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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Brian Barry Smith (talk | contribs) at 01:35, 11 April 2020. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2019 and 4 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Roamorin (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Danstrib, Katelynneller.

About See also

According to a Wikipedia rule of thumb: 1) if something is in See also, try to incorporate it into main body 2) if something is in main body, it should not be in see also and therefore 3) good articles have no See also sections. --Loremaster 20:52, 23 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Odd formulation

The statement 

The term "liberal eugenics" does not necessarily indicate that its proponents are social liberals in the modern sense [...]

does not really make sense: There is no reason why a liberal should automatically be a social liberal, nor am I aware of a significant change in meaning of ``social liberal over time. If we remove the word ``social, OTOH, the sentence has some amount of sense, but stumbles on the implied claim that the modern sense of ``liberal is the same as ``social liberal. (While mostly true in the US, this is not generally true globally, and is also historically highly misleading.)

For want of knowledge of the original intention, I prefer not to edit the text myself, but I strongly suggest that it be reformulated or removed. 88.77.177.21 (talk) 18:19, 10 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest you read the archived dicussions of this talk page to understand the original intention... --Loremaster (talk) 18:28, 10 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sources defining liberal eugenics

For the first line of this article, only 1 of the 5 sources actually uses "liberal eugenics" as a term and attempts to define it and speak to it. All of the other sources merely talk about eugenics and/or liberal political theory with regards to its implementation and practice. None of them use the phrase "liberal eugenics" with the exception of Nicholas Agar who seems to be the one who coined the term. A google search of "liberal eugenics" yields basically a bunch of hits that eventually refer back to Agar. I suggest that these other sources be removed, since they don't actually speak to "liberal eugenics" at all and only speak to eugenics in general, while some of them make an attempt to associate it with liberal political theory. I'll wait a while for a chance of discussion before removing the irrelevant sources.-Scoobydunk (talk) 12:27, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Several authors have tried to clean the article up and added contemporary scholarship. But every time this happens Greyfell reverses it for no good reasons. He is clearly trying to push an ideological agenda rather than accurately protest the scholarship. A quick glance at the article’s history shows this clearly Brian Barry Smith (talk) 01:35, 11 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Suggest Deletion

Looking over the edit history (admittedly in a cursory manner), I think it is apparent that this article is rooted in an American Pro-Life bias. To make my point, one the the earliest major contributions was made by a user that has since been banned permanently from Wikipedia. I believe that political hyper-partisans created, then expanded the article, only to have it patched up by more reasoned contributors in an attempt to salvage a doomed article. I contend that this article has an inherently biased viewpoint, that "liberal eugenics" is not really a distinct ideology but a phantom created to assign blame for a disliked ideology on to political enemies (like say, "liberal socialist programs" when referring to public education, or "conservative fascist ideals" when referring to parking tickets). Further I believe this article provides no useful information that isn't already provided in an objective way in either (or both) the Eugenics article, or the Trans-humanism article. I do not however take the step of deletion, largely due to my own ignorance on how to use Wikipedia (I am new to this), and I, as an American political liberal, believe I lack the objective wisdom to do so on my own authority. Thank you, ForeverZero (talk) 13:03, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regardless of who made it and whether it's biased or not, this issue is more easily resolved by simply adding an issue-box on top of the article indicating that this page lacks neutrality over completely deleting a page with notability and several sources (though the last section requires a lot of clean-up).
Sincerely, --Namlong618 (talk) 13:25, 24 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV renaming of this article

There are three distinct concepts being conflated in the source material and this article.

