[content warning: eugenics, discussion of various morally reprehensible thought experiments]
I just read The Infamous Chapters In Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics In Favor Of Murdering Disabled Babies, and I am not entirely sure that his argument holds.
Singer’s argument is that, under total utilitarianism, it is ethical to kill a potential person when either the potential person’s life will probably contain more misery than happiness or when the potential person is “replaceable”– that is, when the parents, after an abortion, will have another child of equal or greater happiness. (Under another form of utilitarianism, which he calls “prior existence” utilitarianism, it is wrong to kill beings that already exist but okay to fail to bring beings into existence.) He therefore argues that it is ethical to abort hemophiliac babies, even though hemophiliacs’ lives contain more happiness than misery.
(Singer argues that infants are potential people, rather than people. I buy his argument, but I know a lot of people don’t and it’s somewhat irrelevant to my point, so for the rest of this post let’s just assume Magically Awesome Genetic Testing.)
However, I think this argument may prove too much.
Imagine a mixed-race couple. They know their children may be read as white or black. If their children are read as black, they will face a lot of racism: hiring discrimination; an increased risk of being arrested and harassed by police; disparities in health care. On the other hand, if their child is read as white, the child will not face this discrimination. Is it ethical for them to abort any fetuses the Magically Awesome Genetic Testing predicts will have African features?
Most people would say “no”.
Now, you might say that this is unnecessarily rewarding racists. We should not respond to racists by getting rid of all the people they don’t like, because that just encourages people to be racist. On the other hand, a lot of the harm from disability comes from failure to accommodate people with disabilities– things like an absence of wheelchair ramps. Surely the same argument proves that we shouldn’t reward ableist refusal to accommodate disabled people by aborting disabled babies.
You could say that there’s a difference between those things, because accommodating disabled people costs abled people a lot. On the other hand, becoming less racist also costs people a lot (particularly if you consider subconscious racism). I suspect that most black people would respond to this hypothetical with “I don’t CARE how hard it is for white people to stop being racist, they should still stop being racist! We should not abort black babies!”
Similarly, imagine a couple that said that they didn’t want any children with IQs below 120. Would it be ethical for them to abort all children with IQs below 120? (And, yes, having an IQ above 120 is correlated with happiness.)
This is perhaps a more direct comparison to the problem of aborting intellectually disabled children than the blackness example. Thanks to the Flynn Effect, a person whose IQ means they would be intellectually disabled now would be neurotypical in 1900; therefore, aborting intellectually disabled children today is basically the same as aborting non-gifted children in 1900. (…assuming 1900 had Magically Awesome Genetic Testing.) If you would be against a couple aborting all their nongifted children, you really should be against a couple aborting all their intellectually disabled children.
I suspect some people– perhaps including Peter Singer– would bite the bullet on this one and say that it is fine for parents to abort nongifted children and children who don’t pass as white. But I suspect that many people would have more repulsion to both hypotheticals. (Indeed, a partner of mine who is quite pro-eugenics blanched when I suggested reducing the risk of me having a child with antisocial personality disorder by aborting all male babies.)
I am extremely confused about eugenics but I think I might be able to sketch out an argument.
I think there is a solid case to be made that diversity of minds and (less so) bodies contributes to human flourishing. Obviously, of course, people with different minds are good at different things: if everyone wanted intellectually challenging work, then maids and garbagepeople would universally be miserable. But beyond that, I think that there’s an advantage to society having a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different desires, a lot of weirdness. Perhaps this is merely a personal aesthetic preference or a cultural bias from someone who grew up in a diversity-prioritizing culture, and I certainly can’t ground it in any principled fashion. But I think my life is better off when there are people who are far different from me.
My intuition is that mind-selective abortion is more morally problematic than body-selective abortion. A society where everyone looked exactly the same would be a bit confusing (although maybe what it’s like for faceblind people all the time!), whereas a society where everyone thought exactly the same would be horrifyingly dull. My intuition is also that abortion to eliminate disabilities like autism, which affect all of one’s mental functioning, are much more morally problematic than abortion to eliminate disabilities like dyscalculia, which are limited to a specific area.
A common objection to anti-eugenics arguments is that it would be very strange if the optimal level of diversity for human flourishing is the level that happened to come about because of genetic mutations, evolutionary pressures, etc. I agree. But I am also a transhumanist so it is not remotely problematic for me to agree that there should be far more diversity of minds.
The diversity argument also shows why race-selective and disability-selective abortion is objectionable in ways that non-selective failing to bring potential people into existence is not. Me choosing to abort a child I’m not financially ready for (or, for that matter, to not be pregnant right now, or to choose one potential father over another) does not reduce the amount of diversity that exists in the world.
However, the diversity argument doesn’t mean that we should be against all eugenics or even all abortions of disabled babies. It is kind of an asshole move to go “yes, you are in tremendous pain for the entirety of your life, but the diversity your suffering adds enriches society.” The eugenic elimination of Tay-Sachs– which even the most ardent anti-eugenicists are usually in favor of– is perfectly legitimate. Similarly, I suspect eugenic elimination of major depressive disorder would be perfectly ethical.
Thing of Things 
I wouldn’t want to condemn someone to a worse life for the sake of diversity. A parent should seek to make their child’s life as good as possible, and if that means aborting them or committing infanticide when something inhibits that, so be it. Besides, neurotypicals’ minds are already diverse.
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But we’re not talking about condemning someone to a worse life[1], we’re talking about “condemning” someone to life itself, as against killing and replacing them.
[1] In this context; the matter would be rather different if we were instead considering prenatal genetic therapy.
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It seems to me that at the point at which it’s still infanticide, killing and replacing isn’t too different from aborting and replacing. Only later does the child become a unique person.
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I’m (moderately, kinda) pro-life, and also animist. We seem to have a massive axiom gap here.
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You’ve got quite the headline going here, Ozy.
An interesting consequence of the argument you’re putting forward is that it doesn’t ethically distinguish between death and genetic alteration in many cases. If we had a Magically Awesome Gene Switcheroo Machine along with your Magically Awesome Genetic Testing that could turn an autistic person neurotypical in vitro, that would seem to cause just as much harm as an abortion. (Tay-Sachs and other disabilities that you classify as uncontroversial to abort because they cause extreme duress would seem to be exceptions.)
I’m not saying anything about whether I agree with your intuitions – only raising a side-effect as a topic of conversation.
