Please remove the offending apostrophe. The lama would have none of this sort of thing!

Stephen Hawking is a terrible example of a person that can't take care of himself. He can pay someone to take care of what he needs because he IS a productive member of society. I never said that this method was humane. I said that the unproductive members of society would, in effect, cease to exist. They would either learn to be productive so that they could take care of themselves, or they would be unable to take care of themselves and would no longer exist. If particular individuals decide to take care of someone that cannot take care of themselves then that is excellent, kudos to them. If some of these people that are strongly in favor of a welfare state would like to put their own money up to fund private organizations to handle that matter, then great. But forcing productive citizens to pay for the care of unproductive citizens is criminal in my opinion. I'm not a particularly caring individual, I would not contribute to such a system if I had a choice. And I should have a choice.

The human race screwed itself over when it invented medicine.

Accept it, Idiocracy is the best prediction of the future there is.

It has electrolytes! :cyclops:



Also, best movie quote: "By Hawking's wheelchair!"

The bottomline of that is that the human race will cease to exist since we are all incapable of taking care of ourselves at birth, and stay that way for long enough to have died before ever being able to take care of ourselves.

What is criminal in your opinion is one of the measurements of civilization according to many, how well does a society take care of its weak members?

Also, it is a consequence of a rather defining difference in behavior between many animals and humans, this concept of taking care.
So, while you should have a choice in the matter, you might do well to consider carefully.

Hmmm….and we all know that plants crave electrolytes. Most medicine is derived from plants. Eureka! That's it! The plants gave us medicine as the first step in a sinister plot, setting off a chain reaction that would lead to the gradual dumbing of our species - all the better for the plants to control us. All the better for the plants to get their never ending supply of electrolytes, fed to them by us - their unwitting slaves! We've got to put a stop to this evil plant conspiracy before it gets out of hand! We must join together to rid the world of all plants!

Arrgh triffids!! noooooes

I think that there's a big difference to be made between people who are unproductive because they have no choice, and people who are unproductive because they are lazy. I have far more sympathy for the former than for the latter. I think that the debate of how we care for the weaker members of our society is fairly different from that of the so-called "welfare state".

Just like there's a difference between people who are born unproductive and people who are made unproductive by misfortune. A eugenics policy would simply eliminate the need of providing for the former, not leave the latter to die.

Who organizes such support, and who should receive the benefits of it are two separate questions.

The point I was making however, and why I brought in Hawking as an example, is that you cannot predict beforehand if someone is going to be a productive member of society. While the exact causes of his disease are unclear, there is a strong suspicion that a dna defect is part of it. Lets assume this is the case, and there would be an eugenics program in place, he'd likely never have been born to begin with.

Beyond that, I predict that we'll with due time find out that many generic defects that aren't the result of recent mutations have some direct or indirect relation to beneficial traits.

A rather pronounced case of this is http://sickle.bwh.harvard.edu/malaria_si...

I was actually agreeing with you aidil. :smile: I felt that when we start using the word "unproductive" we have to distinguish between various reasons for unproductivity. You were talking about protecting the weak as a measure of civilization, which I agree with; I was distinguishing that from the different problem of helping people who could be productive.

FWIW, I don't think that Shasarak was saying that any child with any defect should not be born. He said that all other things being equal, a child without deafness is preferable to one with deafness. I don't think he would argue that Hawking should not have been born. However, it does put any eugenics program in something of a pickle, because as you point out, you cannot predict what a child will bring the world. Hawking could have been a brilliant kid who went on to not do much with his brilliance; instead of went on to become one of the world's best scientists today, and perhaps in our entire history.

Like when living on credit mankind will one day pay the price for modern medicine. Just because human evolution has come to a grind doesn't mean that the world around us won't. Drug resistant viruses are probably the best example, mosquitoes become increasingly more effective at feeding on humans, and bedbugs have become resistant to common pesticides.

