Bodvar Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Mon, 19 Jan 1998 19:05:44 +0100
Doug, Dave, Hugo, Magnus and Samuel -- and Squad!
Thanks for responding to the Eugenics issue, you have given me
valuable inputs that go into my answer. It came to look like this,
but is on "hold" for a while if anyone has further comments.
***********************
....your question: "Is eugenics moral" requires a little preparation.
I dont know how familiar you are with the Metaphysics of Quality
(MOQ), but from your well-written essay it sounded good enough. As you
will know: according to the MOQ everything is moral or value, but all
phenomenons do not belong to the same static value level. This is the
reason so many issues take on a confusing taint when addressed from
the Subject/Object point of view. Yes, it is the source of all good
versus bad struggles of this world.
Well, then where in the MOQ hierarchy does eugenics belong? At first
glance the obvious place would be the interface between the Inorganic
(matter) and the Biological (life). Only the organisms able to adapt
to changes in environment survive, but this is hardly eugenics in
your book, only when the Social level comes into play does it take on
the ominous quality we usually connect it with.
"Society" in the MOQ sense is a very wide term, it can be defined as
"the whole at the cost of the part" and in that capacity groups have
always put pressure upon its members to adapt to the group's interest,
f.ex. an insect colony's highly specialised individuals, and flock
animals' total devotion to the common cause (such things are called
"instincts", in SOM). This is the extreme, but even human societies
"breed" individuals that can best fill the society's needs. However,
this comes naturally so to say; Eugenics as an idea (political
program) is a relative modern phenomenon.
According to Pirsig (Chapter 23 in LILA) the time from the turn of the
century and up to the second WW was the last throe of the Social
level's dominance of Western culture, and the war itself the final
shootout between the rising Intellectual level and the declining
Social one. Fascism and Nazism were social value presented as
political programs: the individual was to sacrifice itself for the
common cause (Das Vaterland, the race etc.), and the unwanted were to
be removed (holocaust).
The MOQ postulates this law: the value of a lower level is low value
to the one above. Naturally, for the rising Intellect, social value
is invariably bad, and the Western culture which is now dominated by
Intellect look upon every social effort to control the individuals as
infringement upon it's chief value, freedom. Death penalty isn't
eugenics, but another social value abhorred by Intellect.
Conclusion: To the Inorganic level eugenics isn't "known". To the
Biological level it is amoral - neutral - life is eugenics itself.
To the Social level it is moral, and to Intellect it is immoral. As
Intellect is the highest value level, eugenics as an IDEA should not
be contemplated; no programs should be worked out to refine the human
stock by killing "unwanted" individuals. And yet, it cannot be
eradicated and is still practized under new names: pre-natal tests,
abortion, gene manipulation, the Genome project, etc.
If you still insist: "Yes, but is eugenics REALLY good or bad?"
there is no such (objective) reality in the Quality universe, there
is only this hierarchy of morals. Nothing can be dismissed as REALLY
evil without ending up with paradoxes and/or with an incomplete
world. .....
Yours sincerely...............
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