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Does the consent of the person being altered matter? If we postulate a Magically Awesome Mind Rewiring Machine that works on adults, and an autistic person wants to use it to become neurotypical, should we stop them in the interests of societal mental diversity? What if a neurotypical person wants to become autistic — is opting for a less-common mental pattern more okay? Are psychiatric medications a limited case of such a Machine?
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My intuition is that an ex-autistic NT is a different sort of person than both a never-autistic NT and a never-NT autistic, so if diversity is the only consideration you should support that person in doing what they want.
The fact that most people would support someone in becoming an ex-autistic NT, but not support people staying or becoming autistic, is where the problem is. Most autie activists I know don’t actually object to people wanting to become NT, but we know that if a Magically Awesome Mind Rewiring Machine were to come to exist, its use wouldn’t be restricted to people who consented to it (either directly, or by things like having support taken away from them to pressure them into it), and we tend to think that it’s better for that machine not to exist at all than for it to be used nonconsentually.
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I do not see why individual parents deciding what children they want is “eugenics.” Eugenics, to me, requires an explicit social policy (intentionally changing incentives would still count even if there was no violence).
I am basically 100% fine with early term abortion. Certainly I think its much less bad than killing a cow or something. And in the rest of what I say I am assuming abortion is early term. I think selecting for intelligence is actively virtuous. And if the selection was done through embryo selection instead of abortion I would policies to subsidize/encourage selecting for intelligence. But even intelligently selecting for intelligence through abortion seems actively virtuous to me (though not ethically required at all).
The issue with selection for mental traits is that I am in a small minority when it comes to my “ideal” world. Like Ozy I personally value and prefer a wide variety of minds and alot of weirdness. But it seems like most people do not. If you gave most people the ability to choose their children’s personality traits they would want gender-conforming, mostly law abiding, socially conforming, etc children. So I do think that allowing un-restricted child selection might easily lead to a disaster from my point of view.
But I cannot bring myself to try to stop people from using eugenics in this way. People need to be able to try to make a better world if they are not hurting others. I am strongly in favor of children’s rights but parent’s having children of the sort they want does not violate the rights of any actually existing children. Just as I find it horrific people try to stop others from using psychedelic drugs or gene therapy I find it horrifying to stop people with different ideals from my own from using embryo selection.
Also there is always the chance people like me and Ozy are just wrong. And the world would be better off if everyone was much more “same-y” and conformist. I find this hard to believe but thats always how it feels from the inside. One should not discount the probability they are on the “Evil team.” The risk of batting for the villian is always real.
I would however support banning practices that are sufficiently and clearly harmful to the child. Though the bar for “sufficiently harmful” needs to be very high. Or else people will try to ban having trans/autistic/etc children. Though it should be illegal to try to breed incredibly obedient slave children (though above average obedience is ok to select for).
Note I also think its virtuous to select for happy children. Intelligence and happiness are both sufficiently useful I think its actively good to select for those. I will note I myself am not very happy and many of the people I love are not max happy either. I love them 100% as they are. This is not inconsistent with my views imo.
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Given how strong people’s preference to associate with people broadly like themselves is, and how much strife is caused by people just not liking diversity, it seems extremely plausible that less diversity (especially of the bodily kind) is desirable. It is perhaps telling that those who are in favour of immigration and race mixing will sometimes talk about how in the future we will all just blend into one race.
The most useful kind of diversity is the diversity of ideas, and that has more to do with high intelligence than anything else.
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The correlation between ethnic homogeneity and support for the welfare state suggests this true up to a point. I’d bet it’s only up to a point, though. Take away the big differences, and people will find small differences to dislike each other for.
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@Matthew: Again, up to a point. I think that a big problem is that our societies are fundamentally too large, with the consequence that ingroup-outgroup distinctions that really should be inter-societal end up being intra-societal instead.
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I also find it pretty likely that society works better with less diversity, *especially* less diversity of expectations around social norms, but also just plain physical diversity, that makes people feel more “kin” with their fellow citizens (this probably works better if they are aware of faraway places where people look really different).
Though the “diversity of social norms” thing could also be that some social norms are good (for civilized society), while others – often those from people coming from less developed / educated countries, or from a semi-criminal underclass – are just harmful norms (e.g. nepotism, avoiding the police, vendetta, avoidance of western education…)
It would be interesting to know if a mix of “functional, civilized” norms e.g. sweden and Japan worked well or not.
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Emphasis mine.
Putting aside all arguments as to the truthfulness of the narrative given by trans people that their problems stem from being the wrong sex for their gender…
If we take this as a given, then it seems unimaginably cruel and evil to doom somebody to require a long journey of self discovery and invasive operations to feel at home in their own body when somebody else could have been born who would be cisgender.
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Agreed, I would expect that a lot of trans people would be okay with that kind of selective abortion, though it might depend on whether you phrase it as “we should eliminate transexuality by selective abortion” or as “we should make sure that everybody is born with the kind of body they wish they had”.
On the other hand, I knew one trans woman who wanted to have a trans daughter. But then she was a bit, um, unhinged, even compared to the average trans (is it is cissexist to say that trans people tend to be a wee bit more “mentally weird” than other people? Not that I mind, our society should be more tolerant of benign weirdness).
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I’m in complete agreement that it’s ethical to selectively abort transgender fetuses. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s ethically required, but we do go through buckets of unnecessary suffering, and not all of that is related to social discrimination.
Just last night I injected testosterone too close to a nerve and the inflammation left me feeling like my ass was on fire. That may sound like a joke, but it’s less amusing when you consider that I have no choice but to – barring medical advancements – stick a needle in myself once per week, and that’s the least of the purely biological inconveniences being trans has left me with.
However, I don’t know that we’re an especially “weird” population, or that we wouldn’t be if we weren’t often forced out of more mainstream cliques, or denied the kind of employment and services that help keep your average person mentally healthy. I am, in many respects, a tremendously boring person, barring my roleplaying habit (and my trans status, if you’re one of the people who finds that interesting).
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I’m trans and I would rather trans people continue to exist, actually, for the exact reasons of diversity my original post said.
I experience bodily dysphoria, I am going to experience social dysphoria for the rest of my life, and I get various disgusting biological indignities from being trans. (For instance, one of the ways my bodily dysphoria manifests is that my brain can never remember that periods are a thing that happens to me. Including when I’m having them. Yeeeeeep.)
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I got lambasted for making this exact point in the last open thread.
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I like being trans. In fact — and although trans activists sometimes over-romanticize these facts — there have been cultures where trans people were respected for having a special kind of wisdom. Certainly in a gendered society, having a class of people who cross the divide is a fine thing.
