A less severe form would be financial incentives for licensed parents. You're still free to have children if you want, but you're only supported by the state if you got a license. Pair this with free birth control implants and abortions for everyone who wants them and you get most of the effect without the use of force. You could even pay men to get a vasectomy.
If only certain people are encouraged to have children, you automatically have an underclass, no matter how it's implemented. I think that providing free (or more incentivized) birth control would lead to very few cases of unwanted children. IUDs and vasectomies are simple and effective.
I don't have data at hand, so I can't contradict you with evidence, but you could also provide some numbers with your claims. I know of Project Prevention [1], which pays drug addicts for long-term birth control. The Wikipedia article doesn't provide data on effectiveness, but I guess they'd stop handing out money if it didn't work.
"You're still free to have children if you want, but you're only supported by the state if you got a license."
The traditional "license" to have children used to be marriage, and children born without such a license were called illegitimate - i.e. outside the law. It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children, and we've moved away from it for a reason.
> It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children
If the current system (where marriage and procreation are notionally separate) were found to hurt a lot of innocent children, would we call our system unjust and abandon it?
I suspect not. The current culture around marriage and parenting didn't evolve from pragmatism as much as (various takes on) ethics, morality, and self-determinism.
Maybe because "it's eugenics, and eugenics is bad, just look at the history!" appeal to 'historic tone-deafness' is not a valid argument.
Yes, Nazi Germany did some shitty stuff for ideological reasons and tarnished the "eugenics" label, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of influencing human reproduction and/or selecting for preferred traits and/or direct DNA interventions.
That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert). After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
In practice, eugenics seems to move from "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others, and we should strive for those in future generations" to "some genetic makeups are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should force there to not be so many of the others". There doesn't seem to be any clear point at which you can say, "No, you've gone too far", and explain to the true believer why the step they took is too far. They'll just tell you that it's logically implied by the steps that you are in agreement with.
And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places. (I probably need to qualify that with "eugenics movements that had some influence", because if you don't have enough influence to get people to accept step 1, you don't move on to step 2. And that may be begging the question on my part, because Nazi Germany may be the only historical example where the ideas got taken seriously and actually influenced much of anything.)
Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
> That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert).
Because it doesn't. I will assert that even though I'm not a Marxist True Believer.
> After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
And that's just plain stupidity, which is exactly what I'm complaining about. It's "someone tried that before some time ago and it didn't work, therefore let's label this stupid and throw it away" kind of attitude. The real reason we're ignoring the entire idea is because communist propaganda has lost and US propaganda has won, and it has little to do with actual merits of the idea itself.
You could utter similar dismissals for fire before we mastered it, or for gasoline before we created ICEs, or for powered flight before Wright brothers. What I was asking for is an actual discussion of the idea - pointing out where the idea is wrong, and talking about how can we modify it to avoid its problems while reaping the rewards.
Which fortunately you did in the rest of your comment, so forgive me for the text above, but I really really disagree with the sentiment of your first paragraph.
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> And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places.
I don't think we had many of such examples - the only ones we label "eugenics" happened within the last 100 years, and involved powerful people with ideology doing stupid and harmful things because doing things because of an ideology is generally stupid and harmful.
> Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
Yeah, that's a strong point I'm going to agree 100% with. Too strong adaptation to current environment means you'll be really out of luck when the environment changes.
But if it works out badly in practice (enough times, for some value of "enough"), don't you have a basis for saying that the idea doesn't seem to work in practice, no matter how good it sounds in theory?
You don't want to do that after one failed attempt. You probably don't want to do so after two or three. But after enough attempts, you probably have a basis for saying that, no matter how good the theory sounds, it won't work in practice next time either. And if each time it fails produces large amounts of human suffering, there comes a time to quit trying the same stuff that has worked out badly over and over.
No, eugenics really should be tainted forever. Cystic fibrosis can be heritably cured without eugenics, e.g. hopefully within a few decades via gene editing something like CRISPR. Let us not use specious arguments about curing rare Mendelian diseases as a Trojan horse to usher eugenics back into mainstream acceptability.
As a sibling comment notes, eugenics is conventionally understood to be gene selection via people selection, i.e. differential all-or-nothing biological reproduction of whole humans. And it was that sense of the idea I was critiquing.
And it is in that sense of the word that people shooting from the hip with talk of "licensing" the basic human right to reproduce are engaging in shocking historical naivety -- or worse, with facepalm-worthy apologetics like those corners of the commentariat that defend misogyny, slavery and other social aberrations that have rightfully been interred to the dustbin of history.
So you're okay with gene editing. Are you okay with editing a bunch of genes, as long as anyone is allowed to have a child that's still fundamentally a mix between them and their partner?
Because I'm pretty sure that would satisfy 90% of the historical proponents of eugenics, even if you refuse to call it such.
That is direct genetic manipulation. Eugenics is, in many people's mind, limiting people's reproduction to breed them like they were pets.
One is unfocused and hard to target genetic manipulation via reproduction incentives and force, the other is a choice for very targeted and obvious things.
