A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical PrinciplesClapperton, Jane Hume
Philosophy
A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical Principles
Clapperton, Jane Hume
Ethics, Evolutionary; Social evolution
In examination for official appointments he would have attention paid to
a candidate’s ancestral qualifications as well as his personal ability.
The man of inherited sound constitution and average ability should be
preferred to the man of superior ability who belongs to a delicate and
short-lived family. The former will in all probability become the more
valuable servant of the two. Some scheme should be devised by which to
bestow marks for family merit, to put, as it were, a guinea stamp to the
sterling guinea’s worth of natural nobility; and this, he conceives,
might set a great social avalanche in motion. It would open the eyes of
every family, and of society at large, to the importance of marriage
alliance with a good stock; it would introduce the subject of race as a
permanent topic of consideration, and lead to a careful collecting of
family histories and noting of those facts which are absolutely
necessary for guidance in right conduct. Late marriage, as advised by
Malthus, Mr. Galton utterly condemns. The prudent alone are influenced
by that doctrine, and it is, he says, a most pernicious rule of conduct
in its bearing upon race. His policy, then, is early and fruitful
marriage for the best specimens of our race, and widespread celibacy in
the case of those less highly favoured, whilst everywhere the sentiment
should prevail that _eugenics_, or the improvement of the human stock,
is the primary consideration in marriage and the guiding principle in
sex relations.
This theory I hold to be one-sided, and the policy misleading and to
some extent false. Mr. Galton ignores the fundamental principle of
social life, viz., that the happiness of all, at all times, should be
the aim and object of rational man, and he mistakes the quality of human
nature in highly civilized man. To demand celibacy of men and women
whose defective organisms it is not desirable to perpetuate, would be in
hundreds and thousands of instances to sacrifice unnecessarily present
happiness to future gain—to build up the comfort and enjoyment of coming
generations at the expense of the comfort and enjoyment of our own
generation. The sentiment of justice repudiates this action as well as
condemns the reverse position of a reckless self-indulgent procreating
to the deterioration of the human stock, whilst reason distinctly shows
that individual liberty, in respect of marriage, is a social necessity
perfectly compatible with the well-being of all. Physical regeneration
of race will not be achieved by an overstrained morality that does
violence to the emotional human nature of the normal and average man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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