Eugenics And Reproduction Licenses FAQs

Eugenics is the improvement of genetic qualities through selection, to make people/organisms more adaptive to their relative environments. What is considered “Eugenic” is always relative to a given environment, but if the environment in question is not specified, it’s usually assumed to be Modernity. In simpler words, Eugenics just means selecting for traits that we value in other human beings, such as intelligence and responsibility. No matter what we do, the social environment places selective pressures on the human genome. Eugenics means that we consciously choose to select for traits that make people better members of society. Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.

Making people better doesn’t sound like such a horrible thing, but it does imply that people aren’t born equal, and so it conflicts with the humanist belief in the intrinsic value and equality of human beings. The racial aspect of dysgenics makes it even more taboo. Not only are individuals unequal, races are also unequal. That doesn’t mean we have to genocide races to have eugenics, but it does mean that any race-blind eugenics program would have a disparate effect on racial demographics. Instead of dealing with the moral and social issues involved, our culture just pretends that evolution doesn’t apply to humans. This is not rational. It is willful ignorance.

Different people each define “eugenics” differently, with the broadest (and dare we say more accurate) definitions including the prohibition of incest and the selection of desirable traits since those help improve the quality of the gene pool. A gene pool cannot maintain a good quality if it allows a significant amount of incest, so prohibiting incest should count as negative eugenics at the very least.

The definition of Eugenics and people’s opinions of it are affected by the Sapir-Whorf Effect. Some people mistakenly believe that eugenics has to involve race, that it has to be tied to Nazism, or that it has to involve cherry-picking specific traits, and many other misconceptions, so this FAQs page was created to address all these misunderstandings and explain how eugenics can, in fact, collectively benefit society.

We are mainly arguing for (eugenic) population control (EPC), above all else. Fortunately, a favorable genetic selection will naturally follow from that, similar to how natural selection improves the fitness of organisms in nature. Depending on how eugenics is defined, the regulations we are proposing arguably don’t count as eugenics after all. If so, then we’re only proposing population control and nothing else. For this reason, many of the sections on this FAQs page will link to the Overpopulation FAQs page, where the questions are answered there.

A better question would be: Why shouldn’t we implement eugenics? We live in a time where there is unprecedented evolutionary mismatch between the people living in society and the modern technological industrial environment. Biological evolution is slower than cultural evolution and humans evolve more slowly than pathogens.

The only ways to solve the evolutionary mismatch facing us today are: 1. get rid of modern civilization, or 2. eugenics. We argue that the latter is far more preferable than the former. Either we change the environment back to what it was, or we change our genetics to fit the new environment.

Modern civilization will collapse if we don’t implement EPC. Even worse, if modern civilization collapses, it will probably never recover since the fossil fuels that powered it will already be all used up, and humans won’t have the necessary energy input to restart industrial civilization. The scientific knowledge, technological complexity, social complexity, and economic complexity will all fall apart if that happens.

Evolution is not guided by a human brain. The humans that did get to pass their genes onto the next generation only had to be smart enough to build shelter, hunt and gather food/water, and raise healthy children for the next generation. Evolution hasn’t gone far enough in selecting more intelligent humans.

Additionally, if someone is going to insist that eugenics is always bad under all circumstances, then they ought to be against all socially acceptable forms of eugenics as well.

Welfare states are a free-rider problem. They tax productive self-sufficient people in order to subsidize the reproduction of unproductive and irresponsible people who tend to have more children than they can afford to take of. The EPC system that we are proposing eliminates the need for child support and related welfare by guaranteeing that parents have to self-sufficient in order to have children. Having welfare can be justified for the sake of being humane, but the positive feedback loops it introduces (more dependents -> more welfare -> yet more dependents etc) creates an unsustainable system in the absence of a compensating negative feedback loop(s).

With enough generations or so, the inevitable outcome of a welfare state is a population where the majority of the people living in it are irresponsible and unable to take care of themselves. If we reach this point, then society will collapse due to immense irresponsibility, lack of self-sufficiency, increased violence, and financial bankruptcy.

You can’t be truly anti-welfare unless you’re pro-EPC. If you are anti-welfare and anti-EPC, then the only other option is to let impoverished children starve to death, which everyone would label as inhumane.

• Sustainable: A Sustainable future, fewest moral dilemmas.
• Unnecessary: Being Pro-EPC eliminates the need for virtually all welfare, except during extremely dire situations (similar to the Great Depression or WWII), so there’s no dilemmas or contradictions here.
• Inhumane: Impoverished children must starve (to death) since there’s no welfare and no method for preventing their unfortunate existence in the first place.
• Unsustainable: The status quo, a system that subsidizes irresponsibility and taxes responsibility because anti-welfare is “cruel” and pro-EPC is “evil”.

