Lots of good points. I think that genetic enhancement technology is very important and it will need to be defended against the eugenics claim. I think identifying all these examples and inconsistencies in our moral outlook is a good approach.
One possible line of argument I made in an article was to say that some forms of eugenics are bad because they harm people and to ask who is harmed by selecting the healthiest or smartest embryo. It seems hard to find a victim.
The main issue with eugenics is access and support for people who can't afford the necessary medical interventions. A good essay on the matter is "It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning" by Ted Chiang (https://archive.ph/cPaMI). It's great to advocate for better healthcare but most arguments for eugenic interventions do not properly address the socio-economic and political system in which such policies are enacted and so fall far short of what would be needed to make the technology of genetic engineering a net positive for individuals and society.
I agree, it's an argument in favor of free healthcare (dental or otherwise) for all which is a socio-economic problem: "Our goal should be to ensure that every individual has the opportunity to reach his or her full potential, no matter the circumstances of birth. That course of action would be just as beneficial to humanity as pursuing genetic cognitive enhancements, and it would do a much better job of fulfilling our ethical obligations."
You're right, but not right enough. Life is more suffering than not, as Mr. Buddha and the Stoics, and The Poor can arrest to, and there's no way to guaranteed any individual a quality of life worth living, much less to account for the externalities to others of we could, so we shouldn't do it. Anti-natalism is the ethical choice for individuals. At the larger scale, the only way to eliminate suffering (the primary moral imperative) is to eliminate nature, and that means virtualizing or eliminating everything.
True, but I don’t like this analogy because the social outcomes of the two situations are not comparable. Some people being able to afford root canals while others cannot is unlikely to lead to a two-tiered society, whereas only the Uber rich being able to ensure their babies are top notch is. They already have the advantage of better nutrition, medical care, and a healthier environment to raise their children. Add eugenics tech into the mix and It’s getting very Brave New World.
This is becoming more and more important as our capacity to prevent harm to future generations increases. We can not only screen for diseases with genetic components, we also have the ability to remove them from DNA. There is a moratorium on use of this, but it won't last forever.
Our ability to have a conversation about this topic will be a crucial determinant of how much harm our children and grandchildren experience.
"Our ability to have a conversation about this": Therein lies the rub. In our hyper-'liberal', hyper-virtue-signalling, hyper-thought-policed 21st c West, people who want any kind of real conversation outside of the Overton Window will never get a hearing in the mainstream; so they end up talking to each other. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Great post! You took the idea and flew with it to the very end. Its great to see posts that take ordinary beliefs and dig in deep enough to help us understand the underlying ideas that it represents. The question however is whether government should be allowed to make these decisions or if these decisions should be only made on an individual level.
Government represents the people and it shouldn't start going the other direction, with people living life for the government. There are certain sacrifices that people need to make to be part of a functioning society, but there should be limits on how far the government is allowed to make or force decisions on the individual.
Also when it comes to such decisions being made on an individual level, eugenics is not the correct term for it. The ideal member of the society for the government, is different from what an ideal partner is for me, an ideal child is for me, ideal sibling is for me, etc. Biases vary between individuals, and its a form of sexual selection, based not simply on what is the "fittest", but rather someone who is familiar, respecting of our needs, compatible with our behaviors, etc.
Nevertheless, great post, and I hope to see more of the same!
Many people are ok with the government using nudges- for example posting calorie counts or putting pictures of blackened lungs on cigarette cases. The implication is that all people have a desire to be healthy. Let’s say someone came in for drug treatment. They probably don’t plan to have a family while they are trying to get off drugs. So why not a similar nudge - offering a free reversible form of birth control. This, to me, seems no different than a doctor with the national health service offering you information on smoking cessation.
The problem here (and the one that eugenics faced historically) is the question of what is considered "good" or "bad". Genetical mutations that are considered "bad" is based on our biases of what that means. There are so many different selection criteria here to follow and which one do you consider the most important?
Is it good to be a good son, a good citizen, a good husband, a good worker, etc? What is good varies with time period as well - like how others stated about autism. It is an incorrect assumption to make that we all want the same things, and it is an even poorer assumption to make that nature selects for the same things. What are your thoughts on that?
