"Eugenics has become a dirty word in popular culture because of its excesses in the early twentieth century, including forced sterilization laws in the USA and Germany (which were applied to the âfeeblemindedâ but sometimes also to epileptics and even sexual deviants). But a lot of the criticism of eugenics conflates what Galton and many modern academics in bioethics mean by âeugenicsâ with how the Nazis misused it [...] Moral grandstanding has become so common in connection with the word that journalists often use âeugenicsâ to mean something like âunjust coercion of innocent parentsâ. But Galton and Darwin would have rejected this, and so should we. According to Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwinâs son and past president of the Eugenics Society of England, âEugenics is the study of heredity as it may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human raceâ [...] While people disagree about precisely which traits are worth promoting, what motivates eugenics is a concern that individual welfare depends in part on the average traits of a population, and that demographic trends matter to the extent that they influence the success or failure of entire populations."
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Sources
Anomaly, Jonathan. "Creating Future People : The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement" (2020, 1st Ed.), P.80
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eugenics
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Eugenics
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