Hi Platt, Bo and Squad,
Platt provided us with Bodvar's post from several months ago dealing
with the morality of eugenics. I've carefully read the post, and I'm
very pleased that Bodvar comes down against the immoral practice of
eugenics, but I feel that Bodvar's main conclusion is unsupported.
>"Conclusion: To the Inorganic level eugenics isn't "known". To the
>Biological level it is amoral - neutral - life is eugenics itself. To
>the Social level it is moral, and to Intellect it is immoral. As
>Intellect is the highest value level, eugenics as an IDEA should not
>be contemplated; no programs should be worked out to refine the human
>stock by killing "unwanted" individuals. And yet, it cannot be
>eradicated and is still practised under new names: pre-natal tests,
>abortion, gene manipulation, the Genome project, etc.
Society has historically placed great value on hereditary worth. This is
a static value called pedigree, and applies to humans and other species.
For thousands of years, humans have practised genetic manipulation to
breed plants and animals of greater utility. In some cases, man has also
bred plants and animals to maintain their pedigree. However, in the case
of our own species, breeding for pedigree is virtually the only breeding
programme that has ever been consciously followed and takes the form of
breeding based on rank (e.g. feudalism, caste system, social class) or
race.
This makes social sense to a society that values its own continuation.
The ruling classes DEPENDED on the servant classes, and as long as
everyone accepted their lot, all was stable (and static). The Victorian
aristocrat VALUED the servant in the basement and even the destitute in
the gutter, not as equals, but as essential parts of society.
Everything changed with the political revolutions of the 18th/19th
centuries and with the horror of the First World War. Man the individual
emerged as the prime moral value, protected by constitutions,
declarations and bills of rights. This value is so important that Bodvar
and others want to call it an "Intellectual value" to underline it's
dominance.
Once this value was applied to EVERYMAN, then defective man became a
threat. Society no longer had a place for the man in the gutter or the
village idiot. This is the era in which eugenics was born.
Eugenics is not a product of traditional society, but a product of the
ivory tower. It took hold in the USA which was supposedly leading the
movement to place intellectual over social values. It was the policy of
intellectuals who intelligently, rationally and dispassionately saw how
humankind could be genetically bettered by the relatively painless means
of sterilisation of the undesirables. It certainly sounded much better
than simply murdering them! We are still grappling to find a good
intellectual answer.
Eugenics is BAD - a child can see that. How come so many professors and
physicians didn't?
Jonathan
on eugenics from
-----Original Message-----
From: Platt Holden <pholden5@earthlink.net>
To: moq_discuss@moq.org <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Date: Thursday, November 26, 1998 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: MD PROGRAM: Morality and the MoQ
>Hi Jonathan, Horse, Bo and LS:
>
>Now that cooler heads have prevailed permit me to call upon a post
>submitted by Bodvar Skutvik to the LS on January 19 of this year
>because it beautifully demonstrates how to use the MoQ to rationally
>consider ethical questions without resorting to unrestrained
>emotionalism and name calling.
>
>Bo wrote:
>
>"....your question: "Is eugenics moral" requires a little preparation.
>t know how familiar you are with the Metaphysics of Quality
’I don
>(MOQ), but from your well-written essay it sounded good enough. As you
>will know: according to the MOQ everything is moral or value, but all
>phenomena do not belong to the same static value level. This is the
>reason so many issues take on a confusing taint when addressed from
>the Subject/Object point of view. Yes, it is the source of all good
>versus bad struggles of this world.
>
>"Well, then where in the MOQ hierarchy does eugenics belong? At first
>glance the obvious place would be the interface between the Inorganic
>(matter) and the Biological (life). Only the organisms able to adapt
>to changes in environment survive, but this is hardly eugenics in your
>book, only when the Social level comes into play does it take on the
>ominous quality we usually connect it with.
>
>"Society" in the MOQ sense is a very wide term. It can defined as
>"the whole at the cost of the part" and in that capacity groups have
>always put pressure upon its members to adapt to the group's interest,
>f.ex. an insect colony's highly specialized individuals, and flock
>animals' total devotion to the common cause (such things are called
>"instincts", in SOM). This is the extreme, but even human societies
>"breed" individuals that can best fill the society's needs. However,
>this comes naturally so to say; Eugenics as an idea (political
>program) is a relative modem phenomenon.
>
>"According to Pirsig (Chapter 23 in LILA) the time from the turn of
>the century and up to the second WW was the last throe of the Social
>level's dominance of Western culture, and the war itself the final
>shootout between the rising Intellectual level and the declining
>Social one. Fascism and Nazism were social value presented as
>political programs: the individual was to sacrifice itself for the
>common cause (Das Vaterland, the race etc.), and the unwanted were to
>be removed (holocaust).
>
>"The MOQ postulates this law: the value of a lower level is low value
>to the one above. Naturally, for the rising Intellect, social value is
>invariably bad, and the Western culture which is now dominated by
>Intellect look upon every social effort to control the individuals as
>an infringement upon it's chief value, freedom. Death penalty isn't
>eugenics, but another social value abhorred by Intellect.
>
>"Conclusion: To the Inorganic level eugenics isn't "known". To the
>Biological level it is amoral - neutral - life is eugenics itself. To
>the Social level it is moral, and to Intellect it is immoral. As
>Intellect is the highest value level, eugenics as an IDEA should not
>be contemplated; no programs should be worked out to refine the human
>stock by killing "unwanted" individuals. And yet, it cannot be
>eradicated and is still practiced under new names: pre-natal tests,
>abortion, gene manipulation, the Genome project, etc.
>
>"If you still insist: "Yes, but is eugenics REALLY good or bad?" there
>is no such (objective) reality in the Quality universe, there is only
>this hierarchy of morals. Nothing can be dismissed as REALLY evil
>without ending up with paradoxes and/or with an incomplete world."
>
>t that terrific? I think so. The issue is not whether Bo or Pirsig
’Isn
>is right. The issue is whether such problems can be discussed calmly
>and reasonably among people of goodwill. IMHO, the MoQ is a huge step
>forward towards Quality in that regard, and Bo shows why.
>
>In response to Jonathan's plea to trust human instincts in matters
>moral, here's what Pirsig had to say:
>
>"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth
>century intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and
>natural is disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in
>which everyone cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual
>good of all is a devastating fiction. It isn't consistent with
>scientific fact." LILA, Chap.24.
>
>I must disagree with Bo and Donny to the extent that they leave the
>impression that Pirsig doesn't tackle contemporary social ethical
>issues in LILA. He applies the MoQ to many of them, from war to
>capital punishment to racism. His MoQ assessments of the failures of
>communism and socialism are especially penetrating. He doesn't give us
>a manual, that's true. But he does gives us a rational scaffolding on
>a perspective I —which to ponder the issues from a new
perspective
>submit that is different from any heretofore offered in human history,
>i.e. revolutionary.
>
>Unlike Jonathan I don't KNOW that I'm right. The only thing I know is
>that I could be wrong. Where Jonathan and I definitely agree is that
>ZAMM and LILA are "thought provoking" novels. I hope we can continue
>to keep the emphasis on "thought."
>
>Platt
>
>
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