Issues in Ethics | Page 8

flow of human numbers is subject to three
regulatory demographic mechanisms, the combined action of which
gives hope.
The Malthusian Mechanism
Limited resources lead to wars, famine, and diseases and, thus, to a
decrease in human numbers. Mankind has done well to check famine,
fend off disease, and staunch war. But to have done so without a
commensurate policy of population control was irresponsible.
The Assimilative Mechanism
Mankind is not divorced from nature. Humanity is destined to be
impacted by its choices and by the reverberations of its actions.
Damage caused to the environment haunts - in a complex feedback
loop - the perpetrators.

Examples:
Immoderate use of antibiotics leads to the eruption of drug-resistant
strains of pathogens. A myriad types of cancer are caused by human
pollution. Man is the victim of its own destructive excesses.
The Cognitive Mechanism
Humans intentionally limit the propagation of their race through family
planning, abortion, and contraceptives. Genetic engineering will likely
intermesh with these to produce "enhanced" or "designed" progeny to
specifications.
We must stop procreating. Or, else, pray for a reduction in our
numbers.

This could be achieved benignly, for instance by colonizing space, or
the ocean depths - both remote and technologically unfeasible
possibilities.

Yet, the alternative is cataclysmic. Unintended wars, rampant disease,
and lethal famines will ultimately trim our numbers - no matter how
noble our intentions and how diligent our efforts to curb them.

Is this a bad thing?

Not necessarily. To my mind, even a Malthusian resolution is
preferable to the alternative of slow decay, uniform impecuniosity, and
perdition in instalments - an alternative made inexorable by our
collective irresponsibility and denial.
Racing Down
Eugenics and the Future of the Human Species
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

"It is clear that modern medicine has created a serious dilemma ... In
the past, there were many children who never survived - they
succumbed to various diseases ... But in a sense modern medicine has
put natural selection out of commission. Something that has helped one
individual over a serious illness can in the long run contribute to
weakening the resistance of the whole human race to certain diseases.

If we pay absolutely no attention to what is called hereditary hygiene,
we could find ourselves facing a degeneration of the human race.
Mankind's hereditary potential for resisting serious disease will be
weakened."
(Jostein Gaarder in "Sophie's World", a bestselling philosophy textbook
for adolescents published in Oslo, Norway, in 1991 and, afterwards,
throughout the world, having been translated to dozens of languages)
The Nazis regarded the murder of the feeble-minded and the mentally
insane - intended to purify the race and maintain hereditary hygiene - as
a form of euthanasia.
German doctors were enthusiastic proponents of an eugenics
movements rooted in 19th century social Darwinism. Luke Gormally
writes, in his essay "Walton, Davies, and Boyd" (published in
"Euthanasia Examined - Ethical, Clinical, and Legal Perspectives", ed.
John Keown, Cambridge University Press, 1995):
"When the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche
published their tract The Permission to Destroy Life that is Not Worth
Living in 1920 ... their motive was to rid society of the 'human ballast
and enormous economic burden' of care for the mentally ill, the
handicapped, retarded and deformed children, and the incurably ill. But
the reason they invoked to justify the killing of human beings who fell
into these categories was that the lives of such human beings were 'not
worth living', were 'devoid of value'"
It is this association with the hideous Nazi regime that gave eugenics -
a term coined by a relative of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, in
1883 - its bad name. Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster of North
Ireland, thinks that this recoil resulted in "Dysgenics - the genetic
deterioration of modern (human) population", as the title of his
controversial tome puts it.
The crux of the argument for eugenics is that a host of technological,
cultural, and social developments conspired to give rise to negative
selection of the weakest, least intelligent, sickest, the habitually
criminal, the sexually deviant, the mentally-ill, and the least adapted.
Contraception is more widely used by the affluent and the
well-educated than by the destitute and dull. Birth control as practiced
in places like China distorted both the sex distribution in the cities - and
increased the weight of the rural population (rural couples in China are

allowed to have two children rather than the urban one).
Modern medicine and the welfare state collaborate in sustaining alive
individuals - mainly the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the sick,
and the genetically defective - who would otherwise have been culled
by natural selection to the betterment of the entire species.
Eugenics may be based on a literal understanding of Darwin's
metaphor.
The 2002