  1. The functional definition- concerning who is making the eugenics decisions: the state, or the parent? As defined in the topic sentence, this article discusses parental eugenics.
  2. The proper political philosophy category for this activity. Is it close to the idea of classical liberalism (the technical philosophical concept not to be confused with the popular sense of a politically progressive point of view). Agar advocates this position, but Dov Fox argues in his peer reviewed political philosophy paper, this is fallacious. Health policy expert Richard Escrow extends the argument, claiming this is more properly classified as libertarian eugenics. To associate either label is a matter of controversy, and endorsing either unnecessarily biases the article's portrayal of the phenomenon described in (1) towards one particular POV.
  3. The proper category from a moral philosophical POV to apply to this activity. The advocate of the term "liberal egugenics" is a professor of moral, not political philosophy. What Agar is interested in is whether a moral argument can be constructed based on the ethics of liberalism. Not just his conclusions, but his associational method of moral argument is controversial. In this review in the journal Biology and Philosophy, Richard Joyce, a moral philosopher dissects Agar's use of moral images and contextual understanding of terms in particular domains to justify moral positions.

Both from a perspective of moral philosophy, and political philosophy, labeling parental eugenics with any category (whether it is Liberal, Libertarian or other) is at best controversial. This should not detract from clearly describing the concepts or biasing the reader to any particular interpretation of the non controversial factual material. If there is value in maintaining a separate article on the subject of eugenics when it is conducted by individuals, then it would be in line with Wikipedia's NPOV guidelines to refer to the subject with a more neutral term then have sections describing the various arguments advocating how it should best be classified from moral philosophy and political philosophy points of view.

Regarding which neutral name should be used, I have no strong opinions and perhaps some of the main contributors could suggest alternatives. I probably would go along with any neutral functional name for eugenics directed by individuals rather than the state. J JMesserly (talk) 20:45, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

For a more functional treatment and historical survey of the material, Suzanne Elizabeth Evans' paper on Parental Eugenics is an additional source worth a look by interested readers. There is material here for further enhancement of this article. -J JMesserly (talk) 18:39, 2 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There has been no response in the past two weeks, if it is non controversial, then I shall be proposing the change of name to a neutral name. Two choices that immediately come to mind are parental eugenics or consumer eugentics. There are minor differences between the two having to do with focus. "Parental" takes a narrower focus- working on the sort of private decisions couples make that are familiar in current society. The other takes a more macro view of the social and economic forces driving reproductive decisions that affect genetic outcomes in a child. As I said before, I don't have strong opinions either way, and I would tend to use the two terms interchangeably in the article since the consumer is always a parent except in speculative science fiction scenarios where a religious cult or multinational businesses are the consumers of the commercial eugenics services. I am proposing the article be renamed to Consumer eugenics. This was an article many years ago that had very few contributors and was once nominated for deletion. The outcome was Keep, but due to its persistent stub status it was merged with the eugenics article. There are references to Consumer Eugenics in the press. These are perhaps not the best examples, but here are a few:
By focusing on the sort of social forces driving parental eugenics decisions, renaming the article "Consumer eugenics" doesn't just solve the POV problem, it allows the article to grown into a broad augment of the Eugenics article going into depth of analysis and information related to the commercialization of genetics technology in the businesses focusing on child bearing. Unless there is a strong opinion against a rename notice, I shall put one up next week sometime. -J JMesserly (talk) 19:16, 10 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the term "liberal" here doesn't help. Yes, one philosopher called it that, but others have questioned it and the word liberal has several meanings.

I would propose the use of the term "new eugenics". Examples of this use:

One could accuse the term "new" of being vague, but I think this gets across the fact that it is enabled by new technologies. Although I have identified uses from 1999 and 2001, This term has perhaps gained use since 2013, when J JMesserly posted. Arguably, it is now the WP:COMMON name.

Yaris678 (talk) 19:25, 30 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As you noted in user talk, this discussion did not previously attract much attention. Probably the only way to do that is with WP:RM, so I've opened one below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  15:05, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 31 October 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved to New eugenics. Jenks24 (talk) 10:15, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]


