Eugenics

Post Reply New Topic

While it is no longer a popular idea, eugenics is inevitable because we have the technology for it, and someone is going to use it eventually. The issue isn't the possibility of eugenics, but the ethics behind it. We need eugenics based on good ethics to ensure it actually is moral. Unfortunately, it seems that modern commentaries in favor of eugenics are using similar ethics to Nazis, and we saw how much of a disaster that was. Even when they differ from the Nazi's, they are still problems I find in their ethics, so here I will construct an alternative set of ethics.

First off, negative eugenics is ALWAYS unethical. This is because people have the right to reproduce (whether or not you agree with a matter of ethics, but it is recognized as a human right by the UN, but I'd argue it's ethical foundation can both be found in biology and religion) and to try to prevent people from reproducing is violating this right. Some methods for enforcing negative eugenics are particularly deplorable, like forced sterilization because it violates people's bodily autonomy. Finally, negative eugenics doesn't even work, because the groups that were historically the most targeted were groups (the mentally ill and mentally ret*d) that didn't even reproduce as much as the general population. Racial minorities were also often targeted, but I don't think there is any risk of that becoming ethically acceptable anytime soon.

There is one area though where the ethics for negative eugenics is a bit different, and it is still acceptable today even though I find it wrong. This is selective abortions. This is not a case of right to reproduce, but rather a case of right to live. But given the current political climate, the fetus is not recognized as having a right to live (I'm not making any statement on if a fetus has an inherent right to live, I'm just speaking of how people see that right), so this does not suffice for an ethical argument against it. So rather, I'll make an appeal to how selective abortion works in practice. The ethical justification for selective abortion is primarily based around the women being able to choose what is in their best interests, and a lot of it goes to the utilitarian idea that a child who is more likely to experience pain should be aborted in order to prevent said pain. This is an idea I wholeheartedly disagree with, so this is where I outline the new ethics.

First, let's consider not selective abortions, but financial abortions, meaning someone undergoes an abortion because they lack the financial resources to raise a child. This is actually an extremely eugenic policy, because the poor tend to be racial minorities, so by creating the option of financial abortions is actually enforcing the population reduction of racial minorities. We already established this is seen as wrong. But according to the utilitarians, this is the right decision, because this poor minority child is more likely to suffer pain. So why do we defend the right of the minority to propagate? It's because the utilitarian's house is not the house we live in. Whatever idea we hold, it's not the utilitarian's idea that was is best is the hypothetical person with minimal pain. I'd argue what' going on is that we value diversity more than we value the hypothetical person. This is not wrong, as society is more than just the individual, and even if the individual may suffer more than another, they may bring more to the society just their own existence. And even if they don't, I'd argue that diversity is intrinsically more valuable than pleasure, as it adds beauty to the world by adding more depth, and while pain only lasts a moment, extinction is permanent (after all, you don't just kill somewhere whenever they are in pain, as while it does stop the pain, it ends their experience, even if that person is more likely to experience pain than some other person).

So with this new idea of ethics, lets go back to selective abortion. First we'll consider sex selective abortion. Female fetuses are aborted much more than male ones, and the utilitarians would agree that the female would have a harder life than the male. But the effects of female abortions in the long term are devastating because of the resulting sex imbalance it creates, and any feminist would get up in arms over the idea that is is better to not be born than to be born a woman. Next, we'll consider the abortion of the disabled. Well, if it's wrong to abort other minorities groups for the same reasoning, should it not also extend to the disabled? If racial diversity is important, than neurodiversity should be even more important, as it makes much more practical difference than race does as a person's abilities are defined more by their mind than their body. Some argue that the difference is that the pain of disability is inherent to the condition, but the truth is that disability only exists in the social context (just as does race), the pain of disabilities can be alleviated, and if it cannot, then the disability would be weeded out on it's own by natural selection and thus trying to apply eugenics to it is futile. Since there is no benefit for the negative eugenics of the disabled, but there is a cost, it is clearly unethical.

Now we can finally get to positive eugenics. This I'm not entirely against, but the problem with positive eugenics in the past is that it worked on the principle that some neurotype is more desirable than others, and trying to promote that type. The alternative principle I have is that positive eugenics should instead be used to preserve diversity. We already do this with animals with the classification of endangered species and their preservation, and with people we already have programs to encourage cultural diversity, so why not do the same with people? The key principle would be to analysis which minority groups are losing the most people, and due all that is possible to incentivize and enable reproduction in that group. Autistic people may potentially be such a group, which is why is the main reason for making this thread. We need to ensure our survival by working with the system rather than against it.