George Bernard Shaw on Eugenics

  1. Rusty Shackleford
    Rusty Shackleford
    Shaw was a proponent of a position now known as "Shavian eugenics", after himself, believing that human beings would naturally tend toward biological improvement, without the need for political intervention.[68][69] He wrote that "the only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man"; the selection of partners "without consideration of rank or wealth" would come about when personal incomes were made equal.[70][71]
    He was a critic of the use of force for eugenic purposes, and especially of the racist employment of eugenic logic.[65] At a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society of 3 March 1910 he lampooned parts of the eugenics movement by mockingly suggesting the need to use a "lethal chamber" to solve the problem. Shaw said: "We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment …" This was an example of Shaw satirically employing the reductio ad absurdum argument against the eugenicists' wilder dreams, although many in the press took his words out of their satirical context. Dan Stone wrote: "Either the press believed Shaw to be serious, and vilified him, or recognised the tongue-in-cheek nature of his lecture."[72][73]
    (1 = 72, 2 = 73)

    1. ^ Stone, Dan (2002). "The Lethal Chamber in Eugenic Thought". Breeding superman: Nietzsche, race and eugenics in Edwardian and interwar Britain. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press. p. 127. ISBN 9780853239970. "Either the press believed Shaw to be serious, and vilified him, or recognised the tongue-in-cheek nature of his lecture … only The Globe and the Evening News also recognised it as a skit on the dreams of the eugenicists."
    2. ^ Searle (1976: 92): "This was widely felt to be a joke in the worst possible taste".
    found a response for the comment on eugenics.