Oh, absolutely, the whole endeavor would be about as ethical as any other form of wholesale genocide.
I was setting ethics aside for a hypothetical.
I will point out that we could accomplish a half-assed version of my above post by means of sizable cash incentives.
Marry one young lady, produce a brood, and get paid.
Marry the other at your leisure and simply forgo the option of pecuniary compensation for reproduction.
Is it really any different than trying to make sure you marry a nice Jewish girl?
Pursue women in a certain feasible pool of partners, eventually you may find love.
The USA is a limited pool as well, but many of us find love nonetheless.
PS- No reaction to my above musical group reference? None? My feelings are going to be hurt…
First of all, I think you have a contradiction here. You use the word “eugenics” to describe the science of transmission of particular phenotypes traits in humans. Eugenics as it was practiced was no such thing; it was a decidely pseudo-scientific attempt to “perfect” the human phenotype by eliminating traits that someone had judged were undesirable.
Eugenics refused and refuses to look at the hard problems. Even if it’s morally sound to eliminate undesirable traits, what are they? A certain type of skin color? Uh, unfortunately different skin colors are sound adaptations of different human populations to the amount of sun they experience. So even on the science, eugenics gets it all wrong.
In fact, our knowledge of genetics, both human and in general, is far less developed than you might think. Decades of research have enabled us to link a few phenotypical traits, syndromes, and diseases to genes, but only a few. I think we’ll probably end up deciding that the majority of traits are a combination of genetics, in utero development, and post-birth development through adolescence.
Thus, a scientific effort to link all human traits to genes is bound to fail. We already do eugenics, in that we study the effect of genes on human physiology and behavior. We’re not going to get much further than that.
Above all, we shouldn’t. No human or group of humans has any conceivable authority to eliminate “undesirable” traits or emphasize “desirable” ones. If we reach the point in human society where we can even agree on the meaning of “undesirable” and “desirable”, then we’ll be right back where the Nazis were. If the whole world became that way, then IMHO the universe would be doing us a favor by dropping an asteroid on us.
But say, if we found the gene (s) for mental retardation and could control it by screening people before they had kids and performing genetic engineering, wouldn’t it be unfair to have people born with crippling mental problems?
I really have to question this supposition that we’re going to be able to trace X broad trait to Y gene and (this is the main point) select for it. Intelligence, strength, health etc. as general traits are typically expressed with a degree of synchronicity as the interplay of the effect of several gene clusters operating in specific environments. There are specific genes for health disorders etc but in terms of the aforementioned general traits I think there’s lot more going on than specific genes being turned on or off.
This will be one of the more interesting stories uncovered as we parse out the genome and how it is expressed. My own guess is the opposite: many phenotypic traits such as intelligence are going to end up being genetically simpler than we thought they were. Only time will tell. It will certainly be more complex than a single gene turned on or off, perhaps, but I think it will be a story which can, and will, be unravelled, and in the reasonably proximate future.
It’s not really unfair to be born with a defect (whatever it is) since the alternative is to not be born at all, rather than to be born without the defect.
(Haven’t read the whole thread yet, but here goes)
Eugenics as promulgated in the early 20th century was the proposal that social problems were curable by eliminating bad genes. It was uncritically accepted that poverty, crime and deviancy were the result of low intelligence. The literature of the time is obsessed with claims that the underclasses of society were populated by the “feeble-minded” and “morons”, leading to widespread and popular laws calling for the sterilization of the mentally retarded, the poor and the underclasses. This was a modern pseudo-scientific justification of the old prejudice against those of “low breeding”. You may have seen references to the old slur of “insanity runs in the family”: it sounds like a snobbish joke now, but people took that sort of thing seriously. And many people believed that modern civilization was creating a dysgenic trend ala’ Idiocracy, which would eventually bring down civilization unless actively countered by eugenics.
Scientifically, the proposition that certain well-defined traits have a genetic basis is a perfectly valid one. The nitpick is “well-defined”. How do you find genes for “pauperhood”, or “criminal tendencies”? By that standard, the British could argue that Americans are a race of traitors, since they not only revolted against their lawful sovereign but eighty-five years later had a further revolt against their own government.
In short, eugenics wasn’t being promoted on an individual basis, but on a social, demographic basis; and it attempted to extend the hard science of heredity to sociology, where a lot of subjectivism comes in, which led to inevitable abuse.