How does "preventing brother-sister marriage" have anything to do with eugenics or preventing to harm to others? People can can children outside of wedlock. And anyone who supports same-sex marriage (I don't know if you do or not) or the modern view of marriage already believes that family formation and reproduction has nothing to do with marriage, but rather that it's only about love. On the modern view, what the state should prevent (if anything) is male-female sibling sex when both siblings are capable of reproducing.
Ah yes, the use of state coercion to prevent harm to others is an "abomination".
Yes, people who create children that are a drain on society are indirectly harming others. Society should not allow that to happen. Keep in mind that doesn't require killing anyone. All it requires is the state limiting reproduction.
This article is well written. There is a fundamental flaw, however in the principal argument. The author claims a myriad of examples to be “eugenics”, when in fact it is a by product of a different intention. The fact that I want my children to be healthy and not have a genetic disability, doesn’t make the opposite true: that I am then a eugenicist that is trying to mitigate the disability. In fact, that likely never crosses my mind. Perhaps a better example is the one about future parents not abusing alcohol or drugs during pregnancy. It’s a good thing for someone not to use drugs and abuse alcohol in general. We hold this as a moral good, because we want this person and other human beings to flourish. The fact that a person who eats healthy and doesn’t abuse drugs has a healthy baby is a by-product of the person flourishing. In other words, eugenics isn’t the end in mind, but a potential consequence of good choices.
You may not have genetics in mind when you think of human flourishing, but genetics has you in mind.
You’re right that promoting health does not necessarily entail promoting eugenics, but I think you’re missing the thrust of the article here: that one
of the strongest mechanisms for promoting human flourishing is the selection of “healthy” genes over “unhealthy” genes. Avoiding drugs, exercising, staying healthy and general human flourishing are signals for reproductive fitness.
We may not have that intention in our heads, but the principle belies our actions, beliefs, and taboos. For instance, humans have been universally repulsed by incest for much longer than we’ve known about genetics. We don’t need to rationalize it, because selection does the job for us, and instills a disgust of incest into us.
And perhaps taboo and healthy habits were as far as we could go before the age of reproductive technology, but now we have to come face to face with the eugenic intent behind our instincts, as the principles selection has instilled in us become motivating forces for how we use reproductive technologies. So I agree with the author; we have to own up to our eugenicist tendencies, and recognize that they are synonymous with our desire to promote collective human flourishing.
There are still many debates to be had regarding how these technologies will bump against our cultural, ethical, and religious values, but let’s at least be transparent about why so many people want to use these tools to promote human flourishing: because natural selection makes eugenicists out of all of us.
I think for a person with right/libertarian leanings, there's an analogy to be made to "communism". Both "communism" and "eugenics" refer to 19th/20th century social movements. The analogy is actually very tight, I think. Both social movements became very fashionable among a broad swath of intellectual types, were influential in academia, had a theory of social development inspired by novel scientific ideas, and were directly and indirectly responsible for heinous crimes on both small and large scales.
Someone could support the 40-hour workweek, want seats for union reps on company boards, and believe in government taking a role in industrial policy. It would not be correct to tell that person "you're probably a communist" (although leftists do say stuff like this all the time).
I submit you are conflating two different concepts, given your introductory story: "Eugenics" and "consanguinity." This conflation ultimately derails your thesis.
Hey, just found your Substack! I’m a long term follower of the evolutionary psychology perspective on the human condition, so I’m interested to follow along.
You want to hear something weird? When I was partway through this essay on eugenics, the thought occurred to me, “she’s using a Motte and Bailey argument to say that we are all eugenicists.” So I was intrigued to see you further along use the exact inverted formulation. Your Motte is the (practically) universally accepted ‘siblings shouldn’t procreate.’ The Bailey is then ‘so there are lots of other cases where we also might consider preventing genetically transmitted abnormalities.’
I’m sort of on alert to Motte and Bailey from seeing the critical thinking folks list it as a logical fallacy. They usually qualify it as an “informal” fallacy, which I think is because what it really is argumentation by analogy. And many arguments by analogy depend closely on the details. Take the example of ‘aversion to sibling procreation makes you a eugenicist.’ On evolutionary psychology grounds most everyone would ‘feel’ like sibling incest is in some essential way not analogous to issues like probability of transmitting Huntington’s chorea, etc. Which is why the European court was stumped on the question.
