Let's Get Rid of the Word Eugenics

How it undermines rational discourse

'when u're wooing a thot

that is healthy & hot

thats eugenics!

when they make an arrest

for the crime of incest

thats eugenics!

when on tinder u say

that u're 'sapio', k?

thats eugenics!

evolution just means

when u pass on good genes

(thats eugenics!)'

A Poem!

Imagine we came up with the word Angrosh. Angrosh means two things. The first thing it means is racial violence. The second thing that it means is passing a universal basic income. The word Angrosh gets an extremely negative connotation — calling a view Angrosh is enough to disqualify it from rational contention.

This is sort of how I feel about the word eugenics. It expresses a few distinct concepts, some obviously terrible, some good.

First, for the terrible: eugenics describes the murder or forced sterilization of disabled people. This is bad and we shouldn’t do it.

Second, eugenics is used to describe genetic engineering to get rid of disease and other actions to improve the quality of the future. This is obviously good — future cancer is bad and there should be less of it.

I’ve had several totally wild conversations with people where the word eugenics was used to blot out rational argument. In one case, a friend of mine declared that genetic engineering to reduce future cases of Down Syndrome was immoral. I replied that Down Syndrome makes people’s lives worse, so we should reduce it. She replied by saying she ‘didn’t want to argue about it’ before calling it eugenics. (I wouldn’t have wanted to argue it if I had to adopt her crazy view either).

In another case, I was chatting with an acquaintance that was an anti-natalist. They claimed that it’s bad to have kids because it violates bodily autonomy. I asked what if the child would have an infinitely good life? They said it was still immoral — the entire wrongness comes from violating bodily autonomy. I asked if they thought that, were one to have a choice between certainty of creating one person who experiences infinite torture or certainty of one person with infinite bliss and a .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 chance of another person with infinite bliss, which one should they create? They replied the infinite torture one because they were “not down with eugenics.” This is obviously unimaginably stupid and, were they to act on it, would comprise history’s worst act.

Some critics of longtermism have been claiming that it’s eugenicist. This is ambiguous. While longtermism does want to make the future better, and care about the stock of the future so to speak — by which I mean, they’d rather the future was super happy than miserable — it doesn’t support forced sterilization or genocide, obviously. Thus, this charge is deeply misleading.

Thus, ‘eugenics’ is outdated. Let’s retire the term. Either that or only use it to mean the really horrible stuff like forced sterilization. If a term is, by way of implication, getting in the way of desirable genetic engineering and improving the future, let’s dispense with it!