A Limited Defence of Toby Young

(Originally posted as a two-parter at the other place, here and here.  Admittedly, events have moved on a bit since yesterday, but the point about eugenics stands.)

The response to Toby Young's appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from "He's not the best person for the job" to "He's the worst person for the job".  Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his general lack of qualification.  Writing in The Times, Janice Turner is - I think - balanced in her assessment of his qualities, but still finds him to be (to say the least) wanting.  But the thing that's of interest to me here, on what is a bioethics-related blog, is one of the other sources of controversy: his public support for (a kind of) eugenics.  The mere fact that he could be associated with eugenics has had some people in paroxysms.  Taken more or less at random here's a tweet from Vince Cable:

Theresa May stood by Toby Young when she should be firing him. This is a man who has a record of misogyny and backs eugenics. His appointment shows poor judgement and, as May admitted, a lack of due diligence. It seems all you need to survive is be a friend of Boris Johnson #Marr

— Vince Cable (@vincecable) January 7, 2018

Note that "backs eugenics" is offered as being a reason in itself to object to Young's appointment.  Cable is not, by a long way, the only person to make this sort of comment.

Is it justified, though?  Well, the article that's generated the ire is this one, called "The Fall of the Meritocracy", published in 2015 in Quadrant.  It's a long piece, and the eugenics bit only comes about 80% of the way through, and for that reason I'll only home in on a few details.  But it is worth looking in a bit more depth at some of those details.  I think that what he's arguing is, in many ways, fairly unremarkable.  It's mistaken in important ways, too; I'll come to those in the next post.  But whatever problems there are with the piece do not flow from the use of the "E-word".  And so, to the greatest extent possible, I'll try to talk about it without mentioning eugenics.


Young spends a lot of his article talking about the links between IQ, social mobility, and wealth.  I'll come back to those links in a little while - I think that this is where he gets into trouble, but looking at them will have to wait for a moment.  For the time being, let's allow that there is a connection between them, such that those with a low IQ will have less good life-chances than the rest of the population in a way that is clearly attributable to their low IQ.  (I'm aware that the relationship between IQ and intelligence is also not clear, but I'm out of my depth there, so will leave it to one side for the sake of this post; it doesn't make much difference here.)  Allow, too, the plausible-enough idea that genetics has at least something to do with intelligence.  Young takes these links, and suggests that it might be good if we could select embryos according to which, based on their genes, we expect to have the greatest intelligence:

[C]ouples wouldn’t be creating a super-human in a laboratory, but choosing the smartest child from the range of all the possible children they could have. Nevertheless, this could have a decisive impact.
[...] My proposal is this: once this technology becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies.

Making use of technology to bring to birth embryos with the highest intelligence would, Young claims, ensure that everyone has a greater chance of social mobility - by which he means a greater chance of becoming wealthier - than they would otherwise have had.  Moreover, he points out, screening and selecting embryos based on their genetic traits is already fairly workaday.  If we're willing to use IVF and screening to ensure that we can avoid certain health problems in our offspring, why not extend the principle?

What's notable from a bioethicist's perspective is just how familiar the arguments being presented here are.  It's hard to read Young's article without thinking of a good chunk of the work on genetic screening, and on enhancement, that's been done over the past few years.  Notably, there's more than a hint of Julian Savulescu's work on procreative beneficence.  Here, for example, is what Savulescu was saying in 2001, a full 14 years before Toby Young:

Imagine you are having in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and you produce four embryos. One is to be implanted. You are told that there is a genetic test for predisposition to scoring well on IQ tests (let's call this intelligence). If an embryo has gene subtypes (alleles) A, B there is a greater than 50% chance it will score more than 140 if given an ordinary education and upbringing. If it has subtypes C, D there is a much lower chance it will score over 140. Would you test the four embryos for these gene subtypes and use this information in selecting which embryo to implant?

Many people believe intelligence is a purely social construct and so it is unlikely to have a significant genetic cause. Others believe there are different sorts of intelligence, such as verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence, musical ability and no such thing as general intelligence. Time will tell. There are several genetic research programs currently in place which seek to elucidate the genetic contribution to intelligence. This paper pertains to any results of this research even if it only describes a weak probabilistic relation between genes and intelligence, or a particular kind of intelligence.
Many people believe that research into the genetic contribution to intelligence should not be performed, and that if genetic tests which predict intelligence, or a range of intelligence, are ever developed, they should not be employed in reproductive decision-making. I will argue that we have a moral obligation to test for genetic contribution to non-disease states such as intelligence and to use this information in reproductive decision-making. [...]