I'm curious why you chose to have a child with an autistic person given this, when the risk is even higher than with schizophrenia - one autistic parent means 80% chance if the child is a boy, 33% chance if the child is a girl. As your child is a girl, there's an epistatic effect, but her children will be at increased risk even if she doesn't present.
Unfortunately the diagnostic categories of autism have been collapsed. There is a huge difference between a person who is nonverbal and a person who has some trouble reading facial expressions. The latter used to be called Asperger’s and this category contains many of the smartest and most productive people in the world. I don’t know where you got your data from but I would be happy if my child was similarly on the spectrum as my husband. Unlikely, because I’m very far from being on the spectrum and no one in my family is on the spectrum.
This was roughly my belief before having children. Unfortunately in retrospect that was hubris. In reality, it's extraordinarily unlikely anyone will have a child *exactly* as autisitic as they are, and I shouldn't have risked it. Both my husband and I are high IQ, my husband is an academic like yours, and neither of us suspected were on the broader autism phenotype until it was too late. I also didn't know that the genes for IQ and autism overlap until it was too late.
I have a 10 year old who has a high IQ but unfortunately is nonetheless severely disabled by his autism. After getting rejected from several autism specialist schools for being too difficult, the LA has placed him in a £30,000/yr independent school for troubled kids that uses restraint techniques. We don't have the heart to send him there.
In my social circles there are so, so many parents who are smart and a bit geeky or nerdy who've ended up in my position. I think this is a blind spot of the rationalist community. It's hard to both celebrate nerdiness and also grok that a segment of the next generation will suffer for it.
Eek, you have made me a bit nervous here - both my partner and I are potentially a bit autistic also. You speak as though you would have done something differently had you known, but what could you have done? Rejected your partner in favour of a football player?
"Older men and women are more likely than young ones to have a child with autism, according to multiple studies published in the past decade. Especially when it comes to fathers, this parental-age effect is one of the most consistent findings in the epidemiology of autism.
The link between a mother’s age and autism is more complex: Women seem to be at increased odds of having a child with autism both when they are much older and much younger than average, according to some studies."
Old parents (55!) plus at least one autistic parent, I wouldn't be so sure. As far as government nudges go, preventing the elderly from reproducing is by far *one* of the most important. The increased chances of autism are concerning, with some studies showing as high as 75-400% increased chance of the elderly having autistic children compared to the general population. Not to mention the myriad of other pathologies that are more likely.
"The latter used to be called Asperger’s and this category contains many of the smartest and most productive people in the world."
They're also four to ten times more likely to commit suicide when compared to the general population, depending on the study. Considerably more likely to develop anxiety, depression, self-harming behaviors, remain unemployed, I could go on. Autism is without a doubt, *not* a sign of genetic fitness.
It is true that autistic people are more likely to have anxiety, be depressed, commit suicide, etc, but you still acknowledged that many aspies are among the smartest and most productive people in the world.
This is why nobody in first world countries likes eugenics, they're afraid of a Reproduction Board picking who gets to have kids. Not like that power will ever be abused.
That is one reason, but [the main reason is that the Nazis made it look bad and mixed it with pseudo-science](https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/eugenics-FAQs#nazis-were-dysgenicists). You have to recall that eugenics used to have *a lot* of public support in the early 1900s. So much so, that countries like the United States even passed eugenics laws in some jurisdictions.
Even if eugenic population control is compulsory, the obligations imposed on everybody won't be any different from forcing people to pay their taxes. It's the cost of living in a society. There are fair and reasonable ways to enforce eugenics, and it will certainly yield better results if plenty of reasonable safeguards are implemented.
Interesting. I wonder if it is possible (or will be) to determine whether a child in the womb has autism, and to what degree. Some people may chose to terminate rather than risk a non-verbal individual, and some may even prefer to abort a child with Asperger’s, given the social difficulties they may encounter. Does that prospect bother you? What if such practices were to become enforced policy?
