Philosophy in the Trenches : Reflections on TheEugenic Mind Project

Robert Wilson’s The Eugenic Mind Project is a major achievement of engaged scholarship and socially relevant philosophy and history of science that exemplifies both the virtues and vices of interdisciplinarity. The virtues of his philosophical analysis include drawing attention to the emerging “fragile sciences of sociality” (e.g., criminology, sociology, and anthropology) and how their classification practices were deeply enmeshed in the toxic mixture we label “eugenics,” his argument that the persistent desire for human betterment derives from our evolutionary heritage of prosociality, and his application of these insights to present manifestations of eugenics. The vices, though few, revolve around the underdevelopment of different strands of the argument, such as differential manifestations through history of eugenic attitudes derived from prosociality and closer attention to the dynamics of category reification in social science classification practices. Overall, the book is a rich combination of scholarly analysis and personal narrative that provokes both reflection on and action in light of the eugenic mindset.


A Book Worth Reading
Robert Wilson's The Eugenic Mind Project (Wilson 2018a) is a major achievement of engaged scholarship and socially relevant philosophy and history of science.It exemplifies the virtues (and a few of the vices) of interdisciplinarity.As principal investigator of the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada project, while employed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, Wilson encountered a proverbial big ball of mud with questions and issues that involved local individuals living through a painful set of memories and implicated his institutional home in outstanding moral obligations.It is engaged scholarship because it required building relationships with affected persons and taking responsibility for his institution's legacy, as well as transforming Wilson's own outlook along the way ("my perspective had shifted to that of an ally of survivors of a long-lasting eugenics program" [19]).It is socially relevant philosophy and history of science because it brings to light issues that remain salient today, especially how eugenic themes are ubiquitous in societal discourse and evinced in everyday decisions (Wilson 2018b).It is interdisciplinary because to accomplish this type of analysis requires intellectual gymnastics that range over diverse domains of research: from standpoint theory and disability studies to oral history and governmental policy; from the evolutionary biology of prosociality and variation to conceptual questions about the categorization of human traits and types.
Before probing some of the details, it is valuable to get a bird's eye view of the book.The first part (chapters 1-4) scrutinizes eugenics primarily from a historical vantage point.Here the idea of "standpoint eugenics" is introduced, which refers to understanding eugenics from the first-person perspective of those directly affected by its ideas and their structural manifestation.A crucial element of standpoint theory more generally is that this perspective is (in some sense) epistemically and ethically privileged.This privilege is important for detailing the contours of what Wilson refers to as "The Eugenic Mind"-a mindset or way of thinking that is all too comfortable for people not sufficiently cognizant of the horrors of eugenic reality, both in the past and in the present.Later, in Chapter 9, an epistemology of the systematically marginalized is worked out in detail.
In alignment with the motivations of social change that co-travel with standpoint theory, Wilson seeks to afflict the comforted through a species of interdisciplinary analysis.A healthy dose of history is necessary to this methodology.We need to be reminded regularly that eugenics was motivated by the aim of social betterment through improving the human stock-better living through breeding (apologies to DuPont).Little argument was needed for the claim that hard-won scientific knowledge from animal and crop domestication could (or should) be applied to our own species.Francis Galton just made the logic explicit.Not too long thereafter, public policy put it into action.However, this story is too tidy and numerous scholars have been mapping the heterogeneous and conflicted landscape relevant to a more accurate narrative (see, e.g., Bashford and Levine 2010;Paul 2016).Wilson draws attention to how the emerging "fragile sciences of sociality" (e.g., criminology, sociology, and anthropology) were deeply enmeshed in the toxic mixture we label "eugenics" in retrospect, with the nascent science of genetics only comprising one of its elements.He takes this historical insight and adds an interpretive twist: the desire for human betterment that animates so much of the eugenics movement derives from our evolutionary heritage.We are prosocial by nature, deeply interdependent on one another and oriented to actively perpetuate the interdependency.This is most evident in the vulnerability we exhibit while young.As a slogan: we live because of the goodwill of others.Yet just as every performance measure becomes corrupted upon implementation (Campbell 1979), so too our prosocial tendencies mean we sometimes try too hard to help others, whether they want it or not, with both intended and unintended consequences.The Eugenic Mind is an unwelcome gift bestowed on all of us through the process of evolution in our primate lineage.
