The Biggest Issue with Richard Dawkins’ Tweet

“The latest of these Twitter controversies that I think warrants being addressed started with Professor Richard Dawkins expressing his opinion on the very delicate topic of eugenics.”

It is often a good idea not to give too much weight to Twitter controversies. They tend to have little impact in the real world, and the population of Twitter is decidedly not representative of the general public. However, I also believe that we cannot be entirely dismissive of everything that happens on the platform, especially given that influential individuals such as politicians, academics, and public intellectuals use it as their go-to outlet. In that sense, it is not so different from a television interview or an opinion piece in a newspaper or magazine. The latest of these Twitter controversies that I think warrants being addressed started with Professor Richard Dawkins expressing his opinion on the very delicate topic of eugenics. His argument was that— while we can criticize eugenics on moral grounds—we cannot conclude that eugenics would not work with humans. Predictably, this generated considerable backlash. While it would be impossible to look at all the replies, most of them could be placed in one of two categories. The first is that of those who contest the factual claim Dawkins made; namely, the counterargument is simply that trying to influence artificially the genetic pool of humans would actually not have any positive effects. The second category is that of those arguing that an opinion such as this one misleadingly presents eugenics in a light that ignores decades of the troubling history associated with it.

I think there are problems with both of these lines of counterarguments because they miss what I think is the central problem with Dawkins’ claim, even if we grant that he is correct about the strictly scientific part—and we interpret the moral side of it in the most charitable way possible. The issue with these counterarguments is that they miss something that I see as a more fundamental problem, which is frequently present when scientists engage with philosophical and social questions. I deeply sympathize and agree with natural scientists when they assert that philosophers should not make claims that involve scientific problems that are outside their purview of expertise. But this should be a two-way street, and I think this latest Twitter controversy shows why very clearly. Regarding the first kind of counterarguments, it is impossible for me to take sides since my knowledge of genetics is severely limited in comparison to any biologist who would take either position. So regardless of which side is correct, the problem is that trying to counter the original claim on purely scientific grounds has the same problem that Dawkins’ original claim has. We will get to that, but, first, let’s analyze the second kind of counterargument.

Science is meant to describe facts, and those facts are true regardless of how we feel about them; that much is true. But we are not infallible fact-gathering machines, and there is no such thing as raw sense-data.

These arguments are more complicated. First, it might, very well, be true that a claim like Dawkins’ really does present eugenics in a more positive light than it should. The problem with this line of criticism is that it depends too much on trying to assess a person’s intentions (or even assuming ill will), which is something that is effectively impossible to prove. In a second tweet Dawkins added that he would deplore a policy based on eugenics, and I do believe that our first reaction—if trying to argue in good faith—should be to take him at his word. Dawkins argues that it is possible to place our thumb on the scale of human genetic makeup in such a way that would make humans jump higher or run faster, but he adds, “heaven forbid that we should do it.” In other words, it is possible to influence human reproduction in such a way that desirable traits would be more common, but we ought not to do it because doing so would be inherently unethical. The last part is something that probably most people on either side of the argument agree on. But my claim is that the real issue with Dawkins’ claim is not ethical, but metaethical. That is, we do not want to decide whether his moral arguments are correct according to this or that perspective but, rather, what are the ethical presuppositions, or what is the ethical paradigm that is implicit in his argument?

My point is that when Dawkins (or anyone else) makes these claims he is necessarily smuggling in certain ethical presuppositions. I want to be very clear about the argument I am making here. I am not trying to say that he is being misleading, facetious, or anything of the kind. What I am trying to argue is independent of intentions or any other problems that would fall inside the realm of psychology. The idea is that any sentence, as long as it has some ethical content, has implicit underlying assumptions that give it meaning. These assumptions are left unsaid—not because of duplicitousness but because laying them out every time would be too impractical and because these assumptions are usually clear from a given sentence. For example, take the following sentence: “Adequate nutrition is important for children because malnutrition can hinder brain development and negatively affect their performance in school.” If anyone makes this claim, we can infer that they believe that education is a good that we should value. Otherwise the statement would be meaningless. The value of education is what justifies that we can call nutrition “important” within this context. Otherwise, there could be other ways to argue that adequate nutrition is important, which is the central claim of the whole sentence. Here, the validity of the central claim depends on that implicit premise about the value of education.