I wonder if this is why intellectual power couples are so rare and smart people are so rarely seen as being successful in love--some evolutionary instinct that prevents autism genes from accumulating.
Eugenics can only really be a government program, enacted by law and enforced by police. Perhaps the best way to prevent eugenics would be never to give government regulators the power to create such programs.
But, historically, the people who hypocritically opposed eugenics were the leftists who favored making government powerful enough to do eugenics.
Minimal, limited governments would not have the power to institute genetics, so people opposed to eugenics should oppose powerful government.
mmm, no, as Dr Fleischman notes at length, for example, religious communities at risk of inbreeding can promote 'eugenics' principles to mitigate that risk. And 'social' enforcement can be as strong historically as legal/governmental.
Stopping siblings from having children isn’t Eugenics. Do you not know what Eugenics is?
“The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.” -Francis Galton
Eugenics is about the increasing the number of child in the next generation made by “the useful classes” If two siblings with desirable traits had children, that would line up with the stated goals of eugenics more than two strangers with undesirable traits.
Simply saying not wanting genetic problems is eugenics, is completely inaccurate. By that logic not exposing mothers to radiation and mutation causing chemicals is eugenics. You might as well say communism is just “sharing”.
If you decide to have a kid (bad) or not to have one (#antinatalism, yay), you're a eugenicist, which merely means intentionally controlling the population, as every government always has. There's nothing inherently problematic, much less bad about eugenics. Obviously the tyrannical versions get the most attention, that is all
Lots of good points. I think that genetic enhancement technology is very important and it will need to be defended against the eugenics claim. I think identifying all these examples and inconsistencies in our moral outlook is a good approach.
One possible line of argument I made in an article was to say that some forms of eugenics are bad because they harm people and to ask who is harmed by selecting the healthiest or smartest embryo. It seems hard to find a victim.
The main issue with eugenics is access and support for people who can't afford the necessary medical interventions. A good essay on the matter is "It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning" by Ted Chiang (https://archive.ph/cPaMI). It's great to advocate for better healthcare but most arguments for eugenic interventions do not properly address the socio-economic and political system in which such policies are enacted and so fall far short of what would be needed to make the technology of genetic engineering a net positive for individuals and society.
That some people don’t have money to get a root canal is not an argument against dentistry.
I agree, it's an argument in favor of free healthcare (dental or otherwise) for all which is a socio-economic problem: "Our goal should be to ensure that every individual has the opportunity to reach his or her full potential, no matter the circumstances of birth. That course of action would be just as beneficial to humanity as pursuing genetic cognitive enhancements, and it would do a much better job of fulfilling our ethical obligations."
You're right, but not right enough. Life is more suffering than not, as Mr. Buddha and the Stoics, and The Poor can arrest to, and there's no way to guaranteed any individual a quality of life worth living, much less to account for the externalities to others of we could, so we shouldn't do it. Anti-natalism is the ethical choice for individuals. At the larger scale, the only way to eliminate suffering (the primary moral imperative) is to eliminate nature, and that means virtualizing or eliminating everything.
True, but I don’t like this analogy because the social outcomes of the two situations are not comparable. Some people being able to afford root canals while others cannot is unlikely to lead to a two-tiered society, whereas only the Uber rich being able to ensure their babies are top notch is. They already have the advantage of better nutrition, medical care, and a healthier environment to raise their children. Add eugenics tech into the mix and It’s getting very Brave New World.
This is becoming more and more important as our capacity to prevent harm to future generations increases. We can not only screen for diseases with genetic components, we also have the ability to remove them from DNA. There is a moratorium on use of this, but it won't last forever.
Our ability to have a conversation about this topic will be a crucial determinant of how much harm our children and grandchildren experience.
"Our ability to have a conversation about this": Therein lies the rub. In our hyper-'liberal', hyper-virtue-signalling, hyper-thought-policed 21st c West, people who want any kind of real conversation outside of the Overton Window will never get a hearing in the mainstream; so they end up talking to each other. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Because the right never wields 'eugenics' as a cudgel against, say, abortion. Oh, wait.....
Tangential, but I would love it if you wrote a post about being an egg donor.
