An Ethical and/or Moral Conundrum

I apparently either read or was aware of John B. Calhoun's mice and rat experiments in the 1960's and '70's and have used the phrase "too many mice (or rats) in a cage" frequently as a comment on the ever increasing problems due to population growth. I had assumed that the problems of Calhoun's mice, their extreme population growth followed by their ultimate total demise, were due to overcrowding, as apparently most people had. There is little doubt that overcrowding played a part in their abrupt change in behavior, but ultimately other factors may have contributed to the final result. A recent VDARE.com post by Lance Welton was an eye-opening re-appraisal of the reasons for the disasters, and their application to human populations.

As was discussed in the post, the affluence of the West made possible by the Industrial Revolution and the attendant decrease in mortality resulting from better nutrition, better medical care and an overall rise in the standard of living has virtually erased natural selection from the first world human population. Now most people think of natural selection as improving a species, or allowing a species to cope with changes in their environment, but there is also a very necessary weeding out of negative attributes. In addition to the occasional mutant resulting from environmental accidents, sexual reproduction intentionally tries many variations of genetic characteristics. In the natural state, defective combinations usually fail to reproduce. But in the modern human Welfare societies, we go to extreme efforts to salvage every fertilized human egg. Thus defectives have a high likelihood of not only surviving, but reproducing. As Welton noted, these defective genes are then able to spread throughout the gene pool, thus debasing it. This does not bode well for Western societies.

There have always been some doubts as to whether 'helping' people is always desirable. The old truth that giving a man a fish feeds him for a day but teaching him how to fish feeds him for a lifetime emphasizes the relative importance of education over welfare. In addition, however, giving him a fish may feed him for the day, but it also encourages him to resort to looking for another handout the next day rather than trying to feed himself. This shows that charity can produce cultural distortions that, if allowed to fester and reproduce, are as detrimental to societal health as genetic defects. One must conclude that charity or welfare for all but the most disabled is not a good idea, and even sparing those that cannot survive without help still poses a question of whether they should be allowed to reproduce.

To paraphrase an old wheeze, it's not nice to try to frustrate Mother Nature. Our culture frowns on the subject of eugenics, where the term is referring to attempts to intentionally improve the gene pool (although animal breeders have been using it for ages). But in effect we have, for the last couple of centuries, been practicing what might be called inverse eugenics, where, by frustrating natural selection, we are unintentionally debasing the human gene pool. What seems to be a noble principle of taking care of the less fortunate members of our society has a dark side. This creates what seems to be a moral or ethical dilemma. We must take steps to counter the reproduction of defective genes, or humans will suffer the same fate as Calhoun's mice, at least in the Western welfare states,. As Welton observes, this seems to be further along than we would like to think.

The moral dilemma is that any attempts to purge defective genes flies in the face of religious and cultural taboos. Even current research trying to edit genes before they can be passed to future generations is under attack, and sterilization or worse is virtually unthinkable, especially if it can be labeled genocide. Yet ignoring the problem may well not be an option. Although termination of carriers of defective genes would be a repugnant and unnecessary extreme, rethinking Western Civilization's religious and cultural proscriptions against abortion, testing of fetuses for genetic abnormalities, and sterilizing obvious mutants might be necessary.

There are some things that can be done to stop making the situation worse. A first mandatory step in the U.S. would be to stop importing defective genes from third world populations. Whether any immigration is necessary or desirable, a minimum response to the problem must be to set the bar for admission very high for genetic traits such as intelligence and industriousness, and against negatives such as criminality and genetic diseases. In their native environments a significant number of third worlders would perish from natural selection, but not only do we keep them alive if they get here, but pay them to breed. This is insane.

The second step of a sane response to the problem is to stop paying welfarites to breed. Although not every welfarite has defective genes that cause diseases, the likelihood that they have undesirable genetic characteristics is sufficiently high that encouraging the propagation of their genes is a poor policy. Trying to test for bad vs. good genes in the welfare community smacks of eugenics, and therefore it would be best to just not provide public reward or even support for welfare breeding.

Forced sterilization is a solution of last resort, although it might be worth seriously considering in the case of those convicted of violent criminal behavior. Short of refinement and acceptance of genetic engineering to eliminate less blatant cases of defective genes, voluntary contraception or sterilization would be commendable, but as a compassionate society one hopes that such drastic measures could ultimately be unnecessary with technology. Currently abortion or sterilization of Downs Syndrome children is tolerated or even encouraged, but ultimately gene editing or other high tech solutions may be able to identify and remove such defective genes from the gene pool.

