States Supreme Court voted by an 8-1 margin to uphold the state
of Virginia’s right to sterilize “feeble-minded” citizens. While the language of Buck
v Bell may seem callous, and the evidence in the case was flimsy, the moral foundations of the decision are defensible. Writing for the majority, Justice Holmes argued
that the Virginia statute was premised on the ideas that “the health of the patient and
the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives…without serious pain or substantial danger to life…”12 Controversial
as this statement is, on a charitable reading, the moral principles the court highlights include coercing “mental defectives” (who can’t make competent choices) to
undergo surgery only if it involves little danger or pain, and if it either makes the
person being coerced better off, or prevents them from bearing children who are
likely to impose significant harm on future people.
In the penultimate paragraph, Holmes compares the sacrifice of someone who is
involuntarily sterilized with the sacrifice of soldiers drafted into war:

10

Showing that a trait runs in families was an imperfect way of showing a genetic component in an
age before genomics. This method can still yield useful results. For example, economist Gregory Clark
(2014) uses more sophisticated data analysis than Galton had available to try to disentangle social and
genetic factors in explaining social mobility and success.
11
A character in Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman lamented that “The day is coming when the
great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six-roomed villa will
rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will
delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; while the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and
ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success,
of art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility” (1903, p. 159).
12
Buck v Bell, 274 US 200 (1927).

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We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best
citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who
already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt
to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with
incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The
principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.11
In the final line of the decision Justice Holmes cites an earlier case (Jacobson
v. Massachusetts) in which the Supreme Court upheld a law that required a Swedish immigrant to vaccinate his children against smallpox (despite the father’s objections) in order to prevent serious harm to the child, and through the child, other
people.
While the language of the decision is compatible with a variety of moral theories, the core principle is that a citizen can be required to undergo a procedure if the
cost to him is trivial compared to the social benefits. Nearly all moral theories hold
this view, though people disagree about the magnitude and certainty of benefits we
would need in order to justify the expected costs to the person being vaccinated,
sterilized, or otherwise coerced. Compulsory sterilization is far more controversial
than compulsory vaccination because of the degree of invasiveness, and the potential for abuse. Nevertheless, the following moral principles seem to be expressed in
Buck v Bell:
1. The state may (in some cases) restrict someone’s liberty if their mental capacity
undermines their ability to make voluntary choices, and if their choices put them
at serious risk of causing far-reaching and irreversible harm to themselves.
2. The state may (in some cases) restrict someone’s liberty when leaving them free
to act as they wish poses serious risks of harm to others.
3. The state may (in some cases) require us to act in ways that promote social welfare
when we find ourselves in collective action problems in which each of us has an
incentive to act one way, but most of us are better off if most people act in another
way.
4. When the state has compelling reasons to coerce its citizens in accordance with
one or more of the three principles above, it should do so in a way that restricts
liberty least, and involves the least amount of pain or sacrifice.
The plausibility of these principles in other contexts strongly suggests that much of
the vehement rejection of eugenic policies after the Second World War was about
empirical assumptions rather than moral principles. More specifically, people disagree about issues like the extent of our knowledge of genetics, the safety of eugenic
procedures, and the ability of government agents to make the right call on whether
a particular person or group has heritable characteristics that are likely to be transmitted to children who will live very bad lives, or adversely affect other people. I
argue that we can use these moral principles to inform a more cautious approach to

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eugenics which places more weight on individual liberty and less confidence in the
wisdom of state agents than early manifestations of eugenics did.13 Some call this
approach liberal eugenics (Agar 2004).

4 Policy proposals
Many people distinguish negative from positive eugenics, and coercive from noncoercive eugenics. The idea is that negative eugenics tries to sift out undesirable
psychological or physical characteristics (like psychopathy or Tay Sachs disease),
while positive eugenics seeks to increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare (like creativity or a healthy immune system).14 Coercive
eugenics uses force to achieve these ends, while non-coercive eugenics uses education, information, and social norms to achieve them. The distinctions are not sharp,
and they do not map onto what is right or wrong in any obvious way (Gyngell and
Selgelid 2016). It is best, then, to focus on the justifiability of particular public policy proposals.
4.1 Free contraception
The advent of reliable contraception—colloquially called “birth control”—was seen
by some of its greatest proponents as a way to liberate women: to give them control
over their lives by freeing them from the shackles of continual pregnancy and the
consequences of rape. More generally, contraception allows women to invest in education rather than cosmetics, which is good for them, and for society. But some of
birth control’s most famous proponents also saw the potential for it to have eugenic
effects, since it allows women to decide who fathers their children, and when to have
children. Contraception, in other words, allows women to have sex for fun, but to
carefully decide when and how and with whom to have children.
According to Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, “Birth Control…
means not merely the limitation of births, but the application of intelligent guidance
over the reproductive power. It means the substitution of reason and intelligence for
the blind play of instinct” (1922, ch. 2). Without contraception, Sanger feared, civilization “will be faced with the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that
fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism” (1922, ch. 4). While Sanger’s