Regarding the hardships of being trans, our medical techniques have advanced by enormous leaps, and no doubt they will continue to do so, enough that I would suspect, as a practical matter, by the time we can for certain say a fetus is trans, we should be able to give the resulting child a rich and full life as a trans person. We can nearly do that now.
Certainly the existence of puberty blockers frees a child from a highly dysphoric puberty. Likewise the rise of trans awareness may save many children from a life of confusion — in a society where our tests can say for certain that this fetus is trans, we can tell that child they have the brain features of being trans. Forewarned is forearmed. Exploring a trans gender in a world free from hate would be amazing. It would be a life to envy.
Furthermore, bodily dysphoria exists by degrees. I experience bodily dysphoria, but frankly my HRT has more or less eliminated the pain. I *love* my trans body.
There are a few more changes I might someday make, but they are easily in reach.
In some bright future, were we understand better what makes a trans brain, and where we can bring undeniable science to the debate with bigots, unlike now where we bring speculative science, then there is no reason for a trans life to involve any particular amount of suffering.
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Many people who are trans say they would be reborn trans if given the choice. Though most wish they had realized earlier.
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My impulse is to say that I’d like to be reborn as a trans woman over a cis man… but really I cannot actually quite imagine being a cis man with all that entalis, so my brain is likely to substitute “trans and in denial” for “cis”.
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@multiheaded: I think the question people are focusing on is closer to “would you rather be reborn as a trans woman or a cis woman?”
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1) way to paasively aggressively callgrans people liars. It shod be made clear that not all trans folk consider their transness a birth defect (or a defect at all) and many dont experience their gender as inborn or genetic. But we should believe those who do.
2) if tje parents knew their kid was trand from birth, there would be no paonful journey of selfdiscovery because they shouldnt be misgendered at birth. So, no problems.
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Right. For me this is literally, exactly true.
The two things that parents could control, if they knew their kid was likely trans, are 1) giving the kid a home life that supports free gender exploration and 2) giving the kid good knowledge about what it means to be trans.
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Some trans folks figure shit out when they’re young. I did not. In fact, I went through most of puberty with no real clear picture I was trans. I just knew *everything was terrible*.
It’s like this: I wished I was a girl. But I figured, most guys probably do sometimes. Like, but we cannot talk about it, the same way none of us talk about jerking off. Cuz even though we all do it, someone somewhere made the big rule that it’s okay to bully anyone who admits they jerk off (or worse that they jerk off while wearing their sister’s clothes). So being smart means figuring out what you’re allowed to admit and not allowed to admit.
So just cuz no one talks about it doesn’t mean no one does it.
And I knew I wasn’t gay, cuz I really seriously like girls and find them sexy, and I feel nothing sexual for dudes. But back then I couldn’t actually have sex with girls. Like, my junk didn’t work when I tried to use it with a girl.
Actually, that part my friends *did* find out about. In fact, my “friend” had a punk rock band, and he made a song about my sexual failure. Everyone thought it was hilarious.
My dick worked fine when I closed my eyes and imagined I was a girl. (Later I found a woman who kinda didn’t mind that I dissociated during sex. We made it work for a while, but not forever. I couldn’t really be *present*. She put up with it. After a while I couldn’t anymore — but we’re getting into adulthood here.)
Over the years it became pretty clear that, no, actually most men do not feel this way. But even as I figured it out, I didn’t know any trans folks, which I thought being trans was all about wearing heels and dresses and getting a vagina installed, which basically meant to me that you couldn’t orgasm anymore, since they had to remove the penis. No one told me that in the years since Christine Jorgensen, doctor’s had figured out how to install an aftermarket vagina that can still have orgasms.
But then, no one told me that most trans women don’t get SRS anyhow, and that you don’t really need to unless you want to.
No one told me what hormones do, that they change the shape of your face, the distribution of your fat, the texture your skin — plus boobs! Totally real boobs! (I thought trans women all had fake breasts. My sister-in-law had fake breasts, and she complained that they lacked the sensation she had had with real breasts. I figured I couldn’t hope for better.) No one told me that your sense of smell changes, your sense of touch. You develop female-pattern erogenous zones. Your libido drops. It *smooths out*. Sex lasts longer. It’s more intimate, become like a subtle vibration in your whole body. Orgasms become thunderstorms that last and last and last.
Look, hormones can even change your bones if you’re young enough. I know women who transitioned in their 20’s who got real hips. (Lucky bitches! I hate them a little.)
But more, I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT TRANS WOMEN TOOK HORMONES. I DIDN’T KNOW. NO ONE TOLD ME.
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WAS POSSIBLE.
I thought the only choice I had was to linger in misery or look like fucking Frank-n-Furter, cuz I knew some trans women were pretty, but they were slender and graceful and has feminine faces. I didn’t, so I could never be what they were.
I had no trans friends. Everything I saw on television was a lie.
Look, the knowledge existed. Books existed. I’m sure if I had watched enough documentaries or whatever, I could have pieced it together. But I didn’t. Cuz I didn’t think I could even try, and everything I saw about trans women made me frightened, hopeless, and miserable — so why would I dig deeper into the fear and misery? Best shut it out.
I shut it out for a really long time.
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I’m incredibly happy now. My life is great. Being trans is great. I wouldn’t want to be cis.
But I lost half my life. I mean that literally. I get half a life, like one of those people who have one of those incurable diseases they know will kill them around thirty — ’cept I skipped the first half instead of losing the second. Back then, a person called *me* existed, but I wouldn’t call that life.
I wonder sometimes if I could express the full impact of those words. I get half a life.
It’s a damn sight better than what a lot of folks get. So I’m done crying about it.
But imagine this: if my parents had known I was maybe-probably trans, and they had helped me adjust, given me real knowledge and real choices.
I’d maybe get a whole life, an awesome beautiful long tranny life. That would be amazing.
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Oh yeah, and a lot of shitty transphobic people exist. They can make it really hard for some trans women, especially poor or minority trans women who didn’t luck out to become software engineers, or young trans women who are still searching for their strength.
But thing is, transphobes are petty little monsters. It gets better, cuz you get stronger. You reach a point where mocking transphobes is a positive joy.
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I am definitely not in favor of this, if it involves giving the state the power to mandate abortion. I’d rather preserve that Schelling fence than eliminate one genetic disorder.