I will argue for a principle which I call Procreative Beneficence:

couples (or single reproducers) should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information.

I will argue that Procreative Beneficence implies couples should employ genetic tests for non-disease traits in selecting which child to bring into existence and that we should allow selection for non-disease genes in some cases even if this maintains or increases social inequality.

Note those final eight words.  Now keep in mind that Young's proposal was to be carried out for the sake of something like equality.  Young was proposing making selection available to the poor on the understanding that poverty had something to do with (low) intelligence, and that selecting for intelligence would therefore help alleviate poverty.  Savulescu doesn't have this as his primary motive: he's concerned with ensuring the best possible life for the child-to-be all things considered - and if that means less equality, then so be it.  There's a difference of emphasis between the two.  If anything, Savulescu's suggestion is more radical, and - I would suggest - is likely to be more troubling, just because he's willing to bite the inequality bullet.  Young even suggests that selection should only be available to the least well-off, on the basis that making it available to all would merely cement inequalities:

After all, if people from all classes used it in exactly the same proportions, all you’d succeed in doing would be to increase the average IQ of each class, thereby preserving the gap between them. Wouldn’t it be better to limit its use to disadvantaged parents with low IQs? That way, it could be used as a tool to reduce inequality.

Of course, Savulescu's paper has generated a small industry's worth of critiques and defences in the academic literature, and another (slightly larger) industry's worth of student essays and dissertations.  But such is the nature of academic publishing that it hasn't generated quite the same response as Young's.

I would note, too, that while the Principle of Procreative Beneficence has a normative element to it - the claim at its rawest is that we should select for desirable traits (including, but not limited to, intelligence) - all Toby Young is suggesting is that such selection should be made available, for particular reasons, and within a limited accessibility.  Whether or not we should be persuaded by his reasoning is a further question; I'll address it more in a moment.

What matters for the time being is that there is not anything particularly radical about his suggestion: it's pretty standard stuff in seminar discussions about screening; and nor is there anything that is obviously morally beyond the pale.  If we think that intelligence is a desirable characteristic, and if we have the means to ensure that future children - or, at least some of them - can have their intelligence maximised, then we have a reason to make use of that means.  If using this kind of technology furthers socially desirable ends, then so much the better.  For some people, we might even have a duty to use this sort of technique.  And if - and this is where Young and Savulescu come apart a touch - we want to promote certain ends and embryo-selection is the way to do it, then we have a reason to select.

If you want to call that eugenics, then go ahead.  Young, who is nothing if not a savvy provocateur, obviously does - it's an interesting but not surprising cultural quirk that "eugenicist" is rarely used by people to describe themselves; but one doesn't have to be a provocateur to class this as a kind of eugenics.  What does not follow from that automatically, though, is that there is anything too deeply morally troubling about the idea in its own terms.  (Indeed, if to describe something as eugenic is by default to describe it as wrong, and a phrase like "This is eugenic" is supposed to carry the weight of a full-blown moral argument, it would remain mysterious why someone like Young would describe what he proposes as eugenic: one would have to believe either that he failed to notice something obvious to everyone else, or one would have to believe him to be either a moral monster or a pantomime villain.  That would deny good faith, though, and there's no reason to deny that.)

If what Young suggested can plausibly be described as eugenic - and it probably can - then, pace Vince Cable and quite a lot of the Twitterati, merely backing what we may or may not have decided to call eugenics is not obviously all that big a deal.  It might actually be a good thing in some circumstances.  There's no indication in his article that anyone would be expected to make use of the technology, or that there should be any pressure to do so, or that there would be any penalty for not doing so.  Some eugenic practices, or practices carried out in the name of or while masquerading as eugenics, are morally repugnant; it doesn't follow that they all are.  Young is not proposing that certain people should be prevented from reproducing, or forced to use IVF, or anything like that.  And while of course, it's true that it may take only a few steps to get from "Wouldn't it be good if this were available" to something rather more sinister, they are steps that would have to be taken, and that it is easy enough not to take.

