I am a very sincere sneerer and I wrote a very long hypothetical scenario that shows that eugenics are ok
(seriously, look at this genius’ tactics. They think, oh, I want eugenics to be ok. And I know the left will say it’s ok if lgbt ppl want to do a thing, right? So I’ll invent this huge fucking hypothetical that draws attention to the idea that lesbians will be overrepresented in wanting to use eugenics. And I’m not even claiming that lesbians are more likely, because it’s just a little hypothetical! Be more charitable! And then y’all will be forced to conclude that eugenics are ok in this hypothetical scenario! But holy fuck, just look at how the initial desire to prove eugenics are ok traces through their whole fucking argument and causes them to write this whole long thing–it’s like a microcosm of one of scott’s posts.)
Full text if you really want it:
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Man, I do not get where you folks are coming from, acting like Alicorn’s argument here is self-evidently evil. Is it principled opposition to genetic screening for anything that wouldn’t, under optimal social conditions, severely reduce the potential infant’s quality of life? Or is it about the marginalized status of the people with the traits most likely to be screened out?
Like, here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a counterfactual universe in which lesbianism is highly correlated with both a strong desire to have many, many children, and a strong preference for children who are themselves female and lesbian. Nevertheless, due to a lack of sufficiently advanced reproductive medicine, and a history of intolerance of sexual minorities much like actual history, the lesbian population of Parallel Earth circa 2018 is no larger or less marginalized than here on regular Earth.
But then, all of a sudden, technology is developed which allows prospective lesbian mothers to ensure that their children are also lesbians, by means of pre-implantation embryo screening or selective abortion, and most take advantage of it. (And let’s assume that eventually a means of reproducing without the need for sperm donors is also invented.) Meanwhile, straight people’s birth rate is dipping below the replacement rate, for the same reasons as in our universe (whatever they may be), and no policy intervention can stop the decline, or even slow it down. The implications are obvious to everyone: men and non-lesbian women are headed for extinction; the future belongs to lesbians.
As a straight dude, my attitude about this would be, So what? No doubt some people would be wringing their hands about it, in the manner of people who fret about “white genocide,” but IMO that wouldn’t give them the right to deny Parallel-Earth!lesbians access to genetic screening and abortion services. If the Parallel-Earth!straights want to go on existing, they ought to assume the burden of their own reproduction, not foist it on unwilling lesbians. Likewise, I think people who want trans, gay, autistic, deaf, etc. people to go on existing should just go ahead and make trans, gay, autistic, deaf, etc. babies themselves. Hell, if they want to abort a fetus because a genetic test indicates it’s not one of those things, I’d be fine with that too.
Would the people who disagree with me about that also oppose gender-and-sexual-orientation selection on Parallel Earth? Would you be okay with it at first, but start opposing it if things got to a point where non-lesbians became a politically and socially marginalized minority? Why?
Ah yes, the old “but if you swap x for y and strip the scenario of all context then it’s clear that YOU’RE the racist” manuever. This is a decidedly large portion of SSC-derived posts.
Tbqh I’m a lesbian and I definitely only see myself having a daughter (I don’t care about her sexual orientation though because that’s fucking creepy) and I support selecting traits in an embryo to a limited degree, but still, this doesn’t speak for me, and it’s really telling that he chose lesbians for his weird-ass eugenics parable.
Also >men and non-lesbian women are headed for extinction; the future belongs to lesbians.
wow i love eugenics now
Rationalism is hypothetical-worship in the same way liberalism is civility-worship.
I have never pretended to be a sincere sneerer. I hardly post anything in this sub except dissenting opinions. If anyone got the wrong impression, maybe it’s because I also try to be civil and acknowledge points of agreement where they exist. Anyway, if the mods want to ban me for “““concern trolling”“” that’s their prerogative, but in the meantime I’m gonna argue with people when the spirit moves me.
No, I didn’t “know” that, which is why I asked the question. You are seriously misreading my motives. I’m not doing this to try and trick people into assenting to my secret plan to breed a master race, or paint them into a rhetorical corner so I can “win” an inconsequential internet argument. I’m trying to understand why we have different moral intuitions, because that is a question I’m genuinely curious about, and I’m trying to convey a more accurate impression of why I believe what I believe, because I find it unpleasant to see people asserting that positions I agree with, such as Alicorn’s essay, could only result from a desire to genocide trans people, or similar fascist motives. I read her essay before I read any of the comments here, and I honestly did not anticipate that it would be met with such intense condemnation. In order to better understand why, I used a hypothetical to try and clarify the distinction between the first two plausible motives for opposing opinions that I could think of, namely:
“It’s wrong to modify or discard a human embryo, if that embryo would otherwise grow up to become a human who would probably be grateful that they weren’t modified in that way or discarded.”