13

Versions of these principles can be found in recent work on the ethics of reproduction. See Dan Brock
(2005), and David Benatar (2011). Many critics of eugenics have been so concerned with condemning
past policies, that they often fail to distinguish moral principles from empirical claims (Buchanan 2007).
This has led to moral grandstanding and motivated reasoning among its critics, leading many to minimize the importance of genes in shaping personality traits and capacities.
14
Whether we describe an action as “promoting social welfare” or “not reducing social welfare”
depends on where we draw the baseline. The baseline problem suggests that we cannot come up with a
simple answer in distinguishing “making better” and “not making worse.” In thinking about whether we
are promoting welfare or preventing harm it is always worth asking, “compared to what?”.

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language is harsh, her point is plausible.15 Contraception can prevent unwanted
pregnancies, the social consequences of which are borne broadly.16 Since each of
us has an interest in promoting an environment in which current and future people
flourish, there are good reasons to make contraception freely available for all. This is
one of the most cost-effective measures governments can take, and it can be justified
by its ability to enhance individual autonomy and social welfare.
4.2 Genetic education and counseling
The division of cognitive labor that market society occasions allows us to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge, but it also renders people (rationally) ignorant about
how most things work, including the universe in general, and the human body in
particular (Hayek 1945). Most people apparently do not want to understand cosmology, biology, or genetics. And they don’t need to in order to live reasonably successful lives, even if their success depends on other people knowing little bits about how
things around them work—like microwave ovens, human kidneys, nuclear power
plants, internal combustion engines, etc. All of us depend on these things working
well, and on the ability of experts to repair or replace them when they fail, but very
few people need to know how any or all of these work.
The problem comes when we bear the costs of other people’s ignorance. In a
democracy we share the undesirable policy consequences of one another’s ignorant
or irrational votes (Huemer 2015). And in a society that shares at least some of the
costs and benefits of productive work, the consequences of people reproducing at
random are felt by all of us. This suggests that taxpayers should be willing to finance
genetic testing and the provision of genetic information to prospective parents, with
the goal of helping them make informed reproductive choices that will benefit their
children, and protect other people from harm. Since state provision of education
or information always has the potential to turn into propaganda (Mill 1859, ch. 5),
there may be reasons to publicly finance its private provision by teachers and doctors in a competitive market. Finally, in addition to education, as genetic engineering becomes safe and affordable, barriers to accessing socially beneficial genetic
enhancements should be removed.

15

Sanger’s claim about the link between genes and crime, long ignored or repudiated by academics,
appears to be borne out to some extent by twin studies. See Barnes et al. (2014).
16
The social consequences of reproductive choices spill across borders and generations. This suggests
that citizens in wealthy countries have strong reasons to support subsidizing contraception for those in
poor countries. In particular, the population in most African countries is predicted to explode over the
next century, and while population growth per se is not a bad thing, it is bad when it occurs in countries
that rely on Western technology for food and medicine, but that cannot support their own population
through endogenous economic growth within stable political institutions.

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4.3 Incentives and penalties
The current demographics of Western countries are troubling, as people with a
higher IQ, more education, and greater income reproduce at relatively low levels.
Some have suggested paying people who would make good parents to have children. But this misunderstands the problem of opportunity cost: most people with
higher intelligence or more money don’t reproduce less because they can’t afford
children; they do so because they have many other valuable ways of spending their
time, including writing books, volunteering, taking exotic vacations, and advancing
their careers.
States might improve the situation by mandating paid parental leave in the workplace, so there are fewer costs to temporarily leaving work to take care of children.
Sweden has among the most generous paid parental leave laws in the world, and it
is among the few developed countries with a replacement birthrate. Some studies
suggest that strong family leave laws are the primary reason for its demographic stability (Hoem 2005). But the evidence is tainted by the fact that native-born Swedes
have below-replacement fertility, and foreign-born immigrants from Somalia have
more children, thus bringing Sweden close to replacement levels (Tollebrant 2017).
This makes the effect of family leave laws a little unclear.
Some authors have suggested paying some people not to reproduce, or instituting
a parental licensing scheme. Francis Crick tentatively proposed both ideas at a symposium on eugenics (1963, pp. 276, 284).17 In principle, there are reasons to support
policies like these. But they raise real worries about corruption by bureaucrats, black
markets for pregnancy, and political legitimacy: in constitutional democracies, controversial policies cannot produce their desired effects over the long run unless there
is some degree of transparency and public support.
The rationale for any justified licensing scheme is that some activities require
competence to safely perform, and those who engage in them without adequate skill
or foresight are likely to seriously harm other people (LaFollette 1980). Some parents lack the desire to take care of their children. This is illustrated by the fact that
many single mothers sue unwilling fathers for court-mandated child support. Other
parents abuse their children, or lack the means to provide food, shelter, medical care,
and education to their children.
The typical response is for the state to step in and pay for all of these things, and
in extreme cases to remove children from their parents and put them in foster care.
But it would be more cost-effective to prevent unwanted pregnancies than treating
their consequences, especially if we could achieve this goal by subsidizing the voluntary use of contraception. It may also be more desirable from the standpoint of
future people.
The most compelling reason (though certainly not a decisive reason) for supporting parental licensing is that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence, and

