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Also, take a look at the history of eugenics, which was seen in the years before World War II as a legitimate and noble scientific goal - to improve the human s
by geofft 5y ago
Also, take a look at the history of eugenics, which was seen in the years before World War II as a legitimate and noble scientific goal - to improve the human species by the application of science and engineering, no more immoral than breeding hardy tomatoes or fast horses. Many countries that joined the war on the side of the Allies had significant scientific, governmental, and public support for eugenics (the US and the UK had a Eugenics Society, Canada had provincial Eugenics Boards in Alberta and British Columbia, etc.). Neutral Sweden had an active eugenic sterilization program.
So, the "scientific consensus" of that era involved a number of scientists from many countries who agreed with policies and goals that, in retrospect, we now see as not only politically partisan but also specifically aligned with Nazi political ends.
- cedilla 5y agoYes, a lot of scientists believed in hateful pseudoscience like scientific racism, eugenics and phrenology. Your argument is a very common one but very flawed. Antisemitism, ultranationalism and eugenics aren't bad because the Nazis did it. It's exactly the other way round! Eugenics are just as flawed and criminal when a Swedish doctor or a British politician advocate for it.
- geofft 5y agoI think you're misunderstanding my point - I'm saying that eugenics was bad at the time, even before the Nazis implemented it at horrifying scale, but the scientific consensus of the time was that eugenics was a perfectly reasonable thing to work on, and therefore we should not trust the scientific consensus of the time. If the scientists of that era said that certain humans were an inferior species to Homo sapiens, and the scientists after World War II said that's not true, we shouldn't assume that the pre-war view was pure untainted science and the post-war one was the result of overcorrecting for political/moral reasons - we should consider the possibility that the pre-war scientific consensus was tainted by political/moral views that we now rightly reject.