Welfare enhancement

Sparrow argues we may aim to create children without pathological abnormalities but not children that are ‘better than well’1 (p. 4). He points to a relevant moral difference between suffering from something that is bad in absolute terms and places us below an adequate threshold, and merely failing to have the best possible prospects1 (p. 8, 10). He argues against aiming to benefit somebody independently of what would be ‘natural’ for that individual to have, and denies any reason to go beyond creating children who are ‘normal’ or ‘good enough’2 (p. 10).

To be sure, normal intelligence and pregnancy's normal duration are averages, and so if individuals with below-average intelligence or premature deliveries cease to be born, normality will change and humans will be enhanced. Moreover, some medical conditions may be so common, for example, in old age or developing countries, that it is normal to exhibit them. Sparrow must therefore appeal to a ‘suitably idealised account of proper species functioning’,3 (p. 1) which may not differ from some enhancers’ ideal and which Sparrow does not provide, failing even to specify if ‘normality’ is unrelated to statistical frequency or related but irreducible to it because it is dependent upon statistical and non-statistical considerations.

Sparrow grants ‘the distinction between therapy and enhancement is extremely difficult to describe and defend and the argument that the distinction has no normative significance is even more compelling.’2 (sic p. 117) But he urges us to retain this elusive distinction to avoid concluding that only girls should be born. Sparrow's argument for this provocative conclusion is that female longevity and capacity to bear children outweigh their lesser (eg, weight-lifting) abilities,2 (p. 130ff) and that other male advantages should be disregarded because they derive from injustice. He concludes that we must either reject enhancement or endorse the claim that humanity should be female. He rejects enhancement on the grounds that men have their own normality.

Moral enhancement

One might reject female selection on welfare grounds but still welcome it on moral enhancement grounds. After all, the welfare-based case for female selection is rather weak as neither men nor women can produce children alone and virtually all men prefer being able to have them without undergoing menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause and the risk of unwanted or abnormal pregnancies or miscarriages. These welfare-diminishing costs, moreover, may outweigh additional years of old age. Moral enhancement also provides a stronger case because averting atrocity is far more urgent than extending human longevity. Utopian novels depicting female-only societies like Mizora, New Amazonia or Herland do not express longevity concerns but the hope for a world without war, violence, sexual abuse, animal cruelty and oppressive inequalities. Moral enhancement advocates, like Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, also stress its special urgency, as the mismatch between our sophisticated technology and our primitive moral psychology makes catastrophe increasingly likely. Given those risks, they consider remaining natural less important than becoming more humane and moral (ie, more altruistic and just).4 (p. 107–8, 121, 125ff) As I write, the newsreader describes how in a place as civilised as Oslo, a man shot down dozens of teenagers in a youth camp because he found them too tolerant of other religions. Experts remarked how predictably the killer was male. Drawing on such observations, one might attempt to build a moral-enhancement case for female selection. To understand that case's appeal it is worth considering some evolutionary explanations of several characteristic male and female traits.

Parental investment

Like other hominids, elephants and some cetaceans, humans belong to a group of unusually intelligent mammals capable of mirror self-recognition. These mammalian persons with long-term emotional memory and enormous imitative, linguistic, tool-using and problem-solving abilities can adopt the perspective of others, and respond to their distinct needs. For reasons I explain elsewhere, creatures with such features lie at one end of the R/K spectrum of reproductive strategies, having very few offspring, and investing enormously in each, with great patience, empathy and altruism.5

Polygamy

If the best human features derive from us being ‘extreme Ks’ like some other mammals, the worst features derive from us being polygamous (one male mates with several females) like most mammals.

Polygamy results in the selection of the males who have what it takes to kill or defeat the largest number of other males. They may thus develop an excessive size for the food available, costly weapons and ornaments useless for anything other than competing with each other,6 (p. 115) and, of course, violent propensities. Gorilla silverbacks, for example, live in peaceful association with a group of females protecting their offspring—a behaviour which may explain why silverback Jambo protected the boy who fell in the Jersey zoo enclosure in 2007.ⁱ Since one male monopolises several females, however, frustrated single males eventually team up and challenge the harem-keeper. And since each offspring requires the undivided attention of its mother for many years, the single males may never reproduce if they wait until all the silverback's offspring are self-sufficient. So, they have to kill his offspring and then persuade their mothers that all they can now do now is start over, mating with whoever can afford them the greatest protection: the very killer of their offspring. Combining K strategies and polygamy then has tragic consequences even in what is otherwise a peaceful, vegetarian, non-territorial society, free, for example, from the war and femicide of the chimpanzees.