17

The conference was attended by other Nobel laureates like Hermann Muller and JBS Haldane, and
public intellectuals like Julian Huxley whose brother Aldous wrote the eugenic dystopia Brave New
World.

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empathy have significant genetic components.18 What matters is not just that some
parents are unwilling or unable to take care of their children; but that in many cases
they are passing along an undesirable genetic endowment.
As John Stuart Mill argued:
It is not in the matter of education only, that misplaced notions of liberty prevent moral obligations on the part of parents from being recognised, and legal
obligations from being imposed… The fact itself, of causing the existence of
a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human
life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a life which may be either a
curse or a blessing—unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have
at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that
being (1859, ch. 5).
Mill expressed ambivalence about imposing coercive laws on parents, but was clear
that policies requiring prospective parents to demonstrate their ability to care for
children “are interferences of the State to prohibit a mischievous act—an act injurious to others, which ought to be a subject of reprobation, and social stigma, even
when it is not deemed expedient to superadd legal punishment” (1859, ch. 5).
For a parental licensing scheme to be fair, we would need to devise criteria that
are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm
on their children or (through their children) on other people. This is hard enough.
It would be even more difficult to select appropriate penalties to impose on those
who fail a reproductive licensing test, but have children anyway. One way to enforce
licensing is to impose fines or other costs on those who have children without a
license. Despite its unpopularity in many states around the world, American judges
occasionally order “deadbeat dads” who father children they can’t support to stop
reproducing, though the order is difficult to enforce, especially since most states lack
eugenic sterilization provisions. As a rule of thumb, though, states should apply as
little coercion as possible to facilitate the emergence of future people with traits that
enable them to thrive.19

18

Scientists distinguish the cognitive and affective components of empathy (the first concerns our ability to understand other people, especially their emotions, and the second concerns our ability to react
appropriately to someone else’s emotional states). Both are strongly influenced by genes, and the absence
of either or both is associated with narcissism, psychopathy, or autism (Baron-Cohen 2012). On the other
hand, too much empathy can lead to neuroticism and pathological altruism. So there is presumably an
optimal range of empathy outside of which children are more likely to develop disorders.
19
To the extent that informal social sanctions work, these are preferable to coercive laws. But informal
sanctions often fail to work well in large and anonymous groups, especially when the costs and benefits
of our choices are spread thinly, and accrue mainly to future people. This may give us reason to endorse
more freedom to move between political communities with different rules and norms (Nozick 1974, ch.
10). But this freedom wouldn’t address the demographic worry that the proportion of people in the world
making eugenic reproductive choices may be shrinking, which is a problem for distant generations of
people who share a single planet, if not a single political community.

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5 Conclusion
Public policies cannot create a eugenic utopia. In fact, passing legal mandates
and licensing requirements is often more dangerous and less effective than relying on voluntary choice to achieve the same results. It may be desirable to increase
informed consumer choice by subsidizing contraception and improving access to
education about genetics and reproductive technology so that people can make conscious choices about the characteristics of their children. Changing reproductive
norms can also go some way in encouraging eugenic choices. For example, as it
becomes more socially acceptable to use sperm and egg donors, to screen embryos,
and to use surrogates, the outcome will likely be collectively beneficial. Many people who have a visceral fear of these procedures are even more apprehensive about
genetically modifying embryos. But arguments can change attitudes.
In recent years, influential authors have argued that we have a moral obligation to
produce children with the best chance of the best life (Savulescu and Kahane 2009),
and that many opponents of biomedical technology have a discredited teleological view of human evolution (Buchanan and Powell 2011). I have offered a guardedly optimistic account of how some public policies might increase the extent to
which our reproductive choices are both individually rational and collectively desirable. But I concede that I may be wrong about any of the measures I’ve considered.
Sometimes the best policy is not to have one.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and
the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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