Bluntly, whether or not Young's arguments stand or fall is separable from whether or not they're eugenic.  Still, over the coming paragraphs, I'll moot a few reasons why I think they do fall all the same.

The roots of the failure are in the section of just prior to the "progressive eugenics" part; I'm going to be talking here exclusively about the sections entitled "How high is the correlation between IQ and socio-economic status?" and "Has the meritocratic elite become a hereditary elite?".  As a precursor, I'll note what I'm not going to be talking much about directly: Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, a book upon which Young's argument draws substantially.  This book has proven controversial to say the least, and has been controversial since a long time before Young wrote his article.  What I'm going to say runs alongside criticisms of that work, though.  Having said that, Young does rely on The Bell Curve for a lot of his argument, so I'll have to touch on it now and again.

One of the claims that Young takes from Herrnstein and Murray is this:

IQ is a better predictor of low socio-economic status - and the associated problems of poverty, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, criminality and drug abuse - than any competing variable, including parental socio-economic status. According to their analysis, someone with an IQ of 130 has a less than 2 per cent chance of living in poverty, whereas someone with an IQ of 70 has a 26 per cent chance.
At the pinnacle of American society, by contrast, there is a “cognitive elite”. Typically, members of this group possess IQs of 125 and above, have postgraduate degrees from good universities and belong to a handful of “high-IQ professions”, such as accountants, lawyers, architects, chemists, college teachers, dentists, doctors, engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, natural scientists, social scientists and senior business executives.

Let's assume the figures are sound.  What they won't do, though, is feed neatly into an argument in favour of choosing IQ-maximising embryo-selection in order to help ensure as high a socio-economic status as possible.  If we accept that a low IQ increases your chance of living in poverty, it doesn't follow that a high IQ will increase your chance of being wealthy unless IQ is a cause of wealth.  (Allow that in a system of perfect social mobility, having a low IQ will mean that you fall in social position; this is rarely acknowledged in policy debates, but it would presumably be a feature of true social mobility!)  But there's going to be some difficulty in establishing this.  For one thing, how well you do on an IQ test isn't necessarily going to tell us all that much about your intelligence: it's a measure of intelligence, but measurements ought not to be confused with the thing being measured.

An important thing to remember is that wealth, like genes, is passed down the generations.  And wealth tends also to correlate with things like education, exposure to certain cultural phenomena, and the like - all of which, we might think, allow the seeds of intelligence to burst to life. It would not be a huge surprise born into a well-read household from an academic background, which has plenty of money to spend on things like trips to the theatre or museums in other cities, grew up to be highly articulate and able to engage fluently with all manner of intellectual pursuits without batting an eyelid.  By contrast, if you're born into a household in a deprived area, in which you have to share a bedroom with a sibling or maybe more, and in which money is tight, the chance that you'll be able to go to somewhere quiet and read books is reduced.  You may not have anywhere quiet to go, and you may not have the books.  You may not be taken on trips to museums because of the transport costs.  And that may mean that, at first glance, you'll look less bright than you might.  It doesn't follow that you're less intelligent, though.

Correspondingly, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be better educated; and that might well tell us something about how well you'll do on IQ tests irrespective of the content of your bookshelf.  You might well be less intimidated by tests and scientists, for example, and so more relaxed when you take them.  A high IQ score might be something you have because you're good at IQ tests, rather than wealth being something you get because of your intelligence per se.

Bluntly, someone might look stupid, but simply be stupefied.

Besides: being in a high-paying profession doesn't necessarily mean that you're enormously clever.  I have a colleague in the Law School here at Manchester who will happily tell anyone who'll listen, more-than-semi-seriously, that the only reason lawyers charge so much is to make it look like what they do is hard.  Earning a high wage and holding down a prestige job may not always indicate that you're the cleverest person on the tram to work.

