Yesterday someone showed up in the comments on the Quality of Life Post to complain that Eugenics shouldn’t be a dirty word, and wouldn’t

Why Eugenics Is Bad

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2024-07-04 11:30:06

Yesterday someone showed up in the comments on the Quality of Life Post to complain that Eugenics shouldn’t be a dirty word, and wouldn’t humanity be better off without say hemophilia, and he wasn’t scared of it because the Nazis were for it.

Which honestly is a caldron of a) biological ignorance b)historical ignorance c)wishful thinking that separates the dread disease from the carrier.

I’ll start with the last. When answering the comment, for some reason, I thought of it as the genetic side of it, perhaps because in my future worlds the sort of genetic manipulation where someone could go in and remove the gene that causes hemophilia is possible, and I’ve been living in my fiction way too much.

But the truth is, right now, where we live, the only way to “eliminate undesirable genetic traits” in a population is to kill or sterilize the carriers. And I’m again, no matter how crazy you think this might be, going to tell you that killing people for their own good is one of the greatest evils ever. Because it’s never for their own good, but for the interests and pleasure of those doing the killing. This is then wrapped and disguised in altruism.

You can’t know whether someone is perfectly happy with the quality of life that seems terrible to you. And you can’t judge whether someone with some kind of genetic defect will make a positive contribution in the world. (Even complete morons might make someone else smile. Heaven knows we keep dogs and cats who can’t talk and are very dumb compared even to human toddlers, because keeping them and looking after them makes us happy.) If you have to dressed killing someone as “for their own good” you know d*mn well it’s a bad thing. And the question is always always always “where does it stop?” I have perfect empathy with people who care for people at the end of their life and who think it would be best to spare horrible suffering for a few more hours or days or months, since the end seems inevitable. I’d even trust a few people, personally known to me to make that decision for me personally and if I had no other qualms about it (I do. They’re private and none of your business.) We watched my FIL unable to communicate, move, anything for the months it took him to die, and it certainly isn’t how I’d prefer to go.