Part II (chapters 5-8) displays and explores variations on eugenic themes in contemporary society, which is exactly what one would expect of our continuing prosocial orientation.Contemporary biotechnology trumpets its advances on the premise of ameliorating disease and the promise of a life lived free of suffering (and perhaps also of significance).Sometimes this takes the form of "Big Science," such as in the Human Genome Project; at other times, it is motivated by the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley and manifested in the ever-present market of neoliberalism: "the social relevance of the study of eugenics stems … from the permanent possibility of eugenics gaining purchase through the back door of technologically-enhanced individual choice" (10).What if you could predict a child's IQ from a direct-to-consumer DNA test (Regalado 2018)?Wouldn't that information be "useful" for parents in planning their children's schooling, if not their entire life course?No government policy enforces one decision over another, but social engineering on a grand scale in accord with a eugenic mindset of human improvement might still ensue via reproductive technology.Here we can be cautious about continuities and discontinuities between "eugenics" of the past and "eugenics" of the present (see discussion in Bashford 2010), but Wilson's emphasis is on a common underlying impulse (i.e., the Eugenic Mind).
Wilson holds that we are somewhat discomforted by all of this due to the visibility of public apologies for (not-so-distant) past policies implementing eugenics, especially of the negative variety.(More cynically, court battles were lost and a mea culpa aims to save a few shreds of municipal authority; attempts at legal evasion prior to formal rulings in most cases have been shameful.)However, many from a disadvantaged standpoint have seen a hollowness in these apologies as society speeds ahead with practices that effectively continue both positive and negative eugenics by other means.There is no need for government policies when people assortatively mate by educational attainment and ideology, while genetic screening encourages patterns of decision making in family planning that are influenced subtly by idealized conceptions of humanity.
The final section of the book (chapters 9-10) investigates knowing and agency in marginal communities where eugenics had-and still has-a profound impact on people's lives.Wilson walks us into the center of these concerns via his personal friendship with Leilani Muir , a survivor of confinement and sterilization at the hands of Alberta's provincial government.Although Leilani's case had positive outcomes, including her success in winning a lawsuit against the province in 1996, the legacy is multilayered.Eugenic survivorship pertains not only to those directly affected by the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta but also to "those people with disabilities in our local community who saw and felt in their day-to-day lives very much the same kinds of subhumanization and social exclusion that had been implemented through those laws and policies" (21).It is here that Wilson presses firmly on the tendency to view some patterns of variation in the human population as abnormal and therefore in need of correction.How do we move so easily from a recognition of variation to a categorization of difference with negative valence, which then normatively encourages corrective action?
Instead of offering a crisp, analytic solution to this question, Wilson adopts a different tack.He isolates two issues that make any reflection on eugenics (in all its forms) extraordinarily difficult: institutional complicity and engaged individuality.The institutional complicity in this instance hits close to (actually, directly) home: Professor John MacEachran, a philosopher by training and both chair of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology, and eventually also Provost of the University of Alberta, was the head of the Eugenics Board that formulated the policies Leilani subsequently suffered under.His prolonged role in this capacity from 1928 to 1965 (just seven years before its elimination) meant he was involved in the approval of approximately 4,300 forced sterilizations.In retrospect, the basis for these judgments is odious, especially the empirically specious claim that the so-called mental deficiencies of a patient were heritable.However, MacEachran conceptualized his endeavors as having a philosophical pedigree extending back to ancient Greece, such as in Plato's Republic.
And yet Wilson prohibits our natural proclivity to shame the past and reminds us that a eugenic mindset of human betterment through selective breeding is still alive and kicking.Here the second issue-engaged individuality-moves to the foreground.Leilani was fully present  open access -ptpbio.org in life with a robust sense of her own agency shaped both by her own idiosyncratic preferences and distinctive orientation to the needs of others.The same is true of others categorized as "defective," whether in Alberta's past or our own present: "They had the aspirations, goals, and sense of themselves as agents that are the marks of individuality, and each of them was very much his or her own person" (18).How did the engaged individuality that (no doubt) characterized MacEachran and other officials in various dimensions of their lives misfire with those subjected to confinement and sterilization?At a first approximation, Wilson argues that it is precisely their prosociality and pervasive desire to improve humanity that constituted the conditions of maltreatment.The eugenic mindset originates from and continuously exemplifies the best of intentions.

