This infringes on individual liberty. It is impractical.
Even the "gentle" approach of forcing parents to screen
is repellent to the ideal of personal freedom.

The assumption is a state completely up the butt of
the citizenry in a very literal way, as opposed to
wingnut hyperbole.

It is also impractical due to its difficulty in implementation.
Unless this disease is limited only to populations is
wealthy countries able to implement per-citizen conception
control, it's going to flat out fail for lack of enforcement
in the 3rd world, where we can barely get people to stop
drinking water so dirty they shit themselves to death.

I'm not seeing how this is remotely doable in a
practical way for even this clear-cut (as you make it sound)
genetic culling candidate. I'm afraid this very example
makes clear why eugenics is so far from being on the
list of mainstream policy topics to discuss.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

'82, wasn't a bad year.

The only ways to implement Shasarak's proposal are to either

(a) educate (brainwash?) everybody to the extent that they implement the proposal on themselves by willingly not reproducing (or by screening embryos etc.)

or

(b) by forcing them to comply.

The latter solution leads to unpleasant places…

Sometimes I think I'd quite like to be deaf, a bit of peace and quiet so to speak. Anything's better than my tinitis, thats for sure :cry:



You may not be able to bring yourself to describe it as eugentics, but I bet people there thought it definitely was and had convinced themselves that they were doing the "right thing". Where do you put the line between correct and incorrect decisions about what is genetically desirable?



Sure, the ideal is great. Its the practice that falls down, just like any ideal.



Okay, you pretty much had me all the way, I really didn't disagree with anything you said up til then.

The problem with eugenics is that it is OK up until you start involving other people. Its fine for anyone to choose whether they have children or not, or whether they are able to support their mentally disabled relative. Its fine for you to make decisions about your family and, in some circumstances, friends when things go wrong with their mental health or indeed if they are mentally, physically or otherwise compromised. The problem is when you get "other people" involved. Then you need to categorize, list, draw lines, segragate, equate and all those other things that dispassionate third parties need to do in order to be fair.

Unfortunately, you can never be that "fair". Inevitably, you will in some circumstance, be entirely unfair. Even when you are entirely involving family such decisions, there will be times when even they will not agree.

Even so, the "rules" can be twisted, just like the nazis did, to mean whatever you need them to at the time. And there in lies the problem. For example, your personal decision to not procreate because you are slightly deaf when applied generally would mean that we should try to eliminate all deaf people from the human race by not letting deaf people procreate. However, I know plenty of very nice, productive and happy deaf and slightly deaf people that I really would actually like to be around thankyou.

Just like communism, the ideal of eugenics is great. Yay for being better people. However, in reality, you cannot legislate, rule, meddle, and generally force opinions about "fitness" on others.

Oh, absolutely. It requires a fundamental shift from believing that having children is a right to believing that it is a privilege, and one that, under certain circumstances, can and should be revoked (which is how I feel about it). The way things ought to work is that everyone is automatically fitted with a contraceptive implant at the age of 11 or so, and it should be made a serious criminal offence to remove it without permission. That permission would only be granted in cases where the person you wish to have children with has been assessed to be genetically compatible with you, and where you've completed the appropriate parenting classes first. As a fringe benefit you'd also end teenage pregnancy at a stroke! :biggrin:

Of course this will never happen, and because it will never happen the human race is ultimately doomed :cry: ; but it's a socio-political problem, not a technological one.

In a sense, programmes like this already exist on a voluntary basis. There is a scheme, for example, in the Ashkenazi Jewish community where people are screened for Tay-Sachs Disease. People aren't told whether they carry the gene or not, but if two people wish to get married their names are submitted to the testing centre. If both of them are TSD carriers then they are told - and normally they choose not to get married after all. If at least one of them is not a carrier, then there's no problem, as it's a recessive condition.

As a consequence of this, even though the programme is completely voluntary, and even though couples who both turn out to be carriers are still allowed to go ahead and marry if they choose to, the incidence of the disease has fallen by 90% since the programme started. So even a voluntary eugenics scheme can have very significant benefits. But a compulsory one is obviously that much more effective.

Here's the thing about that… despite me being a big proponent of individual rights and hating the idea of government interfering in our daily lives like that, I can't help but to feel that would be a good thing and I've debated that numerous times.

I think the ultimate problem would come from someone with an agenda other than where it started, which would ultimately come about.

It's a shame that the Human element in so many systems (whether it be this, or socialism) absolutely ruins the chances of it working :p

You're both wrong and I will tell you why.

You want the government to be in charge of fixing the human race.

CASE. CLOSED.

-Crat

Not all deaf people; it aplies in cases where the cause of deafness is genetic, and the chances of the gene expressing itself are high, and the gene is unambigously damaging.


