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Yes, a lot of scientists believed in hateful pseudoscience like scientific racism, eugenics and phrenology. Your argument is a very common one but very flawed.
by cedilla 5y ago
Yes, 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.