Yes, it was so much better back when we used leeches and other sophisticated techniques for curing things. :nods sagely:

Leeches and maggots are both making a come back in the medical field right now. :also nods sagely:

I think that people are grossly misunderstanding me but it is probably because I am so bad at explaining myself. I will try to simplify it even more.

I disagree with federally financed aid. I believe that removing such aid would force people to take care of themselves, or at least depend on friends and family, and not me. I was at one point in time homeless, at another point in time I was so poor that I ate only once or twice a week. For that period of roughly two years I never once took federal aid of any kind, I disagree with it that strongly. What I was saying about eugenics had nothing to do with how humane such a system was, or how well received it would be. I was simply saying "If we stop helping people that can't help themselves, they will go away." It might not be agreeable, but it's true.

I never thought anything you were saying was difficult to understand. I'm not really sure other people misunderstood you either. They just get defensive about the anti-humanitarian aspect of what it ultimately implies.


That makes two of us.

But what's the point of making a statement like this? It's also true that if we kill every single criminal, we won't have any recidivists (by definition, really…). It wouldn't be an "agreeable" solution, but it's true!

The hard part IMO isn't making true statements of this sort; the hard part is evaluating what we actually want to do as a group of people.

Basically, I don't think it's interesting to say that if A –> B, and A, then B; it's far more interesting (and difficult, and, frankly, relevant) to examine if we should be doing A in the first place.

It is not about the anti-humanitarian aspect as much as the historical notion that society is much much better off when it doesn't do what Chris suggests. History quite shows that it results in a less safe, and consequentely, less productive society.

Beyond that, WHO is responsible for providing support, and who should get such support are 2 different things. As long as you keep confusing those, you are nowhere near making a sane argument.

Eugenics isn't about individuals, it's about playing the percentages.

Let's say there's a genetic condition that leads to blindness in childhood. Let's say that our eugenics policy ensures that this condition no longer arises - so every person who might otherwise have been born with this condition is in fact not conceived, and his place is taken by another person who is not set to go blind.

Now, can we be sure that each and every of these new seeing people will be happier and more productive than the blind person he replaces? Of course not. We can't answer that question in individual cases: there are individual blind people who are very happy and productive, and there are individual seeing people who are not. But as I said, it's not about individuals. Is it the case that, on average, a blind person is less happy and less productive than a seeing person? Quite possibly. So, if a million blind people are never born, and a million seeing people take their place, then we can be pretty sure that the total number of happy and productive seeing people within that million will be higher than the total number of happy and productive blind people would have been - hence, the total number of happy and productive people under our eugenics policy is higher than it would have been if we had just let nature take its course. Of course there will be lots of talented disabled people who are never born as a result of the policy, but at least as many talented healthy people will be born instead.

Now, of course, perhaps I'm wrong: perhaps there is something about being blind which actively promotes achievement and happiness, to such an extent that blind people are actually happier and more productive on average than seeing people are. Would that undermine the need for a eugenic policy? Not in the slightest! All it would mean is that reducing the incidence of blindness would no longer be one of the eugenics programme's goals.

It is certainly the case that, under a eugenics policy, I would never have been born. This doesn't trouble me in the slightest. If I had never existed I would not have been in a position to be inconvenienced by my lack of existence.

It makes no sense to get worked up about potential people who are never even conceived. The average ejaculation contains hundreds of millions of spermatozoa. That means that even if an act of sex results in a conception, the same act of sex, given only one fertile egg, could have produced hundreds of millions of different people, only one of whom actually comes into being. Do you stay up late at night worrying about all the hundreds of millions of other people, any one of whom could have been born if your sperm hadn't fertilised the egg, but who will now never exist because it did? I can't say I'm particular troubled by that.

But if you do have the option to choose which one of those hundreds of millions of people actually comes into being, and the only criterion you can use is that you know some of them will end up partially sighted and others will not, I don't think it is unreasonable to make use of that criterion. Hundreds of millions of people aren't going to come into existence no matter what you do, it's just a question of how you choose which one does.

People should strive for happiness and that's all.