Virtues
The most virtuous dimension of Wilson's interdisciplinary analysis is its penetrating assessment of our current moment of eugenics (Chapter 7 is where this shines through most clearly; see also Wilson 2018b).In agreement with historical treatments (e.g., Bashford 2010), this is not a moment confined to the margins of society: "The Eugenic Mind [is] now not only explicitly in the squalid quarters of the ignorant, the xenophobic and the extreme, but also more implicitly in mainstream contemporary thought and social practice" (25-26).Wilson exposes that we lack conceptual resources for dealing with this moment.Contemporary bioethics and moral philosophy are suffused with a eugenic mindset that is employed in its endorsement of individual choice in reproductive contexts.This has specific ramifications for those who live (and flourish) with various disabilities, especially those who choose to parent and find themselves subjected to persistent medical paternalism.Wilson shows that many philosophers are tone deaf to the continuity of eugenics past and eugenics present that labels some lives not worth living.Only a few philosophers have made parallel (and heart-rending) arguments based on their own lived experience with loved ones experiencing disabilities (e.g., Kittay 2017), accenting the subhumanizing aspect of having to defend one's very existence because of not (purportedly) manifesting the requisite rational capacities.This is especially noticeable in discourse about those with Down's syndrome.
The Eugenic Mind is frequently expressed in common attitudes among medical practitioners and patients surrounding practices of selective abortion based on the identification of fetal impairments.This categorization of individuals as "defective" often involves a claim (typically implicit) that they will be a burden to society.In the past this took the guise of criminality, but it is increasingly costumed as a moral obligation to effectively use limited resources for future generations through mechanisms of prenatal screening, enshrined in the principle of procreative beneficence and our responsibility to not pass along an "undesirable genetic endowment" (Anomaly 2018;Savulescu 2008).1 To be sure, not every patient who opts for a selective abortion or doctor who recommends it based on a diagnosis of fetal anomaly is so motivated, and there are no easy or straightforward decisions in these situations, especially given that mothers have the majority of caregiving responsibilities for children with disabilities (see discussion in Löwy 2018).However, Wilson's point is that many people-professional and layperson alikeare unaware of how the eugenic mindset plays a subterranean role in their decision-making process.
Another virtue, already hinted at above, is an emphasis on historical perspective that exhibits how the emerging "fragile sciences of sociality" (e.g., criminology, sociology, and anthropology) were central to the eugenic enterprise.Instead of foregrounding the hereditary dimension attributed to the science of genetics, Wilson draws our attention to the practices of measurement and classification in the nascent social sciences.With psychology separating out those labeled with mental deficiencies, anthropology distinguishing more or less civilized races of humans, and sociology designing protocols for detecting criminality, the materials necessary for enacting eugenic policy were coming into focus.Positive and negative eugenic policy was simply implementation, and heredity a background condition for success.This redirects our energies to understanding these measuring and classifying practices.How were these justified?What problems motivated their development?How did particular properties (or lack thereof ) and specific categories take on the positive and negative valence of "fit" and "unfit"?
These questions lead Wilson to an important observation: the eugenic mindset is grounded in the assumption that there are "sorts of people" who can be distinguished based on "marked variation."Particular patterns of variation are presumed significant (e.g., intelligence) and this marked variation facilitates binning people into groups that are more or less desirable by virtue of what marked variation they display."The goal of intergenerational human improvement within the eugenics movement was thus to be achieved by increasing the proportion of higher-quality people in future generations" (33-34).Some sorts of people are of higher quality than others precisely because of how they exhibit specific patterns of marked variation.Others are of lower quality for the same reason but exhibit a different pattern of marked variation, whether that be "feeble-mindedness" (then) or disability (now).The evaluations extended to cultural variation, which meant its removal through assimilationist means such as residential schools, where students were discouraged from learning about or adopting their indigenous ways of life.A critical part of this chain of reasoning is that the patterns of marked variation, whether of positive or negative valence, were inherently intrinsic.The patterns were manifestations of dispositions to be particular sorts of people.This contributed substantially to institutionalization in mental hospitals or mental hygiene clinics as a central plank of the social mechanics of eugenics, which operated as an aggregate indicator of eugenic trait possession.Complicity occurred across institutions, especially with forced residential schooling and sterilization of children.