Liberal eugenics → Neo-eugenics – Per WP:PRECISE, WP:COMMONNAME, WP:NPOV, and article scope. Detailed rationale below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  15:05, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • Use New eugenics per WP:COMMONNAME Use Neo-eugenics [As pointed out below, my search was bollixed by lack of quotation marks around "neo-eugenics", so what follows is incorrect stats.] as broad enough in scope, non-ambiguous, and PoV-free. The term neo-eugenics (sometimes without the hyphen) in books [1] – sources we care about more than news for a topic like this – utterly dwarfs use of liberal eugenics [2], and also beats new eugenics [3] by a wide margin. News sources (which are poor ones for science terminology) prefer "liberal" over "neo-", but the number of articles is trivially small compared to books results, so news hits are not a statistically significant sample. The neo- prefix is consistently used to indicate a movement that shares features with an earlier one that inspired it, but has a distinct break from it in various ways: neo-Nazi, neo-conservative, etc. No one says "new Nazi". While "new eugenics" is attested, it is imprecise and awkward, and may wrongly imply "really, really new". Cf. new left and new right, which are only about a generation old, with anything like their current meaning (and which do in fact imply something newer that neo-conservative, a term I first encountered around 1989, but not new right, in this sense, until around 2000 or later).

    More problems with new eugenics: The string produces an overwhelming number of false positives of at least three sorts: 1) "a new eugenics [something]" where "new" and "eugenics" are both modifiers of the "[something]", rather than a case of "new" modifying "eugenics". 2) Various journalism articles using that phrase are not using it as a name, but as a description. (A telltale sign of this is when the phrase is prefixed with "the"). 3) A large number of them, worse yet, are using it in the "X is the new Y" cliché ("genetics is the new eugenics", etc.); this badly skews the numbers that would appear to support new eugenics as a common name.

    Liberal eugenics is clearly PoV, and open to multiple forms of misinterpretation. It's also a subset of the topic, describing primarily Western medical concerns only. Consumer eugenics is an even smaller subset of neo-eugenics, and by no means the most important. Many consumer eugenics ideas are in fact still science fiction. Both terms are grossly misleading as the overall catch-all term. E.g., they do not encompass massive efforts like the state neo-eugenics program in China, which is specifically geared to enhancing intelligence (at the projected rate of 5 IQ points per generation), a new kind of "world domination within a century" plan that is the furthest thing from "liberal" or (being a communist government program to control breeding) "consumer"-oriented.

    While a strong WP:COMMONNAME case can be made for neo-eugenics, this is basically a case where COMMONNAME doesn't really apply anyway, because none of the possible names cover the full scope, except for neo-eugenics and new eugenics, while the second of those fails some of the WP:CRITERIA, especially WP:PRECISE and probably also WP:RECOGNIZABLE. Really, the only good WP article title for this is Neo-eugenics, which is itself well-attested.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  15:01, 31 October 2017 (UTC); corrected: 01:28, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I will second this. Neo-eugenics makes more sense not only because all of the above but also because "liberal" seemingly unnecessarily excludes eugenics from fiscally conservative eugenics. What I think should be defining about this article's definition of eugenics is this: "In liberal, market driven societies, however, eugenics will not be coercively imposed by the state for the collective good. Instead, it will be the outcome of parental choice and the workings of the free market." as summarized by Peter Singer in this article.ScienceDawns (talk) 07:34, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi ScienceDawns. I think everyone who has commented so far would agree that "neo-eugenics" is a better term than "liberal eugenics", which is great. The current discussion seems to be on choosing between "neo-eugenics" and "new eugenics". Above, SMcCandlish has made an argument based on number of Google Books hits. There was an error in the Google Books search, as pointed out below. In reality, "new eugenics" has three times more hits than "neo-eugenics". Which term do you think is more appropriate as the article title? Yaris678 (talk) 17:48, 6 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Use new eugenics:
    • In terms of meaning... obviously the literal meanings of new and neo are identical... but I think new is possibly more appropriate here. I think "new" is more commonly used to mark a clear difference from the past, whereas neo is just a reformulation of the same thing for a different era... and we are talking about the use of modern technology, so the methods are very different. I will admit this is point is very subjective.
    • I agree that a search on Google books can be indicative. However, your search included cases where neo was not next to eugenics. For them to be together you need to use quotation marks. (I have checked that hyphen and space give the same results.) That gives 2,490 hits, in comparison to 9,730 for "new eugenics". Yes, there will be a few false hits in the latter, because "new" is a common word... but I think using common words is good.
    • The first two "new eugenics" hits on Google books have the term in the title of the book, which I think supports the use of the term for our article title. I can't see any books with "neo-eugenics" in the title. Yaris678 (talk) 18:34, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      Re: "I think "new" is more commonly used" – But I've already proven that it's not, above. What the first couple of search hits do is irrelevant. When we do a WP:COMMONNAME analysis we look at usage in general, not just book titles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  20:24, 2 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      What do you mean by proven? Did you read the bit where I said 'However, your search included cases where neo was not next to eugenics. For them to be together you need to use quotation marks. (I have checked that hyphen and space give the same results.) That gives 2,490 hits, in comparison to 9,730 for "new eugenics".'? Yaris678 (talk) 11:44, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      Oh, rat-farts. I didn't catch that part, and did indeed forget that Google drops the dash and treats it as two independent words when you feed it something hyphenated without quoting it. I feel like my brain fell out. Support New eugenics, per being corrected!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  01:28, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

