Without God, it’s harder to defend against eugenics

Feb 17, 2020 by

by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:

The first of Dominic Cummings’ ‘weirdos’ came in for his inaugural round of public hazing over the weekend, as journalists dug through the internet footprint of young ‘superforecaster’ Andrew Sabisky in search of nonstandard utterances with which to evidence their fears about Britain’s slide into fascism.

[…]  For a Christian, we are all God’s children and of equal worth. All but the most contorted Christian perspectives would affirm that the notion of making humans ‘better’ via selective breeding is nonsensical, not to mention an insult to the dignity of our fellow humans and a blasphemous attempt to usurp God Himself.

But without God to tell us why it is wrong to breed humans like cows, it is (though, again, not impossible) far more difficult to argue against it. Dawkins’ resort to the phrase ‘heaven forbid’ underlines the way in which our post-religious abandonment of any shared source of moral authority leaves us struggling for concise language in which to reject moral atrocities such as eugenics.

An atheist progressive worldview is, in fact, considerably more vulnerable than a Tractarian one to the humanity-improving blandishments of eugenic arguments: even one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism is reduced to invoking heaven to explain why he feels eugenics is beyond the pale.

The progressive Twittermob coming after Sabisky might consider whether it is he they are attempting to persuade that eugenics is unacceptable, or in fact themselves.

Read here

LISTEN: Tom Chivers on Andrew Sabisky and eugenics

Read also: (from 20160) The chilling return of eugenics by Fraser Nelson, Spectator (£)

 

Related Posts

Tags

Share This