Natural selection isn't good. In terms of “bad things to do to humans”, it comes in just behind eugenics, and that's only because we haven't worked out how to do that without horrible horrible crimes against humanity (yet). (Yes, natural selection is legitimately bad enough that “make eugenics less genocidey and then do that instead” is actually on the table – I am so glad the problem can probably keep for another century or two, so I won't have to be responsible if we end up with some dystopia or other.)
These aren't good things. I mean, war does accomplish them, but… I'd rather they weren't accomplished.
It's eugenics when you force it. It's social engineering when you alter the incentives/rewards landscape to get better outcomes. And it's... evolution when nature does it anyway.
Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.
The point, really, is that eugenics itself is not necessarily evil until and unless you attempt to control the reproductive rights of others by your own eugenic criteria.
Now, explain why that's a bad thing. Voluntary eugenics doesn't strike me as bad or immoral. If you're not forcibly sterilizing people, what's wrong with it?
Have groups of individuals been any less misguided?
Eugenics is one of those ideas that might sound good in theory, but a world in which the government has absolute control over one of your most basic human instincts is a horrible world.
The OP was just saying that most of the non-ineffable things about love are natural selection, and that what the eugenicists wanted was already happening naturally. Nature is cruel after all.
Forced eugenics is obviously unethical but whats so bad about selective breeding in general as long as your going for intelligence, athleticism, musicality etc. and not country of origin.
We all practice eugenics when it comes to choosing a mate, yet recoil in horror at the prospect of applying it to society. Isn't this a remarkable inconsistency? What makes it immoral in the latter case, yet positively encouraged in the former case?
Eugenics are not evil and would rid the world of many terrible, terrible hereditary diseases. However, the way to get it out of humanity should be done by the 'soft' way, not with violence.
An issue to keep in mind when even approaching topics remotely associated with eugenics is how absolutely derailing they can become. Bull in a china shop, so to speak.
Among my own objections is that deliberate negative eugenics seems to me to be a case of evolutionary self-selection, that is, endogenous rather than exogenous evolutionary pressure, which ... seems particularly prone to various feedback effects. Self-selection is not entirely excludable ("mate selection" is a well-known example), but it seems strongly associated with nonfunctional-though-indicative features (the peacock's tail, moose antlers, stotting) in non-human populations. Numerous cases of pro-eugenic policies seem to be based on at best specious "fitness" indicia.
The question of disenfrachisement and its ill effects presupposes the larger question of what the purpose of democratic governance is, as well as what possible alternatives might exist.
Runciman's essay is interesting to me beyond the "poor / uneducated / young" aspect, in that it also addresses the option of sortition, which is a fairly fascinating concept I've been looking at for about a decade now, see "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly" <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. Runciman directly notes that this still tends overwhelmingly to favour representation of the poor and uneducated, which is probably non-ideal.
If we consider polity as the process of achieving collective decisionmaking, and see among the multiple goals of such systems not only effective and good decision outcomes, but social buy-in, fairness, broad consideration, and minimisation of self-serving corruption, then the arguments in favour of democratic processes (over oligopic or autocratic forms) seem more evident, though there are also failure modes of democratic forms. That many of those tend toward oligarchic or autocratic (electing a strong man, outsized influence of campaigns and/or media by a small high-wealth / high-power cohort, for example), bears reflection.
There's also the question and problem of effective representation. A member of the US House represents about 760,000 people. Over a two-year term of office, this means that each constituent can on average claim 1m 23s of their representative's time, assuming the representative is available 24/7/365. Congressional staff and household aggregation assist somewhat with this, but calling the circumstance "representation" seems a stretch. At the same time, increasing the size of the House by the 10x or 100x which might better suite effectual representation would make that body even more ungovernable than it already is. In other contexts, notably both military and corporate organisation, multiple spans of control, each typically addressing 4--20 or so individual units, is common. This of course leads to strongly hierarchical organisations at large scale, but these typically do have effective communications and command flows. Military hierarchies tend to be fairly stable over years and decades, whilst commercial organisations tend to see frequent (and often incomprehensible to those involved) reorganisations, shuffling those relationships.
There is nothing wrong with eugenics for Christ’s sake. People have such a knee jerk reaction to eugenics because of how it was used by Nazis, but before that the field had many noble goals.
If we provide the ability for people to select partners with some precision about what genes they carry and what might be passed to their offspring, we can ultimately create a world with stronger, smarter and healthier humans, and perhaps eliminate some genetic diseases along the way. Humans basically already practice eugenics anyway because of social structures, it’s just very inefficient.
Eugenics doesn’t inherently lead to human rights violations.
You can define better genes objectively by looking at genes of people that live the longest and with the least health issues. Natural selection is poor at selecting for traits that lead to longevity.
Arguably the worst things are completely natural and unconscious.
Natural selection by itself is very brutal, and often slow process, and doesn't always optimize for traits you yourself find desirable.
As far as sexual selection is concerned, it is very often conscious.
In other words, there's nothing inherently wrong about eugenics.
The wrong part is coercing people doing or not doing things.
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