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Never heard it expressed like that, but I guess you could apply it to tons of stuff?
> Lobotomy is not scientifically unsound, as aswegs8 proves, it's just completely outside of today's Overton window.
As far as lobotomy, I don't know, but it seems to be widely discredited inasmuch as it didn't achieve its aims (or if it did, the aims themselves were highly questionable)
Given the title, lobotomy is an apt reference "The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the "discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses"," - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested?
If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're talking about "artificial selection", not "eugenics". People who believe that there are groups of humans that are inferior or superior based on genetic differences would love for you to conflate the two concepts because that gets them closer to their political goals that have historically resulted in unimaginable human suffering.
To reiterate - I do not support this! I think it's evil! but isn't that basically what it is?
But I’d also say that there’s an inherent bias to the word “eugenics” fundamentally: the implication that there are objectively good genetics and bad genetics for humans. In the extreme case there are genetic defects that cause stillbirth and put the mother’s life at severe risk, but this is almost never what is meant by usage of the word “eugenics”. Again, to conflate the two concepts is useful only to people who have caused immense human suffering.
It's like how there's a difference between the medical study of nutrition and how some social media influencers will tell you if you eat X, Y and Z these are superfoods that will mean you will never get a cold for the rest of your life and it will cure cancer or some other nonsense.
This is a testable hypotheses.
What's actually stopping us? Science is not the issue here.
It may not be possible to breed any trait to any distribution one would like.
For body size, maybe, also depending on maternal nutrition. But apparently there is (and anthropologists think always has been) a certain percentage of people with schizophrenia even though it carries a severe reproductive disadvantage.
Similarly, it may well be that personality always approaches a certain distribution like a random experiment.
The culling mechanism would work in any case, of course.
This is why thought experiments like the Trolley problems don't have a simple answer.. and they get even more complex with variations of the thought experiment.
However, please tell me which model of ethics supports eugenics. Is it Utilitarian, Rights, Fairness, Common Good, or Virtue?
What single gene that only causes bad things to happen do you have in mind? Are you sure it doesn’t also control unrelated activity that’s helpful to the population?
As to what specific gene or sets of gene in mind to alter, that depends on what you define as "bad things" and what is possible.
From a rapid google search, Cystic Fibrosis seems like a candidate.
Genetic engineering is probably acceptable to most under all five. You’d probably still have ethical arguments. GE has ethical arguments raised against it in general, but let’s not go into the baby and bathwater arguments here. Editing genes in a fertilized egg or a blastomere has different ethical implications than doing gene editing in a fully born person. It’s different for a patient who can consent and for a child, too.
Cystic fibrosis usually leaves men mechanically sterile, although not carriers and men with CF can still have children through medical/surgical interventions. Its complications are ever more treatable. There are over 2500 known mutations of this gene, accounting for about 30 different disorders including CF. Which mutations would you screen for? Who among the population would you screen - known carriers? People with any CF in their extended family? Everyone?
I can think of little modern philosophy more regressive than the idea that a self-appointed superior can determine that another is inferior to the point that they (or their offspring) should be culled from existence. Eugenics and racism have been intertwined since the beginning and with a modern twist continue to target vulnerable populations.
THAT SAID, "Eugenics" as espoused and understood over the past two centuries isn't that at all. It's 100%, every time, a pretty face for racism. Human social and ancestry divisions ARE NOT the product of deliberate selection, never have been, and any attempt to conflate the ideas is, yeah, pretty fucking unsound. And horrifying.
That's called "artificial selection", and people who believe that certain groups of humans are somehow superior or inferior to each other because of differences in genetics would love for you to conflate "artificial selection" and "eugenics".
There's no need to steelman a concept that has caused unimaginable human suffering.