An Evil Guest - Big Questions, Major SPOILERS

Gwern Branwen · 22 Sep 2008, 23:45 · from 2008-September.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:45:16 -0400
Subject: (urth) An Evil Guest - Big Questions, Major SPOILERS
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On 2008.09.21 20:05:52 -0400, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> scribbled 3.2K characters:
>    On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 7:08 PM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>      The eugenics connection is, I think correct.  As for no one being
>      "heartless" enough to kill a "defective" child post delivery, I direct
>      you to noted ethicist Peter Singer.  Money quote:
>
>      "''I do not think it is always wrong to kill an innocent human
>      being,'' Professor Singer told the rapt audience in Harold Helm
>      Auditorium. ''Simply killing an infant is never equivalent to killing
>      a person.''"
>
>    I know of Singer and his ideas - my point was that most people who would give birth to a child
>    with a genetic defect (instead of aborting it) would be incapable of killing after it was
>    born, after it was more (as it were) than an image on a sonogram. Would Wolfe's hypothetical
>    "civil rights" groups really be looking for permission to kill retarded children five years
>    after birth? How many people would actually take up on that? But if your designer baby didn't
>    come out to spec, maybe you'd eventually decide it wasn't worth it... I think Wolfe's future
>    is pretty dark, once you turn off the Broadway lights.
>    -Matt

I wouldn't be so sanguine about people not killing infants and youngsters. There are many examples of people killing their kids, in a systematic fashion. Wolfe would no doubt be acquainted with the famous Spartan traditions of exposure; I recall similar Russian traditions. You can't read Victorian accounts of China without there being clucking over how those Chinese like to abandon babies to die, to say nothing of how various massacres, wars, purges etc. never respected young humans (and sometimes targeted them specifically; I think I remember Rwandan rhetoric about not letting the children of cockroaches grow up to be cockroaches).

Some of these are economically motivated but many are not. And then we begin to consider all the sterilizations and euthanasias in America and Nazi Germany.

Now, presumably someone who is pro-life before birth will not become pro-choice after birth (and in an extreme Singeresque way); but on the other hand, I've seen more than one fictional work in which a burdensome sibling or parent is quietly extinguished. ("How tragic that our retarded brother passed away last night. I suppose he must have been stifled by the heat.") And we're assuming that that someone has a choice; in some situations like the national eugenics programs, that choice may be nonexistent.

--
gwern
Armani rounds World 7NL Medco Bunny Consul TECS ssor SBI
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