Great post! You took the idea and flew with it to the very end. Its great to see posts that take ordinary beliefs and dig in deep enough to help us understand the underlying ideas that it represents. The question however is whether government should be allowed to make these decisions or if these decisions should be only made on an individual level.
Government represents the people and it shouldn't start going the other direction, with people living life for the government. There are certain sacrifices that people need to make to be part of a functioning society, but there should be limits on how far the government is allowed to make or force decisions on the individual.
Also when it comes to such decisions being made on an individual level, eugenics is not the correct term for it. The ideal member of the society for the government, is different from what an ideal partner is for me, an ideal child is for me, ideal sibling is for me, etc. Biases vary between individuals, and its a form of sexual selection, based not simply on what is the "fittest", but rather someone who is familiar, respecting of our needs, compatible with our behaviors, etc.
Nevertheless, great post, and I hope to see more of the same!
Many people are ok with the government using nudges- for example posting calorie counts or putting pictures of blackened lungs on cigarette cases. The implication is that all people have a desire to be healthy. Let’s say someone came in for drug treatment. They probably don’t plan to have a family while they are trying to get off drugs. So why not a similar nudge - offering a free reversible form of birth control. This, to me, seems no different than a doctor with the national health service offering you information on smoking cessation.
The problem here (and the one that eugenics faced historically) is the question of what is considered "good" or "bad". Genetical mutations that are considered "bad" is based on our biases of what that means. There are so many different selection criteria here to follow and which one do you consider the most important?
Is it good to be a good son, a good citizen, a good husband, a good worker, etc? What is good varies with time period as well - like how others stated about autism. It is an incorrect assumption to make that we all want the same things, and it is an even poorer assumption to make that nature selects for the same things. What are your thoughts on that?
I like to say that violent eugenics is an abomination but non-violent eugenics is a moral imperative.
Using coercion to prevent brother-sister marriage or an IVF clinic combining their sperm and egg is not an abomination.
How does "preventing brother-sister marriage" have anything to do with eugenics or preventing to harm to others? People can can children outside of wedlock. And anyone who supports same-sex marriage (I don't know if you do or not) or the modern view of marriage already believes that family formation and reproduction has nothing to do with marriage, but rather that it's only about love. On the modern view, what the state should prevent (if anything) is male-female sibling sex when both siblings are capable of reproducing.
Ah yes, the use of state coercion to prevent harm to others is an "abomination".
Yes, people who create children that are a drain on society are indirectly harming others. Society should not allow that to happen. Keep in mind that doesn't require killing anyone. All it requires is the state limiting reproduction.
This article is well written. There is a fundamental flaw, however in the principal argument. The author claims a myriad of examples to be “eugenics”, when in fact it is a by product of a different intention. The fact that I want my children to be healthy and not have a genetic disability, doesn’t make the opposite true: that I am then a eugenicist that is trying to mitigate the disability. In fact, that likely never crosses my mind. Perhaps a better example is the one about future parents not abusing alcohol or drugs during pregnancy. It’s a good thing for someone not to use drugs and abuse alcohol in general. We hold this as a moral good, because we want this person and other human beings to flourish. The fact that a person who eats healthy and doesn’t abuse drugs has a healthy baby is a by-product of the person flourishing. In other words, eugenics isn’t the end in mind, but a potential consequence of good choices.
You may not have genetics in mind when you think of human flourishing, but genetics has you in mind.
You’re right that promoting health does not necessarily entail promoting eugenics, but I think you’re missing the thrust of the article here: that one
of the strongest mechanisms for promoting human flourishing is the selection of “healthy” genes over “unhealthy” genes. Avoiding drugs, exercising, staying healthy and general human flourishing are signals for reproductive fitness.
We may not have that intention in our heads, but the principle belies our actions, beliefs, and taboos. For instance, humans have been universally repulsed by incest for much longer than we’ve known about genetics. We don’t need to rationalize it, because selection does the job for us, and instills a disgust of incest into us.
And perhaps taboo and healthy habits were as far as we could go before the age of reproductive technology, but now we have to come face to face with the eugenic intent behind our instincts, as the principles selection has instilled in us become motivating forces for how we use reproductive technologies. So I agree with the author; we have to own up to our eugenicist tendencies, and recognize that they are synonymous with our desire to promote collective human flourishing.
