Eugenics?

Only if they are:

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there are a couple that rise to that level.
e.g

I had a political econ class with this guy, and I swear for every problem we discussed in that class his answers could essentially be summed up as ā€œBy X year, we will have Y capabilities, and thus able to accomplish Z.ā€ The premise for every one of his arguments was a scientific understanding stripped of any philosophy, so ethics were very much a non-issue to his P.O.V. He was nice guy, very intelligent, well-spoken. None of the others in class thought ill of him at allā€¦ But every single one of us took pleasure burying his assertions under a mountain of hypotheticals he simply wasnā€™t capable of responding to.

I get that this might sound mean, but he tended to be quite strident in his arguments, so it was very much an equilibrium thing. If ya canā€™t stand the heat, get outta the kitchen!

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By X Year, we will be able to scientifically solve ethical dilemma Y.

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Ahh, Itā€™s all so clear to me now

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In the meantime, we can exploit the ethical indeterminism for profit Z.

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Again, the problem isnā€™t genetics, or figuring out ways to improve public health - itā€™s assuming that everything can be fixed through genetics. thatā€™s the problem with eugenics, itā€™s lack of grounding in an understanding of human relationships and culture.

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Well I knew there had to be a reason

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itā€™s lack of grounding in an understanding of human relationships and culture.

as in ā€œsometimes two individuals who carry the same autosomal recessive gene may fall in love,ā€?

Youā€™re pretty much missing everything Iā€™m trying to get across here, so I guess thatā€™s all I can say.

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Well, that, and the assumption that there is an objectively ā€œbestā€ state for the genetic pool.

That kind of thinking hasnā€™t exactly worked out well, for instance, with many breeds of dogs. Or with many foodstocks that have ended up in danger due to a decrease in variation. Iā€™m not sure why it would be a good thing to apply it to humans other than in very targeted cases.

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Iā€™d argue that understanding human relationships and culture is part of parsing terms like ā€œbestā€ and ā€œobjective.ā€ The overriding ideology of a society, or a world view needs to be understood and accounted for. Eugenics never and does not do that.

But I think I need to be done with this. Iā€™m sort of being talked down to a bit, and it doesnā€™t feel good.

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For ā€œbestā€, I agree. For ā€œobjectiveā€, that ought to be independent of ideology (though many who want to apply the term, especially in relation to humanity, fail to account for their own ideological biases). Trying to force that ā€œobjective bestā€ on a society that doesnā€™t want to conform to it is, as I think you may have been saying(?), a bad thing.

I apologize if I came across as doing that, was not my intent.

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Sure, but ideology can often be hard to detect. This is because it masquerades as common sense far too often. Thatā€™s the problem that people who practice science far too often (or any number of fields of scholarly inquiry, actually, including my own). Because they are in a field that operates on a basis of objectivity (which is central to verifying findings and replicating studies to ensure their accuracy), many scientists often ignore their own biases. They reason that because, they are scientists, they MUST be objective (which is tautological thinking of course). But the only way to actually deal with oneā€™s biases is to understand them and do oneā€™s best to account for them, including the bias that science by itā€™s definition is objective. Eugenicists did not do that. They assumed the reality of race as a hard and fast fact of biology and not as a social construct that has not much to do with genetics. [quote=ā€œNonentity, post:98, topic:98920ā€]
I apologize if I came across as doing that, was not my intent.
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You did not, so no worries and no need to apologize.[quote=ā€œGinAndJuice, post:99, topic:98920ā€]
And I haaaate it when you are shoved out of a conversation, cause you bring so much frigganā€™ value.
[/quote]

thanks. Not everyone agrees with you and who knows who is being objective here! :wink:

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Soā€¦ you and your brother were identical twins, and the difference in your age is attributable to IVF?

On average, siblings share 50% of their genes.

http://ess.nbb.cornell.edu/relatedness.html

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I completely agree.

In that context, I think I just meant that no matter how the ā€œbestā€ state is determined and what ideology is involved in the determination, it still leaves the major problem that eugenics at its heart is based on the idea that limiting the gene pool to such a state is even a desirable thing from a truly objective standpoint.

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Only to those who consider uniformity desirable, and they would probably not be robust enough to survive over the long term anyway. Again, people seem to refuse to consider that optimum anything is largely subjective to who is doing it, and for what purpose.

limiting the genepool to those people who carry at least one Tay Sachs gene is very foolhardy.

Are you seriously positing a definition of ā€œeugenicsā€ that tends towards less uniformity?

Thatā€™s pretty much exactly what the last few posts between myself and @Mindysan33 were considering.

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It is less a matter of lexicology, and more of ideology:

popobawa4u: How about if we have a nice open talk about what some of the benefits and disadvantages of communism are!

John Bircher: Ho-lee fuck! You are one of them! How could anyone who knows history not know that they are triggering me by suggesting that this could possibly be a good thing. You are either sadly ignorant or a genuinely bad person.

popobawa4u: I am not trying to excuse bad actors. But creeps like Stalin had a very blinkered, destructive idea about what communism is or should be. I am not talking about Stalin and his ilk.

John Bircher: Well I am, so now we are just doing to dogpile upon you about what a nasty shit Stalin was, and have an ideological/tribal bonding experience over it. Make yourself comfortable, you clueless pinko jackassā€¦