Re:Why Saudi Arabia Is Pushing Premarital Genetic Screening
by jerf on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @03:03PM
(#16064527)
As a kind of metareply to all my repliers, I'd suggest that it would probably be easier to find a new word for the safe stuff than try to un-destroy "eugenics". Just starting off with "Let's try to come to a more nuanced understanding of 'eugenics'" is roughly equivalent to "Let's try to come to a more nuanced understanding of 'Nazi'" (and for once the metaphor isn't even that strained because there is a real, pre-existing relationship there); from a very academic perspective, it is a worthy goal, but nowadays, not even actual-factual academia is willing to be that academic.
At the risk of touching things one is not supposed to say in this culture - wouldn't it be good to tone down that opprobrium, or at least cleanly separate out the things that are actually evil from things that are not? The connotational baggage carried by the term "eugenics" tend to infect serious discussions around genetic diseases and genetics in general, and people end up equating e.g. permanently curing genetic diseases (by removing them from the gene pool) with mass mutilation or murder of undesirable individuals (which is the evil part of the as-commonly-understood eugenics).