Dawkins sparks outrage for saying Down Syndrome babies should be aborted

[Aractus]

All people in any given society are resources and should be treated as such. If any society is not maximising their resources (humans included) we call them under-developed. This is the predominant ideology at the moment, as opposed to say the Eugenic view or the view that the public at large are merely objects for the wealthy to exploit (Laissez-fair etc). And it's also hugely successful in bringing the 3rd world out of poverty and into the categories of "developing nations".

All resources have value, and all human resources can contribute something to society. Labelling any person as "defective" is clearly incompatible with the resource-maximisation philosophy.

Let me give you an example that might help illustrate this. The yanks don't really believe very strongly in universal healthcare/obamacare. But from the perspective or resource maximisation it's certainly true that you want to keep your workforce strong and also that prevention is a lot cheaper than treatment. This is just as true for hospitals as is for gaols, etc. This is one reason why under this philosophy the belief of universal education is so important. Education for all - healthcare for all.

Now while education is certainly the preventative measure for crime, the preventative measures for health are certainly not fully exploited - which is one reason why I'm so interested in it - and I don't have the numbers for the USA, but I can tell you that in Australia govt. spending on healthcare sees about 35% or more go to hospitals, but only 2% go towards prevention. So we spend nearly 20 times as much treating people when it is in fact cheaper to prevent the need for treatment. So we're certainly not at the moment even trying to reach potential in this area. In the 3rd world it is very different - most of the health spending is on prevention (creating access to clean water, etc) and then once that's done it too sees that part of the health budget decrease as the spending on hospitals increases.

If you don't agree with this philosophy that's fine - that's your choice. You don't have to believe that all people should have access to education, etc, but in doing so you have to adopt another philosophy. Labelling any group of people as "defective" is incompatible with labelling all people as resources of society; but it is compatible with Eugenics and possibly other ideologies/political views etc.