Famous atheist and hurler of flaming shit heaps into the discourse, Richard Dawkins, said on Twitter: “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”
If I understand you correctly, your conclusion is that selective breeding of humans for some valued heritable or partly heritable characteristic (e.g. high IQ or physical fitness), if strictly enforced, would make that characteristic more common in the resulting population, but that that strict enforcement's negative effects on society (restricted personal freedom, people no longer being viewed as inherently valuable, politics being unconcerned with individual rights as a result) would make such selective breeding immoral regardless of the benefits of the genetic changes it would produce. That seems to be what Dawkins was trying to say too (from https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689 : "Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it."). So I'm not sure where your views on this differ, except that he is using 'works' to mean 'produces the changes in frequency of alleles that it's intended to', while you're using it to mean 'makes society better overall'.
If Dawkins had expressed the same opinions a few years after he was born, he would be canceled faster than Alex Jones, but apparently, this genius has selectively forgotten about history.
Meanwhile, "Is Islam fundamentally violent? For influential New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Richard Dawkins, the answer is an emphatic yes, largely because of the Islamic doctrine of jihad." I think I'm starting to understand where they are really coming from.
If I understand you correctly, your conclusion is that selective breeding of humans for some valued heritable or partly heritable characteristic (e.g. high IQ or physical fitness), if strictly enforced, would make that characteristic more common in the resulting population, but that that strict enforcement's negative effects on society (restricted personal freedom, people no longer being viewed as inherently valuable, politics being unconcerned with individual rights as a result) would make such selective breeding immoral regardless of the benefits of the genetic changes it would produce. That seems to be what Dawkins was trying to say too (from https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689 : "Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it."). So I'm not sure where your views on this differ, except that he is using 'works' to mean 'produces the changes in frequency of alleles that it's intended to', while you're using it to mean 'makes society better overall'.
If Dawkins had expressed the same opinions a few years after he was born, he would be canceled faster than Alex Jones, but apparently, this genius has selectively forgotten about history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufqOe0_pres
Meanwhile, "Is Islam fundamentally violent? For influential New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Richard Dawkins, the answer is an emphatic yes, largely because of the Islamic doctrine of jihad." I think I'm starting to understand where they are really coming from.
https://www.cambridge.org/tc/academic/subjects/religion/islam/jihad-radicalism-and-new-atheism