Deploying Epigenetics to Identify Biologically Influenced Social Inequalities

Abstract

Research on human genetics reveals distinctly political dimensions, given the need for the modern state to regulate human reproduction through laws of hypodescent,1 that is, interventionist natalist policies that incentivize larger families,2 or eugenics.3 But if the natural world and the social world are sharply distinguished one from the other, justice is a matter solely of the social world, meaningless in the natural world. Thus if one’s genetic endowments are entirely a natural phenomenon, then whether one is fortunate or unfortunate in one’s genetic endowment is without moral significance. Rather, it is a matter of individual luck in the “genetic lottery” of nature. Political community has no obligation to address “losers” in the “genetic lottery” – unless one adopts, say, the standpoint of luck-egalitarianism or, alternatively, commits to consequentialism. Otherwise, “to say that something is due to nature” is to relegate it to the “realm of fortune or misfortune,” hence to reject the notion that it might fall within the sphere of justice (Buchanan et al. 2000: 83). In that case, “natural” disadvantages in the shape of genetically based health disparities among members of a community appear to be an inequality that is no one’s fault: a misfortune, certainly, but not an injustice. Corrections are then gratuitous acts of beneficence, voluntary acts of decency, but hardly moral, let alone legal, obligations.