‘Eugenics is possible’ is not the same as ‘eugenics is good’
by Tom Chivers, UnHerd:
I have a rule that I try to stick to, but which I break occasionally. That rule is “never say anything remotely contentious on Twitter”. No good ever comes of it. Arguments that need plenty of space and thought get compressed into 280 characters and defended in front of a baying audience; it is the worst possible medium for serious conversations.
Richard Dawkins does not have the same rule, I think it’s fair to say. “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,” he tweeted recently. “It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice.”
Lots of people got very cross about that, and I was naively surprised; surprised enough to break my own rule. I thought he was saying something fairly obvious, which is that if you bred humans for some trait then it would probably make that trait more common, and that he was explicit in saying he wasn’t talking about whether it was morally acceptable. But other people thought — they told me so — that he was literally in favour of eugenics. (Dawkins later clarified that no, he was not: “I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy [but just] as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. Heaven forbid that we do it.”)
The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”
Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.
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