Search results for "Eugenics"
showing 7 items of 17 documents
Eugenesia y autoría moral. Lectura de una tesis habermasiana
2017
El objetivo de esta comunicación es ahondar en la visión que ha mantenido Jürgen Habermas a propósito de la manipulación genética; en concreto, se pretende abordar críticamente su hipótesis de una pérdida de autoría del sujeto manipulado. A juicio del autor, la intervención genética positiva —aquélla que tiene por objeto la introducción de virtuales mejoras en el sujeto— alcanzaría a violar la conciencia de autoría de dicho sujeto, así como su autocomprensión en tanto agente moral. En este sentido, se pretende investigar críticamente dos aspectos diferentes de la cuestión: en primer lugar, la corrección o no de la tesis habermasiana; en segundo lugar, la pertinencia o no de dicha tesis a la…
EUGENICS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN LATVIA DURING WORLD WAR II: THE INVESTIGATION FILE OF THE MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY OF THE LATVIAN SSR IN T…
2021
This study, based on the materials of the 1948 investigation of the Ministry of State Security of the Latvian SSR, traces and analyzes the scientific and administrative activities of Theodor Upners (1898-1992) during the Nazi occupation regime in Latvia. From 1942 until the end of the occupation in 1944, Upners was formally the leading eugenics specialist in Latvia. During this time, in 1942 he visited Germany on a scientific trip, gave a course on eugenics at the University of Riga, and in 1943 published the book «The Role of Eugenics in the Life of the Nation and the State». In the 1948 investigation, he was accused of collaborating with the Nazi occupation authorities and glorifying Nazi…
BETWEEN PROGRESSIVISM AND INSTITUTIONALISM: ALBERT BENEDICT WOLFE ON EUGENICS
2013
Albeit concerned with the biological element in social evolution, Albert B. Wolfe was among the very few economists of the progressive era who openly expressed his concerns about certain implications of eugenic rhetoric for the social science. Specifically, Wolfe questioned the strong hereditary boundaries that more extreme eugenicists suggested about human beings. As I will attempt to show in paper, a careful examination of Wolfe’s writings reveals that his reaction was rooted in the belief that many of the social problems which eugenicists attributed to hereditary limitations, were actually imputable to the influence that the social, economic, and physical environment exercised on the ind…
On Simon Nelson Patten’s Progressivism: A note
2020
This article is an attempt to offer an assessment of the main coordinates of Simon Nelson Patten’s views on democracy and biological determinism. This will allow us to better delineate the differences—as well as the affinities—between Patten and the core of progressives discussed by Thomas C. Leonard in a series of path-breaking contributions, culminating in his Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. It is our contention that even within the persisting intricacies, ambiguities, and contradictions of Patten’s expository style, it is possible to trace a shift in some aspects of his ideas—a gradual evolution that makes his peculiar brand of progress…
Strange bedfellows: the Bundestag’s free vote on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) reveals how Germany’s restrictive bioethics legislation is …
2015
Germany’s bioethical legislation presents a puzzle: given structural factors, the country should be at the forefront of reproductive medicine, but its embryology regime remains one of the strictest in Western Europe. Past research has linked this fact to an unusual coalition of Christian and New Left groups, which both draw a connection from modern embryology to eugenics under the Nazis. In this article, the workings of this alleged alliance are demonstrated at the micro-level for the first time. The behaviour of individual MPs in a crucial free vote on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is modelled using data on their political, sectoral and religious affiliations. Identifying as a …
Survival Value and a Robust, Practical, Joyless Individualism: Thomas Nixon Carver, Social Justice, and Eugenics
2017
The aim of this paper is to provide a compressive assessment of Thomas Nixon Carver's thought—from his early formative years in the 1880s to his post WWII career as a journalist and pamphleteer. The main (albeit not exclusive) focus of this paper will be on the theoretical and philosophical coordinates of Carver's “new liberalism”—his own definition—and how this broad vision was intrinsically connected with an explicitly hierarchical and eugenic approach to human nature. Just as important, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the extent in which eugenic considerations permeated the realm of political economy during the first decades of the last century an…