In polygamous species, while male reproductive success depends on access to females, female success depends on access to food. α Males have access to more females, and α females to more resources, with males focusing more than females on sex and power, and females on offspring and nutrition.5 Depending on whether the task is to attack or to provide baby-care, it may pay to be patient or aggressive, prudent or daring, compassionate or brutal, with specialisation hampering role-reversal. This takes us to one last consequence of polygamy. A K strategy is a species trait and so any of the endearing features that plausibly derive from it could, in principle, be equally visible in both sexes. Polygamy, however, drives males away from parenthood and towards competition over the control of females, who provide the parenting work. Orangutans, for example, the living hominid that most resembles our common great ape ancestor, nest so high in the canopy that any parental distraction could result in the offspring suffering a fatal fall. Yet, relatively small, single mothers do all the parenting work, lactating for 7 years, and transmitting orangutan culture to their offspring for a decade or more. Maternal care in hominids is not only essential for protection and survival in infancy and early adolescence but also to secure the offspring's normal mental and physical development and the cultural transmission required for long-term survival. Female nurturing propensities are unsurprising because they are absolutely necessary.7

Oxytocin and empathy

When huge maternal efforts are needed, as in orangutans and humans, the most caring and self-denying mothers achieve greater reproductive success, with females becoming more caring and self-denying over time. To ensure mothers perform all the required tasks with patience and perseverance even when stressed or ill, evolution has selected them to feel an intense love for their infants. Because of its intensity, the caring impulse spreads to anything that resembles their offspring, making all creatures with disproportionally large heads, hesitant steps and incompetent vocalisations seem adorable. The caring impulse extends to any creature that stumbles calling for its mother, and then to any vulnerable and needy individual. Interspecies altruism in males is less common but has been observed, and is more easily explicable, in species where males perform—like humans and gorillas—some parenting work.

Nature activates the mothering impulse through oxytocin, which triggers labour and then causes mothers exhausted by the birthing effort to respond lovingly to the irritating calls of their newborns, providing them with milk, with breastfeeding producing more oxytocin, contractions and pain. Oxytocin increases trust and empathy and facilitates the interpretation of body-language to read the baby's mind, adopt its perspective and respond to its needs.

Side effects of female selective pressures

The female bonobo Kuni, for example, who stretched the wings of a stunned starling, carried it to the top of the tallest tree, and cared for it all day until it flew, demonstrated an ability to respond to needs she never had.8 (p. 2)4 (p. 109) These actions sometimes come at great cost, as when female chimp Washoe risked her life to rescue a drowning youngster she hardly knew,9 (p. 29) when female elephants save drowning infant rhinos despite repeated rhino charges, and when female cetaceans engage in altruistic interspecies protection against sharks. Interspecies altruism is also more often observed in human females, where animal protectors are predominantly female while bullfighters and other animal torturers are generally male. The same applies to the fostering of orphans, the feeding of mothers and grandmothers who have become too old or sick to feed themselves, and to other practices like comforting the bereaved. Among mammalian persons, peace-keeping and care-giving are predominantly female. We see this in neonates, with female newborns responding more than male newborns to the distressed calls of other babies and to the human face10 (p. 41, 43). We see it in childhood, with female chimps rocking sticks to sleep while contemporary males play aggressively. We even see it in entire species, in the male-dominated chimpanzee society, with homicide, femicide, genocide, infanticide and generally high levels of aggression, and the less dimorphic, female-dominated bonobo society, where other primates are not killed or terrorised and not a single homicide has been reported. Controlled experiments also show that spraying oxytocin increased generosity in ultimatum games,11 while administering testosterone caused people to make meaner offers, and increased their readiness to punish those who did not deliver what they wanted.12 There is, then, no shortage of biological data to build a case for female selection on moral enhancement grounds. Consider now psychological data.