Although the values at stake in the puzzle of marked variation are baked deep into the constitution of a eugenic mindset, the presence of values is not the problem.In fact, it is quite apposite.If eugenics is seen as a form of applied science, then it aims to accomplish certain goals.Medicine and engineering are no different.The problem revolves around a lack of explicit reflection on the goals of eugenic initiatives.It is hard to quibble with aims such as "reduce suffering," but The Eugenic Mind, according to Wilson, overreaches in assuming what features of humans are desirable or undesirable and not scrutinizing how these assumptions generate kinds or sorts of people, some of which are better and others that are worse.Why is high intelligence desirable and low intelligence undesirable?How do we understand the variation measured for intelligence or other traits?And why would we expect such a tight tracking of the sorts of people exhibiting these features and particular ethnicities?There is too close a resonance between the values that categorized people and anti-immigration laws that kept out specific sorts of people.
A natural question behind the valuations of the eugenic mindset is whether we should consider all or any of these as genuine traits.Certainly, some are now rejected (e.g., criminality).Although Wilson doesn't take up this question directly, he addresses a related concern: What is a eugenic trait?Members of his newfound community who exhibited engaged individuality and had experienced eugenic policies in Alberta did not seem to have anything wrong with them, nor represent an obvious threat to society.But deficiencies that augur a devolution in the human population are exactly what The Eugenic Mind is focused upon.Wilson notes that  open access -ptpbio.orgmany of these traits derive from "untutored, folk knowledge of characteristics of people" (53).This folk knowledge was anchored in the common observation that traits such as intelligence or mental instability cluster in familial lineages.For some researchers, this observation could be refined by the new science of genetics to account for the clustering patterns, but it was not necessary for justifying the observation in the first place.
In close connection with the nature of eugenic traits is variation in those traits and the puzzle of marked variation (Section 5.2).Out of the multitude of variation exhibited by humans, a subset is flagged as more salient (e.g., ethnicity) and frequently given a negative valence (e.g., disability).Wilson has put his finger on something crucial because marked variation is not just about differences among individuals but the categorization of sorts of people.Marked variation serves as a proxy for group structure and commonsense judgments of association.This means the identification of an impairment (e.g., the inability to hear sound) is translated automatically into an evaluative categorization (e.g., member of the deaf community).Persons exhibiting marked variation of a negative valence are shunted into a category of subnormal, no questions asked.Of particular interest here is the pattern of part-whole reasoning: marked variation pertains to parts of the body or aspects of behavior but categorization as subnormal pertains to the whole individual.The resulting classifications are inherently social rather than biological in nature, which means they can be unraveled through attention to their social structure.Wilson's treatment of the social mechanics of wrongful accusation, adapting the work of Judith Herman, is especially powerful in illustrating how a "eugenic" bystander can not only transition to an ally or advocate for those experiencing subhumanization in principle but also become (unwittingly) a perpetrator of this subhumanization in practice, continuing and reinforcing "wrongful accusation" through ubiquitous habits of classifying the marked variation of subnormal individuals and laboring on behalf of future (normal) generations (Chapter 8).
One last virtue in Wilson's analysis worth highlighting is that he is an equal opportunity underminer.Of the various possible responses to eugenics (old and new), he plays no favorites.
Although standpoint theory is central to his account and helps drive home the complicity of the chattering class in eugenics (especially with respect to institutional complicity), it too comes up short in several respects.One of these is the lack of unity that emerges from a reliance on it.Many parents were not only complicit with but sometimes advocates for the application of eugenic policies to their own children.What happens when standpoints diverge?Can a standpoint be discounted by experts in the medical community?If so, how do we reckon with the miserable track record of institutional complicity that medicine displayed in the past?Biopolitics also comes up short in attributing all subhumanizing classifications of individuals with marked variation to the power relations of relatively recent modern institutions (e.g., prisons, hospitals); it neglects the long game of evolutionary history and the contribution of prosociality.Herman's otherwise laudable tripartite model of victim-perpetrator-bystander, which facilitates active involvement of third parties in helping victims, also can encourage advocates to become perpetrators by believing the victim even in cases of wrongful accusation.Analytic epistemology marginalizes standpoint epistemology (despite recent nods toward contextualism), which is an essential component of standpoint eugenics, and therefore hampers the agency that might resist and subvert various manifestations of The Eugenic Mind.However, feminist standpoint epistemology assumed it could generalize from some marginalized agents (e.g., women) to all who are marginalized.This (ironically) constitutes a type of hegemonic maneuver that demotes the concerns and viewpoint of those differently positioned in the human landscape, especially those unable to cultivate and occupy a standpoint.The ubiquity of our subhumanizing tendencies makes whack-a-mole appear easy.