There are still many debates to be had regarding how these technologies will bump against our cultural, ethical, and religious values, but let’s at least be transparent about why so many people want to use these tools to promote human flourishing: because natural selection makes eugenicists out of all of us.
I think for a person with right/libertarian leanings, there's an analogy to be made to "communism". Both "communism" and "eugenics" refer to 19th/20th century social movements. The analogy is actually very tight, I think. Both social movements became very fashionable among a broad swath of intellectual types, were influential in academia, had a theory of social development inspired by novel scientific ideas, and were directly and indirectly responsible for heinous crimes on both small and large scales.
Someone could support the 40-hour workweek, want seats for union reps on company boards, and believe in government taking a role in industrial policy. It would not be correct to tell that person "you're probably a communist" (although leftists do say stuff like this all the time).
VHEMT
I submit you are conflating two different concepts, given your introductory story: "Eugenics" and "consanguinity." This conflation ultimately derails your thesis.
Hey, just found your Substack! I’m a long term follower of the evolutionary psychology perspective on the human condition, so I’m interested to follow along.
You want to hear something weird? When I was partway through this essay on eugenics, the thought occurred to me, “she’s using a Motte and Bailey argument to say that we are all eugenicists.” So I was intrigued to see you further along use the exact inverted formulation. Your Motte is the (practically) universally accepted ‘siblings shouldn’t procreate.’ The Bailey is then ‘so there are lots of other cases where we also might consider preventing genetically transmitted abnormalities.’
I’m sort of on alert to Motte and Bailey from seeing the critical thinking folks list it as a logical fallacy. They usually qualify it as an “informal” fallacy, which I think is because what it really is argumentation by analogy. And many arguments by analogy depend closely on the details. Take the example of ‘aversion to sibling procreation makes you a eugenicist.’ On evolutionary psychology grounds most everyone would ‘feel’ like sibling incest is in some essential way not analogous to issues like probability of transmitting Huntington’s chorea, etc. Which is why the European court was stumped on the question.
I'm curious why you chose to have a child with an autistic person given this, when the risk is even higher than with schizophrenia - one autistic parent means 80% chance if the child is a boy, 33% chance if the child is a girl. As your child is a girl, there's an epistatic effect, but her children will be at increased risk even if she doesn't present.
Unfortunately the diagnostic categories of autism have been collapsed. There is a huge difference between a person who is nonverbal and a person who has some trouble reading facial expressions. The latter used to be called Asperger’s and this category contains many of the smartest and most productive people in the world. I don’t know where you got your data from but I would be happy if my child was similarly on the spectrum as my husband. Unlikely, because I’m very far from being on the spectrum and no one in my family is on the spectrum.
This was roughly my belief before having children. Unfortunately in retrospect that was hubris. In reality, it's extraordinarily unlikely anyone will have a child *exactly* as autisitic as they are, and I shouldn't have risked it. Both my husband and I are high IQ, my husband is an academic like yours, and neither of us suspected were on the broader autism phenotype until it was too late. I also didn't know that the genes for IQ and autism overlap until it was too late.
I have a 10 year old who has a high IQ but unfortunately is nonetheless severely disabled by his autism. After getting rejected from several autism specialist schools for being too difficult, the LA has placed him in a £30,000/yr independent school for troubled kids that uses restraint techniques. We don't have the heart to send him there.
In my social circles there are so, so many parents who are smart and a bit geeky or nerdy who've ended up in my position. I think this is a blind spot of the rationalist community. It's hard to both celebrate nerdiness and also grok that a segment of the next generation will suffer for it.
Eek, you have made me a bit nervous here - both my partner and I are potentially a bit autistic also. You speak as though you would have done something differently had you known, but what could you have done? Rejected your partner in favour of a football player?
“broad autism phenotype” is very commonly identified in one or both parents of non-verbal autistic children.
"Older men and women are more likely than young ones to have a child with autism, according to multiple studies published in the past decade. Especially when it comes to fathers, this parental-age effect is one of the most consistent findings in the epidemiology of autism.
The link between a mother’s age and autism is more complex: Women seem to be at increased odds of having a child with autism both when they are much older and much younger than average, according to some studies."