Testosterone and crime

In Zero Degrees of Empathy, Simon Baron-Cohen analyses atrocities—like the Nazi amputation and re-attachment of hands in reverse just to see what would happen—and defines evil as ‘the absence of empathy’. He notes that non-empathetic individuals, whether in the Asperger-autism spectrum or among psychopaths, are predominantly male,13 (p. 55)4 (p. 111). The former's condition, which he associates with an ‘extreme male brain’, is linked to low empathy, trust, ability to read the minds and body language of others and to take their perspective. Since it is also associated with compulsive rule-following, however, it may cause strict adherence to moral principles, as in Karan Johar's moving film My Name is Khan. Louan Brizendine describes the emergence of the male brain as follows: until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female—female is nature's default gender setting. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centres10 (p. 36).

As a result, the testosterone-formed boy brain simply does not look for social connections in the same way a girl brain does. In fact…autism spectrum disorders and Asperger's syndrome are eight times more common in boys…[T]he typical male brain… gets flooded with testosterone during development and somehow becomes more easily socially handicapped. Extra testosterone…may be killing off some of the brain's circuits for emotional and social sensitivity.10 (p. 47)

Unfortunately, the Khan-types do not balance out the impact of the serial killers, torturers, rapists, domestic violence perpetrators, and child molesters, who also are predominantly male.

Consider, for example, the following chart provided by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in a book which attributes a sweeping range of social ills to economic inequality rather than testosterone (figure 1).14 (p. 132)

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Figure 1

Homicide by age and sex of perpetrator. England and Wales compared with Chicago.

According to this chart, women are so unlikely to murder that they are virtually equally unlikely to do so at age 4, 14 or 40. In contrast, there is a shocking coincidence between homicide in males and the surge of testosterone in adolescence. The chart makes sense when we learn that the very same hormone causing men to be hairy, bald, strong and thick-skinned also makes them prone to aggression, risk-taking, sexual preoccupation and insensitivity to others’ feelings.

This is a worrying combination but one may respond to such data by stressing the importance of individual life histories. For example, leaving genetic propensities aside13 (p. 89–95) it appears that many sociopaths lacked adequate maternal love (earlier cited as essential for normal development), and/or suffered physical or sexual abuse themselves. This is certainly the most common life-history for female criminals. According to the US Department of Justice 1993–97 data, males committed 98% of sexual offences, 93% of robberies, and 89% of aggravated assaults.15 Of the tiny minority of female inmates, 60% had undergone sexual abuse, and 40% were perceived by the victim to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.15 Baron-Cohen's typical non-empathic female patients also lacked maternal love and/or were raped or abused.13 (p. 35ff) So crime can be traced to testosterone either directly, as in the chart, or indirectly because being sexually abused can make victims, women included, capable of serious crimes.

Side effects of male selective pressures

If sexual abuse diminished, then other crimes could also diminish. But can sexual violence vanish without men doing likewise?

The answer depends partly on the explanation of sexual violence. Some authors consider rape an adaptation to transmit one's genes.16 (esp. p. 165) If so, impeding rapists’ reproduction (through prison or optional drug treatment) could both deter them and weed out this trait from humanity.16 (p. 153) Other authors, however,17 deny sexual violence exists to transmit one's genes but consider it a side-effect of other more general male traits, like persistent sexual desire, aggression, strength and low risk-aversion.

Evidence supporting the latter more depressing conclusion includes the fact rapists do not always target fertile females. Male elephants, for example, target infants or rhinos,ⁱⁱ male dolphins rape even turtles, and humans also rape males, and sometimes kill their fertile victims, eliminating any chance of conception. This suggests that just as intense love for our offspring can make us care for creatures quite unrelated to us, intense sexual desires can also extend to all sorts of targets. As we know, these may include individuals that are uninterested, terrified or dead, members of other species or subspecies (in our case, farm animals, Neanderthals18…) and even the very same offspring that inspire maternal self-denial.

If so, it is less likely that sexual violence will disappear without men (or dimorphism, as the Sexual dimorphism section explains) disappearing. Are enhancers therefore committed to female selection? The next section questions the inference to an affirmative answer regarding welfare enhancement and then moral enhancement.

When enhancement doctrines vary

Enhancers may deny any commitment to female selection by insisting that the type of enhancement they support does not favour it. For example, some enhancers may advocate enhancing specific human beings but eschew enhancing humanity by replacing some individuals by others through embryo or sperm selection. Other enhancers may support only those improvements which are major and certain, and then deny female selection qualifies on either count, arguing for example, that male and female lives and respective contributions to society are just incommensurable. And even if there were some differences, many enhancers also deny that every sub-optimality justifies intervention even if they nevertheless also insist that once a condition, such as impaired vision, merits intervention then intervention should aim at providing the patient with the best vision affordable rather than the sufficiently good vision that could have justified non-intervention. On this view, absent severe differences at birth between men and women, intervention would simply be uncalled for. Some doctrines supporting enhancement, then, can resist Sparrow's inference at the very outset.