I’d agree it is right for couples to abort Tay-Sachs fetuses, though. I’m not sure which of those things you’re advocating.
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I am thinking of Dor Yesharim, which is voluntary genetic testing and breaking up of couples that are at risk of having Tay-Sachs children.
I am in favor of full reproductive rights legally; all my discussions of eugenics are intended to be moral discussions.
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I’m perfectly willing to bite the race bullet. Correct me if I’m wrong, but under the social model of disability being black is a disability (but not an impairment), yes? Because you are likely to be read as poor and most people are white and like other white people and so on. And let us not forget Scott’s maxim: Society is fixed, biology is mutable! If the solution to the horrible intractable Racism Problem in the United States is as simple as selecting out high melanin rates, why not do it? Would people be so upset by this that it would really come out net-negative?
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Since I can’t edit: If we are speaking not of policy but of individual actions, then I think race-selecting is really obviously correct if you ignore universalizability concerns. In terms of universalizability — well, if the genetic tests are expensive (not to mention one being more likely to mate with a white person if one is upper class, I imagine), then the Racism Problem would be diminished for richer people and probably increased (although maybe by less) for poorer people. I’m not sure whether this would be a positive outcome or not; the simplest solution would be free genetic testing programs that were very easy and universal.
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I can’t tell whether your a troll or not. But I am pretty sure Black people would be upset with mass selective abortion of Black babies. I would think that would be self evident.
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The political feasibility of the parent comment is seperate from the question of what is or is not ethical to do. Unless your argument is that the dissatisfaction of minorities with mass selective abortion outweighs the benefits morally, in which case carry on.
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But that’s essentially what’s happening anyway, only with the result being slowed populattion growth instead of slow removal from the gene pool.
Seams like just a difference of degree, to me at least.
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If a woman cannot be forced to carry a child to term and raise it how can you possibly justify an exception like “unless it would be disabled / African / neuroatypical” at the same time?
Controlling women’s reproduction for your own aesthetic or ideological goals is exactly what people get angry at fundamentalists for. If we accept that mothers should have the choice to abort unwanted pregnancies then that also entails respecting the criteria they use to determine which pregnancies they want.
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Surprisingly, it is possible to believe that something is unethical and also believe that it is wrong to make that thing illegal. It is wrong to bully others, but bullying people should not be illegal. It is wrong to advocate mass murder, but advocating mass murder should not be illegal. It is wrong to hug people when they don’t want you to, but hugging nonconsenting people should not be illegal.
Unless by “forcing” you mean “writing a blog post arguing that it is unethical.” But, like, surely the only effect this would have on people’s behavior is if I convinced them that aborting neurodivergent babies is wrong. Is convincing people of things forcing them to do those things now? That seems like a very noncentral definition of “force.”
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You are absolutely right, but it’s unfortunately common for people to advocate government intervention in order to enforce their own ethical preferences, or even their own aesthetic preferences. For instance, I have encountered a shocking number of people who support marijuana prohibition mainly because they don’t like stoners.
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A blog post obviously doesn’t count as force in itself but it can absolutely advocate force.
Now apparently I misread your intention here and hope you don’t hold that against me. I don’t mean to interpret you uncharitably it just seemed like the obvious implication.
Your choice of examples don’t really support your point though. Bullying is the child version of the crime of Harassment, advocating any kind of murder is on legally shaky ground even in the US, and while nonconsentual hugs aren’t strictly banned they at least constitute a tort. And most people, especially in SJ would be in favor of making all of them even more illegal.
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What instances of abortion would you consider moral and inmoral, then, regardless of legality?
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Yeah fuck you, why would you ever take utilitarianism this seriously? I understand that it is “just a thought experiment”, but you all seem to think about it way to seriously. This stuff like “Under total utilitarianism killing depressed people seems ethical” is what should be obvious the first time you think about this kind of stuff, upon which any decent person would recognize that it is a stupid concept.
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Killing depressed people isn’t ethical! Not creating depressed people seems ethical. The morality of failing to create a person is very different from the morality of killing a person– just like using a condom is different from murder.
And, no, it’s not just a thought experiment. (The morally reprehensible thought experiments are the bits about eliminating black people.) I genuinely believe that, if we are going to have eugenics, major depressive disorder is probably the thing we should be targeting rather than autism.
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The morality of killing people against their will *is* a serious, non-intuitive result of many kinds of utilitarianism. Simple classic (happiness-based) utilitarianism condemns unfixably (or too-expensive-to-fix) depressed people to execution. Simple preference utilitarianism condemns people if society in total would prefer them to not be around to drag everybody else down.
I hadn’t heard of “prior existence utilitarianism” before; I just looked it up on the web, and from those descriptions I don’t see how it would avoid those conclusions.
Given that you state that you consider killing depressed people to be unethical, do you have a way to avoid contrary results in a utilitarian framework? Or is this just a matter of you not being a (pure) utilitarian?
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Because we’re creative mathematicians who can come up with utility functions that don’t say “kill all depressed people”?
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You don’t need a mathematician to say “Ok, this naive model does not give satisfying results, so let us change it a little, to better fit our expectations”, which is what you are proposing. However, you also don’t need a mathematician to realize that your approach is categorically flawed.
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Well, I guess a proof isn’t actually a mathematician, so you’re technically right. Do you have a proof that all utility functions are flawed?
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Not sure if you’re serious or taking a jab at utilitarianism…
But if the latter, I agree. One issue for utilitarianism is that it’s very easy to reationalize pretty much anything you want if you’re creative with your “math”.
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I have tremendously different intuitions than the people who have commented so far, but that’s one of the reasons I like lurking here.
It really comes down to me rejecting utilitarianism. It’s a useful part of some calculations, but it goes against my most deeply held intuitions when hypotheticals are brought up.
Abortion just seems unethical in most cases, especially if you’re simply trying to maximize utility. Like Ozy says, that doesn’t mean it should be illegal, and I think we basically agree on the system we should live under, this just isn’t the moral path that feels right to me. I wonder if the differences in moral intuitions can be overcome in most cases or if we’re stuck with permanently disagreeing on what is morally permissible (even if practically all options are legal).
I’m also surprised at how negatively being non-white is perceived, at least from the racism perspective, but I’m a neurotypical happy intelligent white male, so what the hell do I know?
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Definitely agree on the race point; I think it’s absurd to claim that nonwhite people in America are so unhappy that it’s ethical to abort black fetuses. The gap in self-reported happiness between whites and nonwhites is quite small if you control for income. Class is a bigger determinant of happiness than race, so the argument would apply even more strongly to abortion in poor families. Sexual orientation, religiosity, and probably a lot of other factors are at least as predictive of happiness as race.