Vices
Interdisciplinary analyses have a common Achilles' heel: underdevelopment.Given the need to weave together a diversity of argument strands, sometimes each component of the skein is thin.The eugenic mindset is everywhere we find humans, according to Wilson, but why does it manifest in such different ways at different times?Perhaps the key under-analyzed point is how some of the regional and national contexts relevant to these differential manifestations through history are slowly being erased in our current age of information dissemination.It is not just that the locus of activity has shifted from governmental policy to individual choice but also that the factors increasingly relevant to influencing those decisions are globalized.
A second dimension of underdevelopment pertains to quantification.Although Wilson does not claim to offer social science analysis, the anecdotes that support his argument could be strengthened considerably with numbers.For example, how representative was the 1920 article "Some Notes on Asexuality; With a Report on Eighteen Cases," singled out from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (84-86)?Although its author, Martin Barr, was an influentially placed doctor in the early twentieth century, Wilson presumes the reprehensible text describing "hereditary irresponsibles" is generally damning.("That this kind of emotionally laden language finds expression not simply in books and journals recognized as vehicles for eugenic propaganda but also in a respected, mainstream medical journal indicates the extent of the infusion of eugenic thought in early twentieth-century medicine" [85].)To what degree can we find these types of discussions in a more distributed fashion within professional journals?If they aren't widespread, why would this count for the "extent of the infusion of eugenic thought"?Or maybe we should focus on what is not said, such as later in mid-twentieth century Alberta when human experimentation involving psychotropic drugs and invasive surgery on institutionalized persons was published without hue and cry (86-88)?Regardless, a degree of quantification for these cases would put Wilson on stronger footing in making the needed interpretive moves of his analysis.
Another dimension of underdevelopment is the flip side of Wilson's equal opportunity undermining.What is the positive alternative for addressing the eugenic mindset?We have already seen that a generalized standpoint theory on its own is inadequate, however much epistemic and ethical privilege might be garnered.This concern is especially visible for Wilson's treatment of prosociality, which ultimately provides his solution to the puzzle of marked variation.The shared lineage of human evolutionary history has yielded cooperative and altruistic dispositions that are critical to fostering the next generation and integrating individuals into the broader community.However, this same heritage is somehow hostile to types or kinds of variation and diversity.Where do we go from here?What constitutes strategic procedures for simultaneously leveraging and mitigating our mixed legacy?Is there a way to reconceptualize variation that is marked and given a negative valence (e.g., disability)?Can we really maintain a perspective that embraces the intrinsic heterogeneity of people?