The best solution to this dilemma is to enforce reasonable legal requirements for people who want to have children, so that we can eliminate the unsustainablility of the welfare state, while achieving the most humane conditions possible.

Dysgenics is increasing faster than ever, due to: 1. evolutionary mismatch created by the Industrial Revolution (humans are not well-adapted to high-tech environments), 2. the removal of selectionary pressures on the human genome (medical technologies enable all infants to live to adulthood regardless of self-sufficiency, disabilities and birth defects, etc); and 3. the proliferation of welfare state policies:

• There is a strong negative correlation between how educated someone is and how many children they have. Less educated people consistently tend to have more children. Source
• Humanity has been undergoing a strong decline in IQ over the past few decades.
• Single-Parent Households are rising. In 2020, 40.5% of all newborns in the US were born to unmarried women, the vast majority of whom will grow up in single-parent households, according to the CDC. Decades ago, single-parent households only made up a few percentage points of the population. This indicates that less responsible children are having more children, which is not a good thing. Raising children should be a two-person job.
  • To clarify, we don’t believe it matters whether people get married or not as long as there are guarantees that people will take care of their own children without relying on government welfare.
  • Furthermore, although marriage has decayed to only 60% among newborns, many of those marriages are likely to divorce eventually, so the problem is even worse that this statistic suggests.
• The Nature of Dysgenics in Modern Society - The Untangler.
• The Internet and other technologies have made it easier than ever for neurodivergent people to meet each other. Since neurodivergent people are more likely to date, marry, and have kids with each other, neurodivergent conditions and disorders are becoming more common among the general population.
• “The Amish make up only about 10 percent of the population in Geagua County in Ohio, but they’re half of the special needs cases” Source. These special needs cases are caused by the Founder Effect. The Amish are one of the fastest growing demographics in the world, so this problem will only get worse.
• Sound Reasoning. The genome is not stable without positive selection. Even without dysgenic fertility or selection, the genome would gradually degrade by mutation. Random noise is always being added to the genome by mutation, and it must be removed to maintain the quality of the genome. What removes mutations? Selection, or in other words, differential reproduction. That selection can come from differential fertility or differential survival to adulthood.

It is a serious problem that the global IQ is falling because of dysgenic fertility. IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. It is just a measure of one’s ability to take IQ tests, and it can be improved with practice. However, it is a good proxy for a certain type of intelligence (abstract reasoning), and it is predictive of social and economic outcomes, such as income and criminality. With other factors taken into account (such as economic system and natural resources), IQ also predicts the outcomes of societies. Higher IQ people create societies that are better by a lot of standard metrics. Lower IQ people create societies that are worse by a lot of standard metrics.

For now, industrialization is still raising the global standard of living (and the global rate of fossil fuel consumption), but a growing population and falling IQ will eventually reverse that trend. Overpopulation and dysgenics both lead inexorably toward civilizational collapse. They lead back to the ancestral condition in which our population is regulated by war, disease and famine. To quote from Brittonic Memetics’ essay “Laissez-Faire Eugenics”:

Modern medicine and abundance bear dysgenic effects because on average, everyone of us is born with 60 or so new, random mutations. Most are situated in non-coding DNA and are neutral. Of the ones that are not, the vast majority are a net negative because they introduce random change in a very ordered, highly functional structure: the human body. In a world with high newborn and child mortality, this “genetic load” is kept at a low level by repeated trimming. In the modern world, however, with very little selective pressure, genetic load simply accumulates and progressively messes up every organ, including our brains. There is still trimming occurring because we can’t save the desperate cases, but the better we are at salvaging dysfunctional bodies, the higher the threshold at which genetic load will stabilize.

Taken as groups, Europeans, East Asians and some others are well adapted to complex, modern societies and have, in that sense, a very high genetic capital. However, the dysgenic effects apply to them too. In the absence of immigration it would simply take longer for them to degrade to the point of being unable to maintain modern civilization, because they have more “capital” to burn through.

To be clear, when I say that some groups are adapted to complex, modern societies, I mean that they are able to establish one and keep it running. Of course, in an evolutionary sense, their current birthrates indicate that they are (if anything) less adapted to the conditions of modern society than overall parasitic populations. “Parasitic” here means free-riding, in the sense that welfare props up their birthrates.

Read More: The Collapse Of Western IQ - Thuletide.

Read More: Civilization Becomes Unsustainable Below 97 IQ Average - 1.

Read More: Civilization Becomes Unsustainable Below 97 IQ Average - 2.