As far as I would go is to argue that it’s ethical to selectively abort if we judge that the person’s quality of life is likely to be so poor that they’re better off dead. That would limit eugenics to a only a few of the most severe genetic diseases. Beyond that, the effect sizes in expected happiness are far outstripped by variance, and Ozy’s diversity arguments apply.
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Yes. We should pay poor people to not have children.
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And you don’t even need a *magic* genetic test for poorness.
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@InferentialDistance: I’d take it a bit a farther: We should pay people not to have children, period. Given a fixed payment regimen, poor people will be more likely to be swayed.
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The most immediate problem with this… seems to me that it will INEVITABLY be used as a cudgel to beat up on the struggling poor parents who do decide to have children. Because omg, those filthy dissolute poors need to accept responsibility for their selfish choices!
And so, instead of many moderately unhappy poor parents you have a few miserable and intensely stigmatized poor parents. Which, no.
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@osberend
Eh, I kinda like the idea of giving rich people tax breaks for having lots of kids. Try and hijack Azathoth to get those inheritances split up.
@multiheaded
Idunno, I’m not seeing the problem here. They’re forcing new life to suffer for their personal satisfaction. I’m pretty sure that should be stigmatized.
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In a scenario where the opportunity cost of having a healthy child with a “KICK ME” sign forever attached to their back is not having a healthy child without a “KICK ME” sign forever attached to their back it seems fairly straightforward what the ethical thing to do is.
Given that there are only so many children a person can have it seems reasonable to be selective about which ones you have.
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Only if it can be done before you realize the “kick me” baby exists. I would take a flawed child in my arms over replacing them with a theoretical unflawed child. Utilitarianism be damned.
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I’m with Mike H. Pre-conception[1] measures designed to avoid conceiving a (future) disabled child are in general good; post-conception measures designed to eliminate and replace a (future) disabled child are in general bad.
[1] I’m pro-life, but you can replace “conception” with whatever boundary you think defines (at least partial) personhood, and get the same basic argument. Which means that, yes, Singer’s argument is entirely correct given his premise (as I understand it) that babies are not actually people. It’s that premise that I disagree with.
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I feel super conflicted about the last sentence. If I had a button which meant nobody would suffer depression again for 125 years, I would press it despite the decrease in human diversity. I would press it even if the cost for pressing the button was financially substantial (I’m pretty sure it’s worth at least 25 trillion dollars and would guess it’s not quite worth 1 quadrillion dollars).
But I’m still not sure that depression eugenics would be good because I worry it would select for tons and tons of valuable diversity accidentally. If you try and select away depressed people, I feel like you end up removing many many valuable aspects of the human experience unrelated to depression by accident and am not sure I like that. (possible Cognitive conflict of interest This might just be a response to thinking about all the people I know who would be dead)
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I guess I’m unusual, because I can’t think of any unethical reasons to abort a pregnancy. I’m not even sure its ethical to create a person in the first place, so /not/ creating a person seems pretty safe, in that regard. And as for why someone might abort, why does it matter? They didn’t want to have that kid. End of story. Every parent willing, every child wanted, right?
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On the topic of unethical reasons to abort, I think in a world consisting mostly of straight people it would be unwise to abort based on sex. I know China has a problem with their sex ratio because everyone wants their one child to be male.
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IMO it can never be immoral for someone to abort a pregnancy even if it’s bad for society to do so.
People do have a few obligations to society as a whole, but not many, and we should generally be wary of assuming them when they don’t clearly exist.
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It’s not an obligation to society: it’s a question of whether it is moral or not. Perhaps I have no obligation to make my house attractive as seen from the street, but it is still moral for me to do so. Thinking in terms of obligations loses this.
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I don’t think abortion is morally OK (or that it should be legal, in general), so this is an easy problem for me.
Embryo selection is a different story, and there I’d be fine with encouraging people to select for above average obedience, for example.
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Ah, Mr. St. Clare. Do come in. I have followed your history over at CT comments with mild amusement.
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I remember hearing about a study on chimpanzees were scientist removed the depressed members of the group to see whether it would improve the groups well being. What happened instead was the entire group was wiped out by predators. It turned out that the depressed chimpanzees were the ones that were warning the rest of the group of predators.
I suspect that a similar relationship is true for humanity. It’s possible that people with mental disabilities provide a collective benefit for humanity that is non obvious. There is some evidence that supports this. Some studies have shown a correlation between mental illness, I.Q, and creativity. People with high I.Q’s have an increased likely hood for mental illness or relatives with mental illness than the general population. People with both a high I.Q and high creativity have even higher rates of mental illness. This implies that selecting out mental illness might drastically reduce the population of high I.Q and high creativity people. Which I don’t think is stretch to say would be a bad thing.
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That last sentence was supposed to be. Which I don’t think is stretch to say would have bad effects for humanity as a whole.
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(This statement is not directed at you)
As a utilitarian I shouldn’t have a problem with this, but I wish people who held positions like this would admit that they’re throwing a significant fraction of the population under the bus for group benefit. Most people would object to a preference reversal on this; they wouldn’t want to nonconsensually make neurotypicals depressed for the greater good. Which, again, as a utilitarian I have to bite the bullet, but come on people at least be honest about what you’re doing.
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Wasn’t there a replicated study where depressed people had more accurate forecasts of (financial? I don’t remember) outcomes in given scenarios than non-depressed people?
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Eugenic elimination of major depressive disorder is the only thing in there that my gut opposes — but that’s probably because I think it’s significantly environmentally influenced.
Also:
Your life is better off when there are people who are highly capable (or potentially highly capable) in different ways than you who are, in some broad way, on your side — because that means your side can explore more of the search-space, do more things, make more useful discoveries, etc.
Your life can be better off when there are people who are on an opposite side, as long as they’re not too strong. If they’re too strong, they crush you; if they’re too weak, you crush them, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women; and if they’re neither, their presence means your side has a very strong incentive to hold itself together and advance. (How many technological advances have come out of the military?) Or, given sufficiently open societies, you can take the things they’re willing to show in public and use them.
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As an aside, on this:
I mean, I can distinguish men from women and tall people from short people, and I notice if someone has a beard versus not — although oddly, I seldom notice eye color unless it is pointed out. And faces, they still have a *geometry*. I can see two faces side by side and say, “The face on the right is rounder,” cuz faces have shapes just like trees and cars and elephants.