Even enhancement doctrines favouring the provision for each child of any trait that would improve his life however slightly could still resist Sparrow by plausibly ruling out interventions with significant negative externalities, such as upsetting sex ratios or risking human extinction. Moral enhancers, furthermore, may not support interventions that are objectionably discriminatory in discarding on statistical grounds individuals who have not, and perhaps will never, have harmed anyone. Given their concern with harm-reduction, moreover, it would be natural for them also to oppose interventions with harmful externalities.

When negative externalities are present

Sparrow attempts to exclude this last response by distinguishing individual parents from social policy-makers, and claiming that neither agent has adequate reasons to refrain from interventions with negative externalities.

Regarding individuals, Sparrow's reply is that ‘any particular couple's reproductive decision will have only an infinitesimal impact on society's gender ratios’.3 (p. 2) This claim is also available to individuals in China, India and Nepal who abort female fetuses. Each contributes only slightly to the scarcity associated with Asia's high rates of girl kidnapping and trafficking and other sex-ratio related problems well-described in Maalouf's novel, The First Century after Beatrice. In fact, given the high costs of having a girl for many Asians, their aborting female fetuses is easier to justify than aborting male embryos on longevity grounds. Sparrow's reply fails because in the absence of important costs for the contributor, it can still be wrong to make even very small contributions towards disaster.4 (p. 66–85) There is even a philosophical literature exploring whether—like its Kantian, contractualist and rule-consequentialist rivals—act-consequentialism possesses sufficient resources to condemn making insignificant contributions towards disaster, or should instead be rejected.19–21 So, Sparrow's response to the individual case is unpersuasive because it assumes it is of no moral relevance if we each contribute a little to disasters like climate change—an unattractive and widely contested premise for which he provides no defence.

Regarding social policy, Sparrow claims that if enhancers like Harris22 are concerned with extinction, this discredits their view by placing it ‘firmly in a tradition of eugenic thought that argues that we should settle the question of ‘what sort of people should there be’ by reference to what would maximise social welfare’.3

A concern with extinction, however, is a concern with a minimum threshold, and not evidence of a plan to ‘maximise’ anything. It is also odd to describe doing nothing as an example of ‘eugenic social engineering’3 (p. 1, 2, 4). Aware of this oddity, Sparrow focuses on an imaginary practice that remains objectionable whether it involves acts or omissions, namely, bringing into existence individuals with lives barely worth living just to feel (comparatively) lucky ourselves.3 This practice—rather uncharacteristic of old eugenics—may be criticised for reasons inapplicable to the present case.

First, the avoidable creation of lives barely worth living is itself abhorrent regardless of its motivation. Second, the motivation is morally repugnant and too trivial to bear on such a momentous decision. Harris's case, by contrast, involves allowing the birth of men, who just have a slightly shorter life expectancy than women, and the avoidance of disaster for men as well. Those differences are not trivial. We would be required to license a treatment able to restore to normality all lives barely worth living, regardless of whether it will trim the welfare of those who love comparing themselves favourably to others. By contrast, we would not be required to license a treatment that could slightly increase male life-expectancy if its side effects included human extinction. Thus Sparrow's response to the social policy case is also unsuccessful. Equating concerns with extinction and eugenics is utterly far-fetched. As I shall now explain, the comparison is also contestable should it be employed against Sparrow's own view.

When the same problems emerge with therapy

Suppose that a treatment, initially believed to increase male life-expectancy directly, is then discovered to cure a medical condition, the removal of which causes an increase in male life-expectancy as a by-product. Suppose that since the treatment can now be justified on therapy grounds, Sparrow supports licensing it. He then discovers the treatment's side effects include extinction. Now, if Sparrow licences the treatment, his position is implausible. But if he declines in order to avoid extinction, he cannot criticise Harris for doing likewise.

The emergence of similar problems within a therapy perspective is bad news for Sparrow, as the point of his reductio was to establish therapy as the way to avoid these problems. In pursuing this strategy, however, Sparrow overlooks the possibility that therapy itself may face comparable challenges.