Read: Overpopulation FAQs: How is overpopulation a threat to humanity?

That’s a foolish objection, and an Appeal to Nature Fallacy. What is the natural order of things? Until recently, most children died young. Now, with modern civilization (based on fossil fuels) we allow most children to live to adulthood. If eugenics violates the natural order, then so does modern civilization.

We could use eugenic population control to create a new “natural order” of sustainable prosperity. And why shouldn’t we? Nature will not strike us down for using eugenics. In fact, the opposite is true. Nature will eventually destroy our civilization if we don’t regulate our population eugenically.

No. It’s no more authoritarian, totalitarian, or tyrannical than limiting the freedom to drive, limiting the freedom to kill other people, or forcing people to pay their taxes. Reproduction has serious consequences that can be harmful to others, so the imposition of social constraints on reproduction is justified for the same reason that social constraints on other behaviors are justified. Reproduction licenses are the simplest, most practical, and least authoritarian solution to save the world from the war and famine that will result from overpopulation.

Also, licenses are already required to adopt children because the public wants to ensure that the children will be placed in good care, so it’s logically inconsistent to not also require licenses for people to have biological children. Almost no one would argue that the rights of prospective adoptive parents are being violated if they are prohibited from adopting children due to not meeting the licensing requirements, assuming that the requirements are reasonable and fair to everybody (including gay couples).

Moreover, higher population densities necessarily lead to more constraints on individual freedom, so population control could make a society less authoritarian by causing fewer conflicts.

There are plenty of reasons why population control would protect human rights, not violate them. To clarify, we’re not proposing that it should be impossible for some people to have children based on predetermined factors, we’re just proposing that there should be reasonable limits on how many children people should be allowed to have. Nowadays, most children live to adulthood, so it’s not as necessary as it was historically to have as large families anyway. Voluntarily low fertility is not a feasible solution for preventing overpopulation.

1. Population control would prevent billions of deaths that would otherwise be caused by the consequences of overpopulation.
2. A child that cannot be supported by its parents is either a burden on the rest of society (which harms other members of society), or it will be harmed by neglect. Uncontrolled reproduction inflicts harm on others, so there is a clear ethical basis for socially controlling reproduction.
   Instead of asking why parents should be required to have a license to have children, we should be asking why it should be legal for biological parents to have children if it’s not guaranteed that they will take care of them, especially when single-parent households have been rising at unprecedented levels. Such behavior is extremely irresponsible, and it’s equally irresponsible for society to just let that happen without consequences.
3. Licenses are already required to adopt children in order to ensure that the children will be placed in good care, so it is logically inconsistent to not also require licenses for people to have biological children. Almost no one would argue that the rights of prospective adoptive parents are being violated if they are prohibited from adopting children due to not meeting the licensing requirements, assuming that the requirements are reasonable and fair to everybody (including gay couples).
4. EPC would select against any genetic causes of criminal behavior, thus offering further protection of human rights by significantly reducing crimes against innocent people.
5. It’s often harmful and distressing for people who were born with debilitating genetic disorders to have to live with them. Many would say that it is a grave injustice to be born with such disorders. Eugenics would discourage or prevent such misfortunes.
6. Rights are whatever people decide they are, and circumstances can cause peoples’ opinions to change on what rights should be, so the only legitimate rights are legal rights, whereas moral rights are nonsense since morality depends on perspective. Any proposed set of rights should be designed so that rights don’t contradict each other, and ideally all the rights proposed would protect and reinforce each other. People may argue that population control violates people’s autonomy, but since the benefit is that it will confer more protection to all other rights via all the ways we’ve just explained, the benefits outweigh the costs and it’s thus a reasonable change to make.

Lastly, it’s important to emphasize that what’s at stake here is whether modern technological society thrives or permanently collapses forever. When a population reaches its carrying capacity, widespread death become inevitable. For anybody who a thriving prosperous future for humanity, what could be more important than maintaining that for humanity’s future? If Industrial Society does collapse, there’s a strong possibility that it will never recover and that the world will be eternally stuck living an 18th-century lifestyle.

Eugenics ≠ Nazism. To the contrary, the Nazis failed to implement eugenics on a rational, scientific basis. In some cases they even promoted dysgenics.

1. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin, and other “Aryan” characteristics cause higher intelligence. Intelligence is affected by mental characteristics, not physical ones.
2. The Nazis murdered millions of people from one of the most influential and productive ethnic groups in history relative to its size: the Jews. Given the Ashkenazi Jews’ strong historical record of making scientific accomplishments and contributing to human progress, killing millions of them is the opposite of eugenics. Positive eugenics is supposed to increase the reproduction of people who are more intelligent, physically-fit, etc than the average human, but that’s the opposite of what the Nazis did.
3. The Nazis’ conception of “eugenics” was dirigiste, not laissez-faire. Top-down eugenics causes just as many problems as it solves, so it’s actually as dysgenic as it is eugenic. Our approach to eugenics would not prevent physically disabled, mentally disabled, diseased, etc from reproducing as long as they satisfy the list of requirements. Not only is our approach guaranteed to work better, but it’s also more liberal.

The Nazis used racism, propaganda, and pseudo-science as a justification for mass murder during the Holocaust. What we are advocating for is real eugenics under a laissez-faire approach, i.e. policies that are backed by reasoning, scientific evidence, and non-partisanship. We would like to strongly emphasize to the fullest extent possible that racism is not eugenics.

As an aside, the Nazis frankly weren’t any more “evil” than the Allied Powers were. Both sides committed crimes against humanity.

See: What are Ethnostates, and how practical are they? - Philosophy of Race FAQs

In theory, an ethnostate can also be a eugenostate, as long as it enforces eugenic policies. There are multiple definitions for ethnostates. If the ethnostate promotes racial homogeneity, then it will be harder to achieve the requisites of a eugenostate since it would have to accomplish two potentially conflicting goals at once. But if the ethnostate only promotes the interests of its most dominant ethnic group, this likely wouldn’t harm its objectives for enforcing eugenics. In order for an ethnostate to qualify as a eugenostate, it must enforce eugenic reproductive control.

An advantage to ethnostates is that they are more likely to have cultural traditions that are unlikely to change over time due to adaptive coherence, since it would exclude ethnicities that have different genes that could affect the memetic and cultural traditions of the society. This could increase the society’s stability. By contrast, if an ethnically homogenous state like Japan was no longer an ethnostate and it has mass foreign immigration, then the culture would change. This would make the country’s future less stable and more unpredictable.

Ethnostates could pass laws prohibiting race-mixing. Not all race-mixing is necessarily dysgenic, and whether it is considered eugenic or dysgenic can only be compared with an existing population genepool. For example, in a country where whites tend to have average IQ scores of ~100, if the Europeans were to race-mix with any other race besides Ashkenazi Jews or East Asians (which have average IQs estimated to be ~108 and ~106 respectively), the average IQ of the resulting children would be lower than 100. If the country desires to maintain a high IQ, it would do them well to prevent the population from race-mixing with races that have lower IQs, except in the case of statistical outliers.

It’s reasonable to oppose race-mixing when it lowers IQ (and other associated, well-correlated factors like delayed gratification, personal responsibility, lower crime rates, etc) and biological fitness. But if the races being mixed both have high IQ and won’t result in much decreased biological fitness, then it’s not worth prohibiting it. In a multiracial society, there isn’t much benefit to preserving distinctive races as long as the population has eugenic qualities, and since race mixing is inevitable to some extent.

In conclusion, ethnostates would help improve eugenics, prevent dysgenics, and increase societal stability, provided that they prioritize eugenic reproductive control and aren’t obsessed with maintaining racial homogeneity to the detriment of their populations’ eugenic quality. Whether it’s feasible to create them or not is a different question that depends on the circumstances.

First, we do not advocate that some race(s) be given greater legal privileges than other races. We believe that all people from any race should be entitled to the same legal rights as anyone else. We advocate for a eugenostate that would treat all races equally under the law, but there would be competition regarding who is authorized to reproduce who is forbidden. It is likely that some races (i.e. Europeans and East Asians) would be more reproductively successful than others under a eugenostate since some races have higher intelligence and greater economic productivity (on average), and are thus better adapted to modernity than others. However, this does not mean that Asians and Europeans would always be better than all the other races in all situations. If the eugenostate that we support did exist, it could not forbid anybody who meets all of the listed requirements from having children, regardless of what their race is. Eugenostates value equal opportunities, not equality of outcomes.

If anything, acknowledging this is actually a good argument for eugenics. If some races aren’t as intelligent or successful as other races, then eugenics could put the less intelligent races on (more) equal footing as other races. The most intelligent races became intelligent in the first place due to natural selection, and the same would have to happen to less intelligent races in order for their intelligence to increase. Eugenics is the best (and only) way to truly eliminate the achievement gaps and discrimination between races within merit-based social systems, once and for all.