Yes, but what about all the people with perfect hearing who have never been born because the deaf people were born in their place? What makes you so sure that none of them have a better right to life than some of the people who actually were born? it's not about eliminating people, it's about deciding which potential people are born and which are not, given that, no matter what happens, the vast majority won't be.

Sometimes this is literally true: you may be confronted with 8 embryos, 2 of which you know to have a fatal genetic disease. Does it really make sense to implant them rather than some of the six which haven't? The point about eugenics is that for every person who is not born, a genetically better person is born.

There was a case a few years ago where two profoundly deaf lesbians sought out a deaf sperm donor because they decided that they wanted to have a deaf child. Should that be allowed? Or is deliberatelyinflicting deafness on a child an act of abuse?

That's like asking about all those people who were never born because their parents copulated on Monday instead of Tuesday. You can't just substitute unborn children for born children…..

EDIT:

Now this is a far more interesting question to me, and not allowing the deliberate causation of something like that is a far more defensible position.

On the contrary, that's exactly what eugenics does do. You substitute healthy children for less healthy ones.

Perhaps YOU people are deaf.




-Crat

Well, that may be bad, but it beats having the people who appear on the Jerry Springer show being in charge of fixing the human race, which is the situation now.

And Crat: I am deaf, I already said that. :biggrin:

Well I happen to be stupid. You don't see me usin that as an excuse.

-Crat

Valid points on both accounts :p

Honestly though, if the government proposed that, I don't know that I could support it in good conscience.

Like I said, there's a lot that sounds great in theory, but the Human element always screws it up.

But how much useful moral distinction is there between damaging a person through an action and damaging a person through inaction? If I run down someone with my car because I choose not to steer around them, is that really better than if I run them down because I steer the car towards them? If a child is made deaf because its parents do not get themselves tested for deafness-inducing recessive genes, why is that better than inflicting the condition on purpose? That's what an existentialist would call "bad faith".

Drama Llama's. Hahaha.

I don't feel like pulling in the various quotes, but it was touched on that the principle at the heart of government control of the population through eugenics is the paradigm shift of going from people thinking of having children as a "right" to people thinking of having children as a "privilege". I somewhat addressed this in the opening post of the thread. First, with the "God given right" bit and second, with the mention of China's One Child policy. After all, what is the difference between a government telling its citizens that each couple can only have one child and a government telling its citizens that each couple can only have children who don't possess certain genes? Is it really any more of an infringement? This isn't some radical notion, or something that will never take hold. We're already taking steps in that direction - or at least China is. Yes, plenty of people disapprove of China's policy; but, China did what needed to be done. How much longer will it be before India implements a similar policy? How quickly will it spread after that to other countries with rapidly growing populations? And by the time most countries in the world have their own one child policy, I guarantee you there will already be some starting up complementary eugenics policies. Unless we decimate our global population by war, disease or some other means in the next fifty years or so, these types of ideals will become a reality by necessity. Then again, gene therapy might make the eugenics angle (at least from a "breeding" standpoint) moot by that time.

P.S. I applaud your personal choice regarding reproduction shasarak, assuming, of course, that there are no advances in gene therapy to repair the various genetic defects you would pass on. If there are, then you've merely become another statistic - another instance of persons with higher IQ having fewer children. In which case, I spit on your personal choice regarding reproduction! :tongue:

Note that you can encourage a reduction in the number of children by doing it with carrots and sticks instead of outright forbidding it. You can provide tax breaks to those who have only one child, and fewer tax breaks to those who have "too many" (however many that is). Of course then you have the difficult-to-publicly-defend position of letting little kids suffer because their parents were so irresponsible as to have too many and therefore not be able to support them properly. It's not the kid's fault, after all.

Although I applaud the self-consciousness and general aim to improve humanity that it takes to make such a decision, I can't really say I applaud shasarak's decision in general when applied to people with so called "problems" or "defects". Somebody can have plenty of vastly redeeming qualities and happen to have a problem such as genetic deafness. It is hard to believe that a child will be inferior in general merely because of a single problem.

Humanity is not an optimization problem pushed to the extreme, after all. We're just here, chilling, trying to not kill each other and be happy.

This is not to say that there is no room for correcting genetic problems should the technology come about (I'm not talking about eugenics, though). It is to say that we are allowed to be satisfied with people who are not quite "perfect" according to some somewhat arbitrary schematic of the "perfect" human being.

Frankly I'd much rather have a group of cripples who have very strong moral character and intelligence than a bunch of brutes with strong bodies, no offense intended to our simian friends. (I realize that shasarak is not arguing for selection solely based on physical qualities.)

Hear hear!

-Crat

/thread