04-14-2020, 07:34 PM
(04-14-2020, 04:44 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(04-14-2020, 04:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(04-14-2020, 12:11 PM)Isoko Wrote: And all of these actions also took place I would like to add for the greater good. Oh and I know America actually founded the eugenics movement which later on inspired the Germans...greater good, greater good...
Making genetic engineering available under free market principles would probably be okay. Parents would select traits based on the individual good, which would be more difficult to pervert into tyranny.
Eugenics?? Talk about socio-pathology.....
Individual good or individual vanity? I might have been a good parent, but I would have been a risky sire. (You probably know by now what the risk is).
It would be very tempting for parents to seek to breed super-athletes. Ted Williams, anyone? Sandy Koufax? Gordie Howe? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Talk about a great meal-ticket in middle age! Of course such would make professional sports less special. It is better that people ask whether George Brett is the Joe DiMaggio of his time as a figurative expression than as a literal clone or near-clone.
Say what you want, but we need plenty of mediocre people -- farm-laborers, shelf-stockers, cabbies, retail clerks, busboys, assembly-line workers... it is the rarity, indeed uniqueness, of a Katherine Hepburn, a Mstislav Rostropovich, Henri Matisse, a Hokusai, a Beethoven... of course some things must be done exceedingly well to be worthy of fostering the talent. Excellence in milking a cow isn't as rewarding to others as is excellence in writing screen plays. But far more people need milk than can appreciate a string quartet.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.