Warning: Nazis will be mentioned.
The fine blogger, my friend, RMJ, has a very good post up about Richard Dawkins' recently self-generated, publicity Scheißesturm in which he presents the alleged moral imperative of aborting a child who will be born with Down Syndrome. As with all of his posts, RMJ's is more than worth reading, I'd recommend it over mine if you have to make a choice. I haven't had the chance to read through all of the various posts and tweets he links to yet. And while I've got a lot of ideas on the topic I'm not nearly ready to address those today I've been thinking of what to say, having done a lot of research into related topics and hardly having exhausted that material makes it hard to know how to get a grip on this aspect of it. I suspect there will be more posts later.
I strongly suspect that Richard Dawkins and many of his admirers have never known a person with Down Syndrome. I've known several and they were all rather nice, happy people who were beloved by their families and who got through live without ever hurting anyone. How many people with PhDs do you know who you'd have to say the opposite about on every point? Dawkins bases his chop logic "ethics" on an especially vulgar and simplistic utilitarian analysis, claiming that people with Down Syndrome subtract from the level of "happiness" in the world, a point which totally misrepresents that evidence quoted in this article in The Daily Beast. Having done a lot of research into questions of people being disposed with on the basis of utilitarian arguments, this reminds me of nothing so much than the great bass singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, decades later, being unable to talk about the "eugenic" murder of his beloved, disabled brother by the Nazis, who presumed to know more about him and his life than his own family on the basis of alleged science and human life being subject to their own form of utilitarian analysis.
I will insert that a lot of the sciency, "evidence based" commentators don't seem to know much of anything about the issue, some of them seem to not realize that most people with Down Syndrome are infertile and that the chances of them passing "it" on are slight and relevant in only some of those with the condition.
Which leads me to being able to make my own proposal in line with this utilitarian -um- thinking.
Given the evidence presented here earlier this week, that atheists are less fit due to both their being more prone to illness and debility, more prone to bad habits (I'll leave out their habit of so often being royal pains and proponents of other peoples' deaths) and their demonstrated inability to achieve replacement levels of reproduction, the very definition of a maladaptation - it is a moral imperative that something must be done about it. I don't think that most of the big name atheists on the circuit today can be accused of adding more aggregate pleasure to the world than the pain they inflict. We should, at the very least, apply the advice given by utilitarians and analyze the question of the various ideologies in terms of their utilitarian virtue.
Is it, according to this line of logic, not desirable to discover a genetic predisposition for atheism and that those who are presented with the prospects of bringing an atheist into the world be allowed to choose to terminate the pregnancy?
If it is possible to test for atheism, then it is desirable, no, even a moral imperative for parents with the possibility of producing one to "try again"?
As the Buddha noted, all life is pain, confirmed by the observation that "man is born unto trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward". Since utilitarianism could, arguably, be used to dispose of any group deemed to add to the "pain" side of the scale, that being the only standard of judgement, then people with Down Syndrome cause a lot less pain than many people who Dawkins rubs elbows with at faculty lounges and in the elite circles he frequents. I think there is certainly a utilitarian imperative to empty out the upper eschalons of finance, the military-industrial complex, the sciences and academic fields that service them in their evil doing.... etc. Oddly, I don't ever remember utilitarian analysis being applied to the very classes who invented that stuff on their own class and the class of their sponsors. You almost get the idea that they invented it to be applied only to "the other".
Tell me why I'm wrong based on the reasoning of Richard Dawkins, his admirers and other fans of utilitarian analysis.
Given the evidence presented here earlier this week, that atheists are less fit due to both their being more prone to illness and debility, more prone to bad habits (I'll leave out their habit of so often being royal pains and proponents of other peoples' deaths) and their demonstrated inability to achieve replacement levels of reproduction, the very definition of a maladaptation - it is a moral imperative that something must be done about it. I don't think that most of the big name atheists on the circuit today can be accused of adding more aggregate pleasure to the world than the pain they inflict. We should, at the very least, apply the advice given by utilitarians and analyze the question of the various ideologies in terms of their utilitarian virtue.
Is it, according to this line of logic, not desirable to discover a genetic predisposition for atheism and that those who are presented with the prospects of bringing an atheist into the world be allowed to choose to terminate the pregnancy?
If it is possible to test for atheism, then it is desirable, no, even a moral imperative for parents with the possibility of producing one to "try again"?
As the Buddha noted, all life is pain, confirmed by the observation that "man is born unto trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward". Since utilitarianism could, arguably, be used to dispose of any group deemed to add to the "pain" side of the scale, that being the only standard of judgement, then people with Down Syndrome cause a lot less pain than many people who Dawkins rubs elbows with at faculty lounges and in the elite circles he frequents. I think there is certainly a utilitarian imperative to empty out the upper eschalons of finance, the military-industrial complex, the sciences and academic fields that service them in their evil doing.... etc. Oddly, I don't ever remember utilitarian analysis being applied to the very classes who invented that stuff on their own class and the class of their sponsors. You almost get the idea that they invented it to be applied only to "the other".
Tell me why I'm wrong based on the reasoning of Richard Dawkins, his admirers and other fans of utilitarian analysis.
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