I recognize my close friends, the same way I can find my car in a parking lot and if you showed me pictures of apartment buildings, I could probably say which one was mine.
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I really, really wish rationalists would stop using the word “eugenics” denotationally.
“eugenics” carries very strong connotations of racism, nazism, mad science, tyranny, frankenstein, oppression, arrogance. The only words I can think of that are less capable of being read in a neutral, denotational way are slurs.
Unless you are intentionally using it as a provocation or a shibboleth, why would you use such a word?
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What other word describes the same thing?
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Hey, that word usage isn’t because I’m a rationalist, it’s because I’m a disability rights advocate.
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Personally, I am in favor of aggressive denotational use (clearly identified as such) precisely because it tends to make a lot of the people that I cannot have a productive conversation with because they cannot (much more broadly) understand what I am saying either leave the room or flag themselves as such by going into histrionics.
Also, frankness is a virtue.
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So you advocate using language
* In a way that is guaranteed to be misunderstood by most people
* In a way that is likely to offend those people and destroy your credibility with them
* But which will be understood by members of your ingroup
* So that you can better recognize members of your ingroup
This is tribalist dog-whistling, not frankness. I don’t think it is virtuous. It seems more like the way 4chan kids throw around “fag”, (and other words I won’t name) as a sort of gleefully transgressive linguistic middle finger directed at the superculture.
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So, there are a couple of key points here.
1. I think of this as frankness because it is how I am naturally inclined to speak anyway; it’s not that I deliberately select words that are denotationally correct but maximally connotationally provocative[1], but simply that I refuse, having hit upon a denotationally excellent word, to select a less precise or more awkward one for the sake of its connotations. I think frankness is a perfectly reasonable term for that.
In contrast, 4chan kids don’t (prior to experience with 4chan) naturally use “fag” as an all-purpose suffix to denote a person of whom the root word is in some fashion or another characteristic. They do that only because it is a shibboleth.
2. The ingroup in question is not “rationalists” (which, in LW sense, I’m really only associated with insofar as I comment here, sometimes read Slate Star Codex, and appreciate some (though not all) of the norms of discussion), but “people who can rationally analyze denotations.” Many people that I broadly agree with on object-level issues are not in that group, and many people that I broadly disagree with are. But . . .
3. What I think you’re missing is that this is precisely the group of people with whom there’s a reasonable chance that I could have a productive conversation about something as contentious as eugenics anyway.
I’m not good at reading social cues, nor at deliberately sending them. Connotations and I don’t get along so well. So yeah, I’m running up a flag[2], but it’s not a flag for “people on my side,” it’s a flag for “people who it’s worth it for me to talk to.” Why wouldn’t I do that.
[1] With the exception of when I’m already in a fight and getting toxoplasmic. Which is still suboptimal, true, but frankly is also still superior to what most people do when they get toxoplasmic, which is to go for maximum offense without constraining themselves to denotational accuracy.
[2] What you’re describing isn’t really how dog-whistling works. True dog-whistling aims to not offend the outgroup, while still covertly signaling allegiance to the ingroup.
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Huh? What’s the connection here? You pick up connotations the same way you pick up other aspects of meaning — either from seeing/hearing the word in use, or from a dictionary. No social skills required.
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@Nita: Here’s what Merriam Webster has to say about eugenics:
That’s all. Nothing about “racism, nazism, mad science, tyranny, frankenstein, oppression, arrogance.” Just an entirely commendable, but difficult to achieve, goal.
As picking up connotations and denotations from spoken/written context, the former are much harder for me to pick up than the latter.
And this is far worse when we move from the connotations of individual words to those of particular words used in a particular context, or of saying a particular thing and not adding a certain disclaimer. Or I might know (from experience) that a particular disclaimer is necessary, but not have any idea how to put it, since disclaimers are often taken as having connotations (which I may or may not perceive) of their own.
In fact, in addition to purely non-verbal ones, a lot of social cues are encoded in the peripheral implications of statements and questions. I’m not good at those either.
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I guess I can kind of see your point of view. If you went around worrying about the connotations of everything instead of saying literally what you meant to say, you’d be acting like a marketer or a politician, which I’m guessing is not something you’re interested in doing.
But still, *eugenics*? Of all the words to mess with did it have to be eugenics?
I do not think “people who are willing to rationally analyze denotations after someone has thrown ‘eugenics’ down like a cat dragging the gnawed head of a robin into the house” is a good proxy for “people who it is possible to have a productive conversation about the ethics of applying technology to human reproduction”.
Notions like “eugenics”, “playing god”, and “frankenstein” loom over all the debates we have about bioethics. They are these stupid, lazy shortcuts that anyone on the “ban it” side of a debate can use, often effectively. Why would you want to willingly associate yourself with a notion that is considered so toxic that it’s used as a smear tactic?
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If you went around worrying about the connotations of everything instead of saying literally what you meant to say, you’d be acting like a marketer or a politician, which I’m guessing is not something you’re interested in doing.
Correct. It is also not something I would be remotely good at.
But still, *eugenics*? Of all the words to mess with did it have to be eugenics?
Because it’s the denotationally correct word for the concept in question? If you mean, “why has this word in particular become a rationalist shibboleth to a greater extent than other, similarly correct-but-provocative words,” then I have no clue. Nor, indeed, do I know if that’s even the case; my ties to the rationalist community are pretty weak.
I do not think “people who are willing to rationally analyze denotations after someone has thrown ‘eugenics’ down like a cat dragging the gnawed head of a robin into the house” is a good proxy for “people who it is possible to have a productive conversation about the ethics of applying technology to human reproduction”.
I’d go more with “people who don’t react to the word “eugenics” as if it’s a gnawed robin’s head in the first place. But really, that’s beside the point, which is that I’m not selecting for people who can have a productive conversation on this topic in an abstract sense, but people who can have a productive conversation on this topic with me.
Notions like “eugenics”, “playing god”, and “frankenstein” loom over all the debates we have about bioethics. They are these stupid, lazy shortcuts that anyone on the “ban it” side of a debate can use, often effectively.
So rob them of that power. Someone says “But that’s eugenics!” and you say “Yes, it is. Now what exactly is wrong with it?” Someone says “You’re playing God!” and you say “Yes, and doing it consciously, which is more than can be said for evolution.
This works poorly in a public policy debate in front of the voters, but that’s not really what we’re engaged in here.
