1. *I am indebted to Matthew DeCamp, Frances Kamm, Paul Lombardo, John Tasioulas, Christopher (Kit) Wellman and three anonymous referees for this journal, as well as to the Editor, Robert Goodin, for their excellent critical comments on an earlier version of this paper.
2. 1Allen Buchanan et al.From Chance To Choice: Genetics and Justice(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 28-29. The author of the present paper was not the primary author of the chapter of this volume in which the conventional diagnosis of the evils of eugenics was advanced.
3. 2This is not to assume that other types of eugenics did not involve moral errors. The focus of this paper, however, is on understanding what was wrong with the type of eugenics that is generally assumed to be most uncontroversially wrong, namely, coercive negative eugenics. It could be argued that some instances of nonracial coercive negative eugenics are not morally wrong-for example, that under certain circumstances it would not be wrong to prevent a couple from having a child whose life would be very short, filled with pain and lacking in compensating good experiences. My purpose here is not to delve into these more complex issues but to assume that at least some instances of coercive eugenic action are morally wrong, to try to understand the nature of the wrong involved, and then to draw out the implications of the analysis for the scope and methodology of ethics.
4. 3Buchanan et al.From Chance To Choice, p. 52.
5. 4Daniel J. Kevles,In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 93.