But: OK - let's allow for the moment that IQ and intelligence are the same, and that they facilitate success, and that they're heritable.  These would be ingredients in formulating an argument for "progressive eugenics".  But, even here, Young seems to be in slightly deeper water than he thinks.  Take this, for example:

[P]eople to select their partners according to similar levels of intelligence, thanks to assortative mating or homogamy. This is a well-documented phenomenon whereby humans are more likely to mate with those who have the same characteristics as them, particularly IQ. Up until the 1950s, the impact of assortative mating on the stratification of society was kept in check by the limited opportunities for highly intelligent men and women to meet each other. However, as the best universities have become more and more selective, and as women have begun to be admitted in equal numbers, these opportunities have increased. If male and female members of the cognitive elite don’t pair up in college, they pair up afterwards in the high-paying firms and rarefied social environments that they gravitate towards. The result is that those on the far right-hand side of the IQ distribution curve have become much more likely to mate with each other and produce highly intelligent children.

Well, OK: but, again, so what?  Allow that one of the things that drives mate-selection is how intelligent someone appears.  Now, there's a problem here inasmuch as that how intelligent someone appears and how intelligent they are might be different things.  For the reasons I sketched above, someone might appear to be not-terribly-bright because they've been brought up without access to rich educational and cultural stimuli.  Correspondingly, it might be that someone might appear very clever because of how their life has worked out, but that doesn't mean that they're not just very lucky to have been well-off from the get-go and a persuasive blagger.  (Hi!)  Of course, we might think that we could suss out fairly quickly when a person is much less clever than they seem, and that this'd make a difference to how attractive a potential mate they'd be.  But we might be wrong.  And - let's be blunt - intelligence is at most a reason to find someone attractive.  It's not the only one.

There's another consideration here, though, and it's very important: it's that there is reason to think that there is a link between poverty and low intelligence, but that that generates normative claims that are very different from what Young thinks they are, because he gets them the wrong way around.

I'm thinking here of work like this and this.  What these papers purport to show is that cognitive ability is related to exposure to parasites.  Bluntly, if your body is having to put energy into fighting off infections, it'll have less energy to devote to things like cognitive development; and so if you're exposed to a lot of pathogens, especially in early life, you might end up less smart than you otherwise would be.  Infectious disease prevalence correlates inversely with intelligence.

Why does this matter here?  Because exposure to infectious illness, and lacking the means to do much about it, correlates with poverty.  That being the case, we would appear to have evidence not that low intelligence causes poverty, but that poverty may be a causal factor in low intelligence.  (Note that much of the evidence cited by Young comes from the US; but the second of the papers just cited also relates to the US - a country in which, notably, healthcare is (a) very expensive, and (b) not universally available.)

This point is potentially very tricky for Young's progressive eugenics, because it implies that, if we want to improve the lot of the worst-off, and to ensure that their children have the best opportunities, embryo selection is much less important than... well, than improving their lot.  If there is a problem with low(er) intelligence and poverty, it is not that the former causes the latter, but that the latter does contribute to the former.  It's a social problem, which is - happily - fairly straightforwardly soluble; and that solution is social.  Whatever reasons we have to select embryo A over embryo B, social mobility isn't one of them.  We can tinker with which embryos are implanted all we like; we could even faff around with particular genes if we wanted.  But if we don't get the broader context right, it'll all be for very little result.

Being super-intelligent isn't your route out of poverty if you don't have the right social context; but having the right social context might well be crucial for anyone escaping poverty.  Science, inasmuch as that it informs public health measures, can help here; but its role is at once much less exciting then embryo selection, and much more important.  Young, I think, has fallen into the trap of thinking that whizzbang science is the solution to all our ills.  And whizzbang science does have its place.  But it's not enough.

And, of course, looking at things this way reduces the chance that we'll fall into one of the more pernicious implications of Young's argument, which is that if we're selecting as a matter of course and someone ends up poor all the same, then that is ordained by nature, and there's nothing that we can, or even should, do about it.  I don't think that this is a claim that Young would want to endorse, and - as with the slippery slope from progressive to sinister eugenics I mentioned in the last post - it's an argumentative move that noone is compelled to make and that is easily resisted.  But the door is open all the same.  If the good lord above and your parents' insistence on natural reproduction made you a Delta, then there's no point crying about it.

I don't think we should resign ourselves to that kind of fatalism.

The take-home message from all this?  Toby Young's piece is mistaken, and any moral claim we take from it is likely to be wide of the mark.  But the problem is not that it is eugenicist, progressive or not.  It's that eugenics is the wrong way to try to solve the problem of poverty and low mobility.