Why would you want to willingly associate yourself with a notion that is considered so toxic that it’s used as a smear tactic?
Because no one can smear you with what you freely admit. And because I hate trying to dance around looming concepts, and throwing them out into the middle of the table avoids that.
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Tough to be fair, the uncanny associations you mention with respect to eugenics are simply what eugenics is about. The difference is that there were slightly different value systems involved, e.g. the Nazis did not care as much about individual freedom, and did not have a fundamental problem with ending lives.
Especially “Playing God” is actually a very accurate description. (Unless you are really reluctant to use religious metaphors whatsoever)
If you can have a rational approach to the ethics of human reproduction, you can surely have a rational approach to the history of the ethics of human reproduction.
I think your desire for another term is the wish to decouple the discussion about a thing with your gut feeling about that exact thing, so in other words you are in favor of using an euphemism (not unlike “eugenics”).
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@ osberend
Actually, I’m in favour of rescuing some words (for instance, “eugenics”) from their negative connotations. It does seem to be the only accurate word for what it denotes. But that’s different from a general attitude of “fuck connotations”, which I think is unwise.
Also, if you “select words that are denotationally correct but maximally connotationally provocative” in a fight, observers might conclude that your claims of having trouble with connotations are just convenient lies.
And thirdly, I disagree that this tactic is ethically superior to using denotationally incorrect insults. Plain insults are easily detected and not parsed as truth claims, while your method tries to sneak the hate in by mixing it with truth.
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Also, if you “select words that are denotationally correct but maximally connotationally provocative” in a fight, observers might conclude that your claims of having trouble with connotations are just convenient lies.
I suppose. I’m probably not maximally effective at doing so, precisely because they’re not. But most things people do in the grips of memetic toxoplasma are not exactly optimized for producing useful outcomes, more of less by definition.
And thirdly, I disagree that this tactic is ethically superior to using denotationally incorrect insults. Plain insults are easily detected and not parsed as truth claims, while your method tries to sneak the hate in by mixing it with truth.
. . . maybe? The contrast I’m thinking of is between, say, referring to rioters as “savages” (denotationally correct, but pushing buttons for pretty much anyone who would be defending rioting) and referring to someone who expresses concern about false accusations as “pro-rape” (denotationally false, based on the facts in evidence). The latter seems at least as sneaky as the former. Maybe I’m not communicating the dynamic I’m thinking of well. Or maybe we just have different axioms here, I’m not sure.
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Ner ner ne ner ner, pro-lifers are more ethically consistent than you.
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Pro-lifers may mentally edit the argument to be about genetic engineering and/or selective breeding if they so wish.
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For some of us (including me), that just means agreeing with editted-Singer.
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Or, at least, sort-of agreeing. Not being utilitarian makes it very hard for me to totally agree with almost anything Singer says, since he’s basically a poster child for taking utilitarianism really seriously and getting into bizarre territory as a result.
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Yeah, but then the argument falls rather flat. Who cares about those things?
That is:
Yeah, I can cheerfully bite the “bullet” of widely-available therapies that cure crippling genetic diseases. Pretty much anyone can. It is not, in fact, a bullet at all.
And neurodivergent people don’t have to lynch me, because, um, Utilitarianism? (Which is nice, ‘cos I’m not strictly neurotypical myself, and I’d hate to have to lynch me.) Run the numbers; if a trait is really bad, cut it, if it’s not leave it in. Same as we do with, um, all other medical treatments.
Eugenics … eh, there are iffy bits about the side-effects of breeding for specific things and the potentially-worrying notion of some centralized authority trying to regulate sex-having. There are similar (although possibly milder, depending on how much you worry about Moloch vs. “liberty”) concerns around unrestricted access to gene-altering technology (AKA “designer babies”.)
Now, some people draw the lines slightly differently, because they assign slightly different values to Respecting Nature or Freedom or Perverse Incentives in their mental models; but it still comes out fundamentally self-consistent, ’cause it’s not running on any unprincipled exceptions. Which is pretty neat and lets us gloat at y’all, even though I wouldn’t hold self-consistency as proof of any ethical system, just it’s lack as disproof.
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This seems like an argument for diversity rather then an argument against eugenics. If selective abortions to prevent an autistic child are bad because they decrease diversity, then it seems that selective abortions to increase the chance autistic children are good for the same reasons.
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Yes.
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I’m willing to bite the bullet – mostly because I expect that if parents had the right to selectively abort depending on genetic tests, they wouldn’t abuse it too much, and we’d still end up with some diversity. Even if some parents make racist choices for their kid, I’d expect that effect to be marginal, and trying to avoid it would create more harm (drama, paperwork, debates) than good.
Similarly, mayyyybe it could lead to a society where everybody looks the same and thinks the same, but I don’t expect it to. It might lead to a society where everybody is smarter and prettier than us, but I’d still expect enough diversity to go around, and maybe even more than today.
Think of it, if someone offered a safe genetic manipulation that would make the hair of your kid green or blue, don’t you suspect a few people would take it? (I don’t know how many, but I’d expect *some*)
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I think that examining the least convenient possible approach ends up conflating two different questions: Is it ethical to kill one one person to replace them with a happier person?; and Is it ethical to make people happier at the expense of diversity.
Imagine that, instead of abortion, we have invented an embryonic retroviral treatment that can edit out and replace a gene correlated with low intelligence, or major depression, or high melanin expression. The embryo doesn’t have a sense of personal identity yet, so I don’t think one can argue that altering it represents killing one person and replacing them with another.
Are people still objecting when no one is dying?
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I’m not.
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“a lot of the harm from disability comes from failure to accommodate people with disabilities– things like an absence of wheelchair ramps”
This is tangential, but I just wanna say that I find it alarming that a lot of people, including those anti-ableist community, regard wheelchair as an intrinsic attribute of a person with limited mobility. Mental health aside, body is a machine that brain uses to do all sorts of things. If the body doesn’t do what the brain wants (e.g. doesn’t walk), one may try to make the body do it (i.e. rehabilitate), use a wheelchair to travel instead, use an exoskeleton to travel instead – on conceptual level they’re the same idea of using technical or medical means to achieve the same result – mobility. I realize that wheelchairs are currently the most widely available option, so it makes sense to optimize for them, but I’m still baffled when people say that somehow exoskeletons are ableist, and wheelchairs are not.