Old parents (55!) plus at least one autistic parent, I wouldn't be so sure. As far as government nudges go, preventing the elderly from reproducing is by far *one* of the most important. The increased chances of autism are concerning, with some studies showing as high as 75-400% increased chance of the elderly having autistic children compared to the general population. Not to mention the myriad of other pathologies that are more likely.
"The latter used to be called Asperger’s and this category contains many of the smartest and most productive people in the world."
They're also four to ten times more likely to commit suicide when compared to the general population, depending on the study. Considerably more likely to develop anxiety, depression, self-harming behaviors, remain unemployed, I could go on. Autism is without a doubt, *not* a sign of genetic fitness.
It is true that autistic people are more likely to have anxiety, be depressed, commit suicide, etc, but you still acknowledged that many aspies are among the smartest and most productive people in the world.
Under the system of eugenics that I have proposed, nobody would be forbidden from having kids as long as they meet the following requirements: https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/eugenics-FAQs#reproduction-license-reqs
This is why nobody in first world countries likes eugenics, they're afraid of a Reproduction Board picking who gets to have kids. Not like that power will ever be abused.
That is one reason, but [the main reason is that the Nazis made it look bad and mixed it with pseudo-science](https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/eugenics-FAQs#nazis-were-dysgenicists). You have to recall that eugenics used to have *a lot* of public support in the early 1900s. So much so, that countries like the United States even passed eugenics laws in some jurisdictions.
Anyway, [your criticism that eugenics would be tyrannical](https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/eugenics-FAQs#not-authoritarian) does not refute how eugenics will be necessary in order for humanity to have a sustainable future. [Dysgenics is rapidly rising in the modern world](https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/eugenics-FAQs#evidence-of-increasing-dysgenics), and everybody will be paying the consequences if we don't do something about it.
Even if eugenic population control is compulsory, the obligations imposed on everybody won't be any different from forcing people to pay their taxes. It's the cost of living in a society. There are fair and reasonable ways to enforce eugenics, and it will certainly yield better results if plenty of reasonable safeguards are implemented.
Interesting. I wonder if it is possible (or will be) to determine whether a child in the womb has autism, and to what degree. Some people may chose to terminate rather than risk a non-verbal individual, and some may even prefer to abort a child with Asperger’s, given the social difficulties they may encounter. Does that prospect bother you? What if such practices were to become enforced policy?
I wonder if this is why intellectual power couples are so rare and smart people are so rarely seen as being successful in love--some evolutionary instinct that prevents autism genes from accumulating.
Eugenics can only really be a government program, enacted by law and enforced by police. Perhaps the best way to prevent eugenics would be never to give government regulators the power to create such programs.
But, historically, the people who hypocritically opposed eugenics were the leftists who favored making government powerful enough to do eugenics.
Minimal, limited governments would not have the power to institute genetics, so people opposed to eugenics should oppose powerful government.
mmm, no, as Dr Fleischman notes at length, for example, religious communities at risk of inbreeding can promote 'eugenics' principles to mitigate that risk. And 'social' enforcement can be as strong historically as legal/governmental.
mmm, no. Religious communities cannot legally use force against people. Governments can and do. It's a whole different ballgame.
When you come back to actual American reality, LMK.
Excellent post, D. Sometimes wish my mother (or hers…) would have considered points like those you raise. If only you wrote this 25+years ago lol!
Stopping siblings from having children isn’t Eugenics. Do you not know what Eugenics is?
“The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.” -Francis Galton
Eugenics is about the increasing the number of child in the next generation made by “the useful classes” If two siblings with desirable traits had children, that would line up with the stated goals of eugenics more than two strangers with undesirable traits.
Simply saying not wanting genetic problems is eugenics, is completely inaccurate. By that logic not exposing mothers to radiation and mutation causing chemicals is eugenics. You might as well say communism is just “sharing”.
If you decide to have a kid (bad) or not to have one (#antinatalism, yay), you're a eugenicist, which merely means intentionally controlling the population, as every government always has. There's nothing inherently problematic, much less bad about eugenics. Obviously the tyrannical versions get the most attention, that is all