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Is Dawkins wrong about eugenics?

abaddon said:
Unlikely, you think? Can't get hundreds of volunteers? Nope. There are hundreds of volunteers for a one way trip to Mars.
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No there aren't. There are hundreds of people who basically signed an online petition. There is no actual trip to Mars, their participation doesn't actually constitute any commitment on their part. We don't know how many would actually volunteer if the trip were real and if their participation actually required a genuine commitment.

Would a group be willing to engage in eugenics voluntarily? Maybe, we certainly can't rule it out. But the Mars mission publicity stunt tells us nothing about that (or even about Mars missions, to be honest).
 
And I see the Church of Dawkins still has some members.
Dawkins knows a lot about Physics,not so much about other things, where his opinion is no more valid then anybody;'s elses.
 
dudalb said:
And I see the Church of Dawkins still has some members.
Dawkins knows a lot about Physics,not so much about other things, where his opinion is no more valid then anybody;'s elses.
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Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. He probably knows a lot more about eugenics than he does about physics. Are you sure you're talking about the same guy as everyone else in this thread? Maybe you're thinking of Neill DeGrasse Tyson. Or Bill Nye.
 
Puppycow said:
Yeah, and the reason eugenics is bad is primarily because it usually involves imposition of force on other people.
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I'm not sure I agree--we impose force upon people for the good of their children (or would-be children) all the time. You need to provide an education for your children, for example, an imposition I don't object to.

You could argue that it's the violation of bodily/medical autonomy that's the issue, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that, either. I don't think I'd object to compulsory vaccination in those terms, for example.

I tend to think the problem with eugenics is that it's historically been dilettante nonsense promulgated by people with nakedly supremacist ideologies. And that's still where we live, the odd soft-spoken bioethicist from the University of Gothenburg notwithstanding.
 
abaddon said:
Well there is also the objection that one would have to persuade the entire population to go along with it. That is daft. All one needs is a willing breeding population of a few hundred participants. Given that, a eugenics program would be trivial. It would matter not a whit what the other 7 billion thought about it's moral consequences.



Unlikely, you think? Can't get hundreds of volunteers? Nope. There are hundreds of volunteers for a one way trip to Mars. So a population to work with would not be an issue.



Arguing that we cannot actually do it at a technical level is nonsense. Because we can and have had the ability to do so for quite some time.



The morals, the consequences, the unintended consequences, the social consequences? Those are the hills we should die upon. Technical feasibility is in the bag already.
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As for volunteers, you'll find lots, yes.

Initially.

See how many continue to agree after finding they are in the "not better" category and "discouraged' from breeding.
 
I have noticed that if one defends Richard Dawkins over something, one is accused of being in the Church of Dawkins, or treating Dawkins as our own personal Jesus or some such

On the other hand if one criticises Richard Dawkins one is accused of hating him.
 
Robin said:
I have noticed that if one defends Richard Dawkins over something, one is accused of being in the Church of Dawkins, or treating Dawkins as our own personal Jesus or some such



On the other hand if one criticises Richard Dawkins one is accused of hating him.
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Standard social discourse nowadays.

You can't just have thoughts. Your statements indicate your alignment in the great cosmic struggle and once I "know" your alignment, I can invent a motive behind your words and attack that (assuming I don't agree with you).

If I do agree with you, you are on my team and all attacks against you are from "haters."

If I thought you were on my team and then you say something I disagree with, you are a traitor, possibly having been planted among us by the other side (or a russian troll took over your account).
 
Delphic Oracle said:
You can't just have thoughts. Your statements indicate your alignment in the great cosmic struggle and once I "know" your alignment, I can invent a motive behind your words and attack that (assuming I don't agree with you).
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A common subspecies of BulverismWP which is just a fun name for the circumstantial ad hom variant of genetic fallacy.
 
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For those interested in the topic, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom discuss Dawkins tweet on the most recent episode of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast. I'm not a subscriber and only thee first 30 minutes of the podcast is available to non-subscribers, but they get into it a little before that cutoff.