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Cleanup

Per concerns expressed above, and particularly the sourcing claim in the intro, I've culled everything that's uncited or only cited to something that doesn't use the term "liberal eugenics" - David Gerard (talk) 09:43, 7 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well it's gotten somewhere. I have added some wording to the lead to explain the theory more clearly and also did some clean up. I don't think this article is anywhere near deletion now. You we're right about that source of course. AlwaysUnite (talk) 19:27, 21 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I must note I fully support your attempt to clean this up, even if I reversed bits :-) - David Gerard (talk) 10:14, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Some of that, which removed sourced material using one of the alternative terms, will need to be undone, because they're all within the current scope of the article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  15:07, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The preceding comments about definitions and distinctions are correct. This page is inaccurate because editors like Greyfell continue to insert odd ideological statements into the text, and conflate liberal eugenics with the worst abuses. When past editors have added nuance to this page, and cited contemporary authors like Savulescu and Devolder, they are immediately deleted by an obsessive, ideological editor. This clearly violates Wikipedia’s policy of creating neutral articles that include the range of scholarly opinions rather than politically charged ones. Brian Barry Smith (talk) 01:33, 11 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Definitions

For some reason a couple of editors are conflating the worst excesses of 1920s eugenics with "liberal" or "new" eugenics, which is conceptually and morally different. The term was coined in the year 1998 by Nicholas Agar in a paper, and then in a book in 2004. It emphasizes individual parental choice rather than state compulsion. It does not come from Francis Galton, who coined the term "eugenics," but who had very different views from Nick Agar, or the many other bioethicists who use "liberal eugenics." These include Peter Singer, Julian Savulescu, Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, and many other professional bioethicists. I propose simply defining the term in a clear and neutral way, and not including factually erroneous claims (added by Marek and Grayfell) about "excluding those deemed lesser" from reproducing. That's simply not what liberal eugenics means.

Here is Galton's original definition of "eugenics" from 1883: Eugenics is “the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”

Here is Nicholas Agar's definition of "liberal eugenics" in 1998 ("Liberal Eugenics," from Public Affairs Quarterly): While old fashioned authoritarian eugenicists sought to produce citizens out of a single centrally designed mould, the distinguishing mark of the new liberal eugenics is state neutrality. Access to information about the full range of genetic therapies will allow prospective parents to look to their own values in selecting improvements for future children. Authoritarian eugenicists would do away with ordinary procreative freedoms. Liberals instead propose radical extensions of them."

— Preceding unsigned comment added by DoctorOfBiology (talk • contribs) 14:46, 30 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this comment. For some reason, some Wiki editors are trying to bias the discussion in a particular direction, rather than staying neutral. They delete citations of the actual people who coined the word and defend the concept, including those you cite -- Buchanan, Savulescu, and Agar -- and instead they use definitions from Galton and cite books like Edwin Black's "War Against the Weak." This is one source, written by a journalist, rather than by an expert in the field.
This page, and the main eugenics page, are quite obviously biased. This needs to be fixed so that the editors are not "for" or "against" the concept, but are instead accurately describing the relevant positions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drexelbiologist (talk • contribs) 17:47, 1 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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