For example, Sparrow selectively considers some of the effects of testosterone, such as greater strength and diminished longevity, but not other effects described earlier. If we include them all, the possibility arises that the concern to avoid pathologies, which animates therapy, also supports either the elimination of males or of sexual dimorphism (a disjunction the next section explains) as a means to minimise murder, rape and atrocity, which are bad for everybody, including the perpetrators.

This problem remains if we understand therapy as the removal of what is harmful, or bad in absolute rather than comparative terms, or what causes suffering rather than mere sub-optimality. Thus, therapy faces comparable problems to enhancement. In fact, despite its name, and its refusal to grant ‘the natural or normal’ privileged normative importance, moral enhancement could also be seen as a form of therapy insofar as it aims merely at reducing wrongdoing rather than at producing supererogatory agents.

One may also distinguish versions of therapy and enhancement which are more or less aware of the existence of two sexes and conclude that such awareness is a feature of any well-informed theory and not something necessarily linked to therapy or enhancement. For example, feminists working in the philosophy and history of science have noted a tendency within the therapy tradition to employ a conception of species normality built around men, which made women appear inferior, deviant and in need of therapy. It would be unfair, however, to reject the therapy perspective because it included gender-unaware variants which identified, or measured, pathologies by employing an androcentric conception of normality. And it is similarly unfair to reject enhancement because of an imaginary variant that is so gender-unaware, and perhaps also species-unaware, it does not realise a womb will not enhance a male, any more than fur will enhance a whale.

When there are many counterfactuals

A third problem with Sparrow's reductio concerns counterfactuals. Since it would not make sense to describe as ‘welfare enhancement’ the creation of individuals who spend their slightly longer lives bemoaning the lack of companions whose existence we are deliberately impeding, Sparrow assumes women reproduce alone and do not miss male companionship nor anything else men provide, and all have technology that renders male strength unnecessary for any task.1 (p. 5). His imaginary world is also free from dowry, patrilocality and violence—three major reasons why people abort or kill baby-girls—and women are never sexually molested, battered, trafficked, discriminated, undervalued or underpaid, and are neither subordinated housewives nor stressed double-shifters.

One may invoke these counterfactuals to affirm that even in these unreal scenarios we still lack reasons to select out males. Sparrow, however, assumes these counterfactual scenarios and then insists we are discussing ‘a choice with dramatic implications for real-world reproductive decision making’,1 (p. 10) so that if the options are the status quo or destroying all male embryos, enhancers are committed to the latter. This is a non sequitur for the various reasons stated earlier as well as because of the counterfactuals employed.

The same problem applies to Sparrow's other concluding statement that unless we adopt his position, ‘there is no way to explain why there is no good reason to make the next generation ‘better than men’ by making sure they are all female’2 (p. 138). The example is too far removed from reality to have implications for ‘real-world decisions’ let alone for those decisions concerning ‘the next generation’.

The case for female-selecting moral enhancement is arguably different: while selecting female embryos on welfare enhancement grounds requires imagining women are not the victims of oppression, sexual predation or violence, selecting women on moral enhancement grounds merely requires noting they are more often the victims than the perpetrators.

The idea that fewer males results in less sexual abuse, atrocity and inhumanity is the constant theme in the literary tradition mentioned earlier. Crime disappears not only in the all-female, parthenogenetic societies of Mizora and Herland but also in those of New Amazonia and Sultana's Dream where men are the controlled minority. Perhaps merely having fewer men could reduce crime.

Enhancers, however, can still resist Sparrow's conclusion for any of the abovementioned reasons. In addition, we should point out that the crime-reduction hypothesis relies on the questionable assumption that women in a female world will remain as they are in a men-dominated world. Furthermore, we should note that male scarcity will not only deprive humanity of men's numerous positive contributions but may also bring back polygamy, which correlates with male violence and reduced longevity, gender and social inequality, and even despotism and invasion.23 A recipe for envy, jealousy and exploitation, polygamy is also probably capable of prompting increased wrongdoing in both sexes. We would then be paying a very high price quite absurdly, because, as I shall now argue, what enhancers should see as desirable is precisely the end of polygamy and the gradual disappearance of some of the dimorphic traits it causes rather than the gradual disappearance of men themselves.