Quote: (04-14-2012 04:25 PM)Icarus Wrote:
Quote: (04-14-2012 03:50 PM)gringochileno Wrote:
Finally, I'm going to have to keep insisting that the evidence has falsified your position. If prohibiting sibling procreation carried a genuine danger of leading to eugenics, we wouldn't see the universal rejection of eugenics that exists today, independent of countries' policies toward incest.
I will summarize what we've learned from this discussion so far...
This incest scandal shows that, despite the antipathy towards limiting people's reproductive rights, it is still viewed as legitimate to forbid two consenting adults from reproducing when the risks are too "high". In other words, the "switch" that allows the collective to decide who should breed is already in the "on" position, despite the bad memories of the late 1930s, early 1940s.
It would be foolish to claim that forbidding incest will lead to eugenics in our era. The spirit of the times is such that eugenics is deeply repulsive to most people and, thus, will be seen as illegitimate to the collective.
But, the spirit of the times can and will change. In another era, say, 200 years from now, since the "switch" is already in the "on" position and unlikely to ever be in the "off" position, then eugenics may become a reality. If the giant social experiment that is liberalism fails, our descendents will adopt policies that counter those of our time, since it is only normal for the child to rebel against the father. Ideological trends and fads are fickle beasts. A mere economic crisis can make society shift from one end of the ideological spectrum, to its opposite.
You are still assuming that what constitutes an acceptable degree of risk is utterly, completely arbitrary, and something that only depends on whatever the "spirit of the times" happens to be. That is what I am denying.
Your mistake is reasoning from the indeterminacy of borderline cases to the nonexistence of any objective limits on the amount of risk we're willing to tolerate. That generalization simply doesn't have any basis; again, there are ways to make this quantitatively precise, but the case of first-degree relatives is so far from the gray area that we should be able to agree just as reasonable people making heuristic judgments. If not, I can direct you to some resources on quantitative risk-modeling.
Besides, even if everything you say were true (it's not), it's not like having your "switch" in the "off" position would be any barrier to a future society that really wanted to move toward a policy of eugenics. There's no argument for eugenics that wouldn't also be an argument for moving the switch to "on." All it would do is increase the number of children born with serious inherited disabilities, which I think you'll agree with me is a very tragic consequence if you've ever met someone with one of those.