Social Darwinism: Right or Wrong

[Mister Agenda]

But I don't think the difference between humans and animals is so substantial.

It doesn't have to be substantial to anyone but us humans.

It appears substantial, but it's ultimately just an unguided evolutionary process. And who says, if evolution just happened to produce a human being therefore it's special, but a cockroach is not special?

Nobody says that. We're not special because evolution produced us. Any specialness we may or may not have will have to be justified by some other reasoning than 'we were produced by evolution'.

At the end of the day it's all arbitrary. Human value is totally arbitrary.

How does our value being arbitrary translate into Social Darwinism being desireable policy?

To hear another atheist who holds to this kind of a position, I suggest you read works by Richard Dawkins. Today he has softened his position a little bit, to make it palatable. But it's not a scientific change, it's more to appease people.

Please provide a quote of Dawkins advocating Social Darwinsim, eugenics, or euthanasia of children with Down's Syndrome.

You questioned the issue of inside vs outside the womb. I point to an article by prominent ethicists in the Journal of Medical Ethics http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/03...00411.full If you are short on time, read just the abstract.

Your claim wasn't that some medical ethicists agree with you. It was that MOST medical ethicists agree with you. That is the contention which you're not supporting.

So I think my position is well supported by the academics and sciences.

Your thinking so isn't supported by cherry-picking articles that agree with you.

It's not popular in society today because of Christians, and the ideas of charity and mercy that are really just religious tropes we should not take so seriously.

Social apes display instinctive understanding of fairness and reciprocity. They may be inconsistent about it, but they comfort each other, protect the weak from bullies, and unite against outside threats. Moral behavior isn't limited to the one species that has religion. We had morality before we had religion to codify it.

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Says common sense. Darwinism rewards the fit and allows for the spreading of superior genetics.

Darwinism and Social Darwinism arent' the same thing. Darwinism functions like a 'free market' in which everything can be tried and the current environment sorts the wheat from the chaff. Social Darwinism is like a tightly managed economy that presumes that taking biological evolution as a prescription instead of a description will result in 'superior genetics' and some smart people can figure out what's best to select for and what's best to eliminate. However, genes are only superior or inferior in a given context. The gene for Sickle Cell anemia doesn't do you any good in North America, but it can save your life in parts of Africa and Asia. We lower our genetic diversity at our peril. We are already one of the less genetically-diverse species.

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The reason these ideas were basically abandoned in the 50's is because they were the same ideas Hitler used in the 30's and 40's to justify is extremination of 'inferior races.' And, yep, he started out like you in that he didn't want to outright execute them for belonging to a different race, but he put restrictions on them, restrictions specifically on reproduction for example, but as his war carried on he didn't want to have to waste any more resources on them so when he found a cost effective way to do it, he started executing people.

But, but...it was Christian social conservatism that squashed eugenics in the West, Vinny said so!

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If I became convinced that God did not exist, I feel confident that I would adopt moral nihilism.

What is it about moral nihilism that so attracts you? Why do you associate it with killing people?