“It’s wrong to modify or discard a human embryo, if the motive for doing so is a genetic test that indicates that the embryo has a high probability of developing into a person with a marginalized trait (e.g. trans, gay, disabled), because that is a bad motive which reflects an immoral prejudice.”
Now, I don’t 100% disagree with (A); I think it would be wrong to genetically modify an embryo to give it, say, a chronic pain disorder, because people generally don’t look back on their lives and say “Man, I wish I had more chronic pain.” But nobody is proposing to use technology to do that anyway. OTOH, fully embracing (A) pretty much entails being anti-abortion, and I strongly disagree with that position. I can see how a pro-choice person could still be drawing upon (A), to some extent, in justifying their anti-eugenics stance, if they’re the sort of pro-choice person who thinks abortion is a terribly tragic thing that should only be tolerated because it’s the lesser evil, but that’s not how I see abortion. I think it’s wrong to kill people because that would violate their preference to not be killed, and if a pro-lifer were to object that this principle doesn’t rule out euthanizing an unwanted baby in a way that causes the baby to feel no pain or fear, because newborn infants probably don’t experience a conscious preference to not be killed in the same sense that older humans do, I would reply that I agree that euthanizing newborns is wrong, because they are cute and helpless, and, amazingly, despite my status as an emotionally stunted Rationalist galaxy brain, I partake of the normal human instinct to want to nurture cute helpless people and not euthanize them. But embryos and fetuses, until fairly well along in a pregnancy, aren’t particularly cute, and it is even less likely that they experience a conscious preference to not be killed, so I don’t see enough of a basis to regard them as moral patients with independent rights that could ever override their mothers’ preference to abort them.
I think (B) is a much more defensible position, so I was curious how people would react to a hypothetical in which it didn’t apply. Anyway, there’s a sense in which I endorse (B), but, as I’ve indicated, I still don’t consider it a sufficiently compelling reason to outlaw prenatal screening for any particular trait. But there are two independent spectra of nuance that I want to be mindful of, since this is such a controversial topic:
One is the nature of the trait being screened for. I assume most people who aren’t strongly anti-abortion are okay with screening for really bad diseases that only cause suffering and premature death, but if you want to ban other kinds of prenatal screening, you have to figure out where you draw the line between awful diseases that no one would want, and all other traits that could be screened for. If you adopt the attitude that anyone who would even contemplate drawing that boundary less restrictively than you is a NAZI GENOCIDE MONSTER, well, I don’t think that’s a good-faith, intellectually honest way to approach the question, frankly.
The other spectrum of nuance concerns the practical implications of saying that some behavior is morally wrong. Does that mean the behavior should be outlawed under penalty of fine or imprisonment? Not necessarily (although rhetorically analogizing a behavior to Nazi crimes against humanity certainly suggests where you stand on that question). I wouldn’t want to choose my children’s sexual orientation, for example, if I were a prospective parent, and if I were a medical practitioner, I’d like to think I would decline to offer sexual-orientation screening as a service, even in the face of strong market demand for it. I also want society to stop marginalizing sexual minorities, in which case no such demand would exist, presumably. But I’m not sure I would endorse legal penalties to restrict prenatal sexual-orientation screening. Restricting what other people are allowed to do requires justification, which usually involves identifying some moral patient who would be harmed by the behavior. As I said, I don’t consider embryos or fetuses who hypothetically could be born, but won’t be, to be moral patients in the required sense. And anyone who does needs to explain how they reconcile that with being pro-choice, if they are pro-choice. There is, of course, a different set of moral patients who would be harmed by sexual-orientation-selective abortion, namely third parties who find the practice abhorrent. But to me, “I am deeply offended by your choice to use reproductive medical technology in a way that invalidates my identity” just isn’t a compelling enough argument, on it’s own, to legitimize restrictions on what other people can do with their reproductive organs. There are systemic problems that could arise from such technologies, as Alicorn acknowledged in her post, but that’s a whole other ball of wax, and I don’t recall anyone appealing to such possibilities in their arguments in the SneerClub thread.