More on topic, I’m totally biting the bullet, and saying that allowing conservative parents to abort GRSM fetuses should totally be allowed (just like allowing to specifically abort cishet fetuses as well), since this literally is gonna be better for everyone. The experience of growing up in a conservative household sucks for both the GRSM child and the parents who hate them. And if you at the same time allow those parents who are happy to have such kids to have more of them, this is literally equivalent to teleporting a kid from a hating family to a loving family – why would you not do that?
I’m not sure where I am on transgender kids, even binary. Their suffering can be hugely relieved by eliminating transphobia, but that won’t do anything to the part of suffering that comes from not having sex characteristics typical for cis people of the gender they identify with, and modern medicine can only kind of address this problem, with the results hugely dependent of tons of hardly controllable factors (probably this problem won’t be ultimately solved until we’re all stuffed with body-altering nanites or are uploaded minds only controlling biorobots when it’s fun to do so). Now imagine the following: there’s a fetus of a transgirl, who would have been assigned male at birth. Parents abort this fetus, and have another child – a cis girl. This is equivalent of giving the transgirl the body she would have always wanted, which is awesome, and way better than any transition technology can offer in foreseeable future. Alternatively, if they have a cis boy, that will be equivalent to brainwashing the girl into complying with the body she has, which is horrible. And then we end up with the ethical value of childbirth being entirely dependent on the sex of the child, which is nonsense. Clearly my intuitions don’t work here, although I’m slightly more inclined to regard it as giving people the bodies that want rather than exterminating trans people.
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Now imagine the following: there’s a fetus of a transgirl, who would have been assigned male at birth. Parents abort this fetus, and have another child – a cis girl. This is equivalent of giving the transgirl the body she would have always wanted, which is awesome, and way better than any transition technology can offer in foreseeable future. Alternatively, if they have a cis boy, that will be equivalent to brainwashing the girl into complying with the body she has, which is horrible. And then we end up with the ethical value of childbirth being entirely dependent on the sex of the child, which is nonsense.
I think there are two problems here. One is that your equivalents are not actually equivalent. The other is that “brainwashing the girl into complying with the body she has” is only horrible if (a) the brainwashing involves things that are intrinsically bad (e.g., mind-rape, physical abuse, psychological torture, etc.) or (b) her “compliance” actually involves dysphoria.
I see nothing wrong in principle with giving a transgender child (otherwise ethical) psychological therapy that will result in them coming to accept and be happy with their assigned sex, if you can find a way to actually do that.
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I wonder how different people’s intuitions would be if abortion were off the table, if we had a magic drug that made children be born without disabilities, and having a child who was, say, autistic, was “opt in” only.
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Is there a way to measure “weirdness” in a given population, and then check to see if this really does lead to more happiness?
I’ve always been under the impression that the happiest populations of people often reside in countries with little cultural diversity.
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Yeah, that’s the part of the post I’m the most skeptical about. Especially when most examples of neuroatypicality cause more suffering than happiness for the person who has them. (This is coming from someone who has several forms of mental weirdness and would rather not have them, not some evil NT curebie or whatever.)
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not some evil NT curebie
This has reminded me of an observation I meant to get to in an earlier thread and then forgot about. Ozy wrote a post about how one shouldn’t call “pro-life” people “anti-choice.” Shortly thereafter, we had an open thread where I brought up a topic similar to this post. Ozy’s reply started with “Ugh, curebies, no.” That was my first introduction the term, but I rather doubt it’s one the people being described would choose for themselves.
I feel like there’s an “I can tolerate anything (except the outgroup)” point to be made here.
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“You could say that there’s a difference between those things, because accommodating disabled people costs abled people a lot. On the other hand, becoming less racist also costs people a lot”
Accommodating the disabled costs society a lot in perpetuity. Becoming less racist is a transitory state with the long-term effect of reducing irrational bias- a form of economic efficiency. An irrationally racist society has a lot of costs associated with it.
I agree that diversity generally should be seen as beneficial. But I don’t see diversity, in itself, as some kind of terminal value (some people do, I think, but I’m not inclined to subsidize them). Diversity is one of the because values, a useful tool that helps with innovation, avoids brittleness, and so on. The question is, what forms of diversity are a net benefit, and what forms of diversity require too much accommodation to be net useful?
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The assumption that there is a stable state of marginal racism seems bold. At least wheelchair-ramps stay built.
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I know it’s boring, but I’d like to see more economic perspective in thinking about parents of maybe-disabled fetuses. There is a level where bringing up and giving good chances in life for a healthy kid is still possible, but paying for expenses for a lifetime (bc employers are ableist or bc that person has nothing to offer to capitalism, and we suppose capitalism stays where it stays, maybe even that it’s a good thing, w/e) is impossible for them. Ideally the state would pay these expenses, in practice risking creating someone on the off chance that things will go well and the state will suddenly start paying much more… is unrealistic. So should everybody but the rich stop procreating? Is this a realistic thing to want? What if poverty is correlated with, say, being rroma? I also live in a second world country, and I don’t want any kind of kids, but I can imagine being into the 20 year project and not into the lifelong. If somebody may be happy if I just sacrifice everything else I ever wanted to do in my life for them, it exemplifies how hard the pressure to be a martyric mother is, and how conditioned we are to treat these costs as irrelevant. So I’m pro testing being availible, even if some disabled people dislike the mere existence and legality of them.
I wish we could make adoption more accepted. If I ever git into parenting, that’s what I’d do, and given how shitty otphanages are, by not creating one more maybe-happy, maybe-sad person, but making an existing one happier, I would kinda won at utility? But I know this is not something I could impose on others.
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What we really need is an experiment where progressive generations are eugenically selected – and see what the consequences are. It’s not ethical to do this experiment on humans, but luckily we have already been doing this experiment for centuries – on dogs.
What we see is that the ‘pure breeds’ selected for *particular* size, shape, colouration, or functional abilities etc. tend to be less intelligent and susceptible to particular health issues. Litter mates who don’t measure up are often killed or neutered.
It would appear that not only do we need Magically Awesome Genetic Testing of the individual we also need to understand the complete impact of Magically Awesome Genetic Selection on later generations….
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Principled arguments in favor of diversity of minds:
1) It is far easier to follow someone else’s logic than to come up with a novel idea oneself. Some fields (e.g. science) benefit from some proportion of autists, who can come up with a different *kinds* of ideas.
2) Diversity increases variance. Variance increases extreme values (e.g. the average of the top 1% of people by IQ). It is important for society that intellectual elites be as smart as possible.
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Reblogged this on Autism Candles.
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