One quote from Bloom, after saying he doesn't think Dawkins is supporting eugenics, he explains what he thinks is the problem with Dawkins phrasing: "The very structure of what he said is, it's the same structure as 'It would be wrong to burn down Paul Bloom's house on moral grounds, on political grounds, on ideological grounds, but if you had enough gasoline and enough tinder, yeah, you could burn it down...'"

I thought that was an interesting point.

Anyway, there's only about five or ten minutes of discussion of Dawkins on the free feed, but you might find it interesting.
 
To extend the analogy, I've seen a few people saying Paul Bloom's house is made almost entirely of asbestos, unlike ordinary houses which might well succumb to arson.
 
Are people somewhere arguing that burning down houses isn't technically even possible?
 
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Are we hypothesising a world where we confidently create catpeople but getting rid of the inclination to bullying/xenophobia is too hard?
 
If he were wanting to make the general point that we need to, as rational people, be able to keep factual and scientific questions separate from ethical normative questions. I think he could have written it a lot better. I'm very much on board with that idea, and I think a lot of well intentioned people do need it drilled in a bit more.

If he were responding to specific people arguing that Eugenics is impossible using bad arguments, then referencing the particular bad arguments might have been an obvious starting point.

I'm not particularly afraid that Old Man Dawkins or his followers are going to start ethnic cleansing any day now, but I think if he had anything like the goals I mentioned above, he did a piss poor job. If he was craving a little hit of neurotransmitter juice from getting people riled up and feeling talked about and relevant, then it probably worked as expected.
 
sphenisc said:
Are we hypothesising a world where we confidently create catpeople but getting rid of the inclination to bullying/xenophobia is too hard?
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The Futurist Paradox, all future technology must be morally judged based on how crappy we are now.
 
Cavemonster said:
If he were wanting to make the general point that we need to, as rational people, be able to keep factual and scientific questions separate from ethical normative questions.
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I hope not because I... strenuously object.

"Should we use science to make moral decision?"
"Are you seriously asking if we should use the only method we have that gives us accurate information about how the world works when asking questions about the conscious experiences of living creatures because... well yeah probably should."
 
JoeMorgue said:
I hope not because I... strenuously object.

"Should we use science to make moral decision?"
"Are you seriously asking if we should use the only method we have that gives us accurate information about how the world works when asking questions about the conscious experiences of living creatures because... well yeah probably should."
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I apologize if I was unclear. When I said "separate" I meant that what we want and think is good, should not change our assessment of what is.

Of course moral questions can and must be informed by factual information.

Perhaps I'm almost as bad as Dawkins at communicating.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I hope not because I... strenuously object.

"Should we use science to make moral decision?"
"Are you seriously asking if we should use the only method we have that gives us accurate information about how the world works when asking questions about the conscious experiences of living creatures because... well yeah probably should."
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That isn't what he's saying. Science can tell you how the world works, but it doesn't tell you what your values should be. It cannot answer moral questions, because moral questions aren't about what is, but about what should be. Science may inform the answers you come up with to moral questions, but science can never suffice on its own to answer them. So he's right about that.

Take for example the abortion debate. Science can inform that debate. It can tell you a lot about fetal development, when nerve cells begin to differentiate, when a heartbeat begins, when a fetus can feel pain, etc, etc. And all of these factors may be relevant to someone's judgment about whether or not it's moral to kill that fetus. If you draw the line at when it feels pain, science can tell you where that line is. If you draw the line at when it has a heartbeat, science can tell you where that line is. Etc, etc. But it cannot tell you what the line should be. That's not a scientific question, that's a moral question. And we should not confuse moral and scientific questions. Doing so will not help us answer either one well. And differentiating between moral and scientific questions doesn't require denying how science can inform moral questions.
 
Ziggurat said:
That isn't what he's saying. Science can tell you how the world works, but it doesn't tell you what your values should be. It cannot answer moral questions, because moral questions aren't about what is, but about what should be.
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If you say so.
 
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