The problem of affluence frustrating natural selection is sufficiently subtle that its magnitude has only recently come to light. As was pointed out in Welton's post, we are already seeing increases in genetic diseases such as autism, and a decrease in intelligence. Western civilization is already mired in a morass of problems, although many may be related to this one. In any case, as Welton said, we're headed for a disaster, and time to reflect may not be on our side. Some form of eugenics to offset the inverse eugenics of Western civilization's incredible survival successes is necessary.

Discrimination

This essay was written in the 1980's and published on OpEds.com in 2005.  Its relevance to the U. S. scene seems to increase with each passing year.

Discrimination, particularly racial, has commanded the limelight of the media and the almost undivided attention of the citizenry in America for most of the last half of the Twentieth Century. The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling against school segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, opened the floodgates. Since then there have been uncountable laws and rules written, bureaucracies created, suits filed and children bused, wheelchair ramps built and parking places painted, all trying to eliminate both real and imagined discrimination in every possible form. Some of the more blatant cases of discrimination, particularly those denying equal protection under the law, have been eliminated or at least minimized, but in many cases there has been only exchange of one form of discrimination for another.

The existence of discrimination in a society is indicative of a more fundamental underlying problem. Discrimination can only exist when there are identifiable factions in the society. A homogenous population defies discrimination, since there is no identifiable attribute upon which to target individuals to discriminate against. But since most social systems develop identifiable factions sooner or later, it ultimately becomes necessary to address the subject of discrimination of one faction against another.

The solution that has been proposed and attempted by the simple-minded idealists is to legislate the problem away by defining any and all discrimination as illegal. This is the current state of affairs in the United States, but the approach has two shortcomings. The first is the fact that laws are only definitions and no real problem has ever been solved solely by trying to define it out of existence. The second shortcoming stems from the reality that not all discrimination is unjustifiable.

In a social system based upon the principle that all members are equal under the law, no discrimination by the government against any law-abiding citizen should be condoned. The social system as a whole can afford the luxury of presupposing innocence of each individual and only discriminating against those that have been proven as undeserving by due process of law. Relative to the individual the state has virtually unlimited resources, and therefore it is reasonable for the government to amortize the risk of possible damage by an individual over the population. For the individual, however, the situation is very different. Not only is the average citizen blessed with modest resources, but also above all he (or she) is a mortal. As such, survival demands that the individual use any and all information at his disposal to protect his life and property from a hostile world. If experience, valid information acquired from others, or even unfounded rumor suggests that additional risk is associated with the members of any group, the individual must be allowed to take such information into consideration in his dealings with the group. This is true whether the identification of the group is based on race, creed, sex, political affiliation, length of hair, style of dress, or just plain ugliness. Mortality and limited resources deny the individual the otherwise noble philosophy of judging everyone innocent unless proven guilty. In addition, it is unreasonable to expect the state to protect an individual from all risk, and it is even more unreasonable for the state to force any individual to assume additional risk.

A gray area exists with respect to private organizations. If an organization is sufficiently large it would seem reasonable to require it, like the society as a whole, to amortize the risk of each individual over all the individuals with which it interacts. The problem exists in determining where to draw the line as to whether or not each particular organization is 'sufficiently large'. Not only is the wisdom necessary to make such a determination beyond any mortal, and especially beyond those that usually try, but the existence of such an arbitrary 'cut-off' only serves to complicate the subject discrimination, not to eliminate it. An exception to this might be corporations, since a corporation is an entity created by the government and enjoys several legal advantages by virtue thereof. It is not mortal and by definition has limited liability. It would therefore be reasonable to deny it an exemption from anti-discrimination law.



Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that group or faction based discrimination does create a burden on the targeted individuals. In addition, the severity of the burden increases as the relative size of the targeted faction decreases. One of the primary factors of the discriminatory burden is the cost to the targeted individual in determining by trial and error whether he or she will be subject to discrimination in dealings with others. It is therefore proposed that a reasonable, proper and adequate measure to protect the rights of all parties is to require any discriminatory behavior on the part of all private business entities to be publicly declared. Such declaration would at a minimum entail a declaration of discriminatory bias in every advertisement published or displayed by the entity desiring to discriminate. Failure to properly declare bias would then expose the guilty party to criminal prosecution or civil suit.

This approach has several attractive features. First and foremost, it retains the inalienable right of the individual to minimize his risks in the necessary day to day dealings with his fellow man. It puts the burden of action on those that wish to discriminate, but in such a way that protects the privacy and autonomy of the individual. An individual that has no public business dealings with others is unaffected by the rule. It addresses all forms of discrimination without explicitly reciting a list of particulars. It spares those targeted by a properly declared discriminatory policy from the cost and embarrassment of attempting to interact with the discriminating faction, and in addition allows all concerned who are offended by a particular case of discrimination to boycott the business. Last but not least, it spares the society the greater costs of the inevitable failure ensured by attempting to regulate day to day behavior of a large segment of the population by government decree.