Wilson describes three strategies for dealing with the increased social coordination that became necessary in human societies (Section 6.3): develop or acquire better internal cognitive processing, distribute this processing over internal and (increasingly) external sources, or adopt some form of group cognition.In the latter case, a shared intentionality can develop that is a property of the group as a whole, and Wilson holds that it can account for the normative punch we see in the movement from marked variation to categorizations of sorts of people, especially those considered subnormal.In particular, collective action anchored in shared intentionality derived from a common socio-cognitive framework provides a motor for deciding who is like us and who isn't.But now we face a dilemma.Wilson's explanation of The Eugenic Mind is  open access -ptpbio.orgepistemologically, psychologically, and evolutionarily deep.As a result, it leaves one with little hope that we could ever do something about it.How can collective standpoint agency subvert our prosociality when "both survivors and parents in general are marginalized as knowing agents vis-à-vis the systems for the production of knowledge about the relevant phenomenon" (209)?Survivor stories that can support arguments that disability should (in some sense) be conserved to facilitate dynamics of shared and extended agency struggle to get traction, leaving those with negative marked variation vulnerable to a different "generative and intrinsic aspect of the human condition" (164): the reification of subhuman categories such as "disabled." A fourth aspect of underdevelopment is the intersection of the practices of classification, normative ideals embedded in those classifications, and reification.Reification only enters Wilson's story at the end in chapter 10.Here new work on classification and kinds is highly pertinent (e.g., Kendig 2016).Reification is closely related to standardization, and this reification has social, political, and ethical dimensions (Bowker and Star 1999).The fact that there was a centralized effort by the Eugenics Research Office (ERO) is just one example (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).What made this work so well?How does this fit with other classification practices?To what degree is it different, if at all?What are the specific relationships with other classifications, such as for alleles and genotypes?To what degree do practices export from one context to another, such as the modeling of kinship from anthropology?How do these representations become embedded in policy, such as in sexual sterilization legislation (some evidence cited by Wilson suggests they do not)?What are the connections to the ERO's analytic index of eugenic traits in the US population?How is the partitioning of this trait index (physical, physiological, mental, personality, and social) still present in contemporary studies of human populations?For example, current forms of eugenics appear just as concerned with psychological or mental traits, especially those we might now term developmental disabilities.Perhaps more ominous is the standardized classification of mental disorders relied upon in health insurance practices.
A corollary of underdevelopment is missed opportunities.One of the most notable of these is a more thorough study of measurement and classification in the emerging sciences of the social.Wilson highlights that an increasingly fine-grained set of classifications for "lunatics" is detectable in Victorian England (e.g., "low-grade idiots" versus "mid-grade imbeciles"), but the treatment is relatively superficial.The crystallization of a brighter line between "insanity" and "idiocy" is where Wilson comes closest.Insanity was supposedly readily observable, onset at a later age, and curable (at least in principle); idiocy required special training to observe, was present from birth or childhood, and incurable.Case studies of practice could have been revealing, especially in how these categorizations interacted with societal expectations for institutional responsibilities."Feeble-mindedness" became a type of problem in the context of increasing amounts of public schooling and the desire to segregate children exhibiting it.However, crude economic calculation doesn't comport with prosocial orientation, especially for children, who Wilson rightly flags as specially affected.Did it make a difference whether you were located in a large city where issues of crime were more palpable (as Davenport seems to suggest is the inevitable result of mental defectiveness)?
Together both the aspects that remain underdeveloped and the missed opportunities mean that all of the pieces Wilson has in play do not fully congeal into an integrated picture.Importantly, this should not be equated with a lack of success.That an integrated picture does not flow out of an interdisciplinary analysis is not unique and, as the sciences show, these endeavors can be quite fecund.In my estimation, Wilson has accomplished significant tasks in characterizing an enduring mindset that, despite the hopes of many, never went away, and providing a novel explanation of its persistence in terms of evolutionary prosociality.Continued efforts to stitch  open access -ptpbio.org the pieces together will no doubt bear further fruit, both in terms of developing the individual and in pursuing missed opportunities.

Conclusion
In the preface, Wilson offers an illuminating confession: the present book was not the intended plan.Originally, the aim had been to complete a third installment in his extended treatment of individuals across the sciences that focused on sociality and the social sciences (tentatively entitled Relative Beings).This book may still be in the works, but the lesson I want to highlight doesn't require it.In short, opportunity intervened, but opportunity that is atypical of most philosophical inquiry.It was the opportunity to grapple with real world issues pertinent to the time and place where one is situated.And the result is not simply scholarly analysis but a personal narrative that provokes both reflection on and action in light of the eugenic mindset.That Australia would openly address forced sterilization despite never having explicit legislative policies to encourage it or that this occurred in California prison systems as recently as a decade ago-even after the state formally acknowledged its eugenic past in 2003-should no longer be surprising.The Eugenic Mind has always been with us and its manifestations in the structures of modern society show the deadly efficiency of modern bureaucracies that are institutionally complicit.The only appropriate response (however efficacious) is engaged individuality in collective assemblages where marginalized agency can aggregate to manifest a needed resistance to the good intentions that emanate perennially from our prosocial evolutionary legacy.