Eugenics has always been about promoting desired utilitarian outcomes. The old eugenics wanted to improve the human herd through the crude manipulation of who could and should be parents. And, it also promoted the idea of infanticide–to rid the society of those who would drag it down. Margaret Sanger infamously referred to these as “the human weeds.”
The new eugenics doesn’t use such a crude lexicon, but still has the old goal of improving the human herd–as well as a new one of satisfying the personal desires of parents–through the more sophisticated weapons of genetic manipulation, eugenic abortion, and someday, infanticide. Of course, Peter Singer is very there.
He is asked with infanticide and abortion, babies are becoming a “commodity.” From an interview of him in Salon (my emphasis throughout):
Q: If you make the criteria so flexible, if you make matters of life and death negotiable, don’t you think babies will become a commodity?
S: That may be happening anyway, in terms of selecting the children we have before birth.
Yes, with IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis, parents can–to a limited degree–choose the attributes they want in a child, mostly to eliminate a genetic disease or choosing sex.
Tomorrow it will be about other desired personal characteristics. So, Singer is saying, we are already in for an inch on the path to commodifying babies, so let’s go for the mile–no doubt covered by Obamacare. That’s how all standards collapse.