Our theory of how intelligence evolved differently in different human races is that intelligence depended mainly on the level of civilizational complexity. That is, higher intelligence tends to be selected by higher levels of civilization (and vice versa, except for modernity). 2000 years ago, Germanic people were barbarian iron age farmers. Nowadays, they have some of the most intelligent and technologically advanced countries today. Many societies in precolonial Africa had similar levels of civilization as well as noticeably lower intelligence, most likely because their civilization hadn’t advanced enough to select for comparably high intelligence. We see no reason to believe that intelligence can’t be selected for in Sub-Saharan Africans (or any race), similarly to how it was done for Jews, Europeans, and East Asians over a couple of millennia. It should be theoretically possible to create high populations of Sub-Saharan Africans with comparable intelligence to Europeans, if the selectionary pressure for intelligence and population growth are both strong enough after 10 generations or so (give or take).

For more information, see: Philosophy of Race FAQs.

It’s not feasible nor reasonable to have a body of bureaucrats to micromanage a huge population. They won’t have the information or the incentives to make effective decisions that would benefit the entire system as a whole. Top-down / dirigiste eugenics¹ would fail for the same reason why Communism always fails.

1. If a eugenics policy is biased towards people who are suited towards one type of occupation over another, then the genes of people who work important occupations die out, and there will be no one left with optimal genetics for doing those occupations. This would devastate society.
2. Dirigiste policies would restrict who people can and cannot marry. It’s likely to be abused, and it would increase conflict in the society.
3. Not everybody can agree on what traits count as “good” or not.
4. Not everybody can agree on what counts as mental or physical illness or not. No matter how it’s decided, it would still cause potentially desirable genes to be removed from the gene pool.
5. Dirigiste eugenics isn’t as flexible for preventing overpopulation or population collapse. By contrast, laissez-faire eugenics uses population control in order to increase the eugenic quality of the genome, so it’s more adjustable for preventing both overpopulation and population collapse.
6. Dirigiste eugenics is significantly more authoritarian than laissez-faire eugenics, so people are less likely to support it since most people tend to value having individual freedom.

By contrast, this reasonable set of requirements would create a healthy population with plenty of desirable genetic diversity, aside from traits that make people prone to be less cooperative, less intelligent, less productive, more violent, etc. We want our population to have enough genetic diversity so that an unpredictable change to the environmental circumstances will ensure that our population will be able to adapt to the changing circumstances.

Over time, the laissez-faire requirements would cause the ability to pay the reproduction tax to become the primary selectionary pressure since the demand for reproduction licenses would gradually increase over time while the supply stays the same, since we already have a sizable populace who is capable of meeting the other requirements.

Most (maybe all) prohibitions on people breeding due to genetic reasons would be largely unnecessary, and even detrimental to the laissez-faire system we want to achieve. As the reproduction tax gets higher and higher, the competition to have healthy biologically fit children will increase in the population, thus causing most (if not all) unfavorable genes to be eliminated over time. The reproduction tax would essentially be a modern-day replacement to the pre-industrial competition in nature that selected for human fitness.

Read More: Brittonic Memetics: Eugenics.

Read More: Brittonic Memetics: Survival & Reproductive Strategies

The proposed requirements require couples to sign a child-bearing agreement together with one of them being employed in a full-time job. This would likely have the following effects:

• Marriage rates would increase and happen at earlier ages, which would reverse the current trend where more and more children have been born to parents out of wedlock in recent decades. This would instantly eliminate single-parent households, thus resulting in a society with much more desirable family structure and greater social stability.
• While we favor monogamous marriages, we don’t necessarily want to require this because we value individual freedom, and our primary concern is that legal responsibilities are imposed on the parents. This would leave it entirely up to individuals to decide how to arrange their love lives, and it would only regulate reproduction.
• Population control would redefine the role of women in society, compared to what it has been traditionally (raising children and housekeeping). Since women would raise fewer children on average, they would spend more time doing other things, like working paid jobs in the economy.
• Having children would become higher status among both men and women, since population control would make it harder to have children. In modern society, having children has become lower status since it’s become more socially acceptable for people to not have children. Enforcing population control would reverse that trend since people, especially men, are socially driven to pursue higher status.
  • When people see other people with lots of children, people will learn to associate having lots of children with higher social status, as things should be. This is a good thing because this reduces the alienation from our natural biological instincts that has been caused by modern technology and it also keeps us more in sync with our biological purpose.
• The sexual market would balance out. Since it would be illegal to have children without another parent who is legally contracted to help raise the child, there would be no more single mothers, who are undesirable for men to date for a number of reasons. This would increase the number of women for men to date.
• Women wouldn’t be liberated from men anymore. By contrast, the modern welfare state and culture of modernity have liberated women from men (i.e. women no longer need men to help them raise their children when they can depend on welfare instead).

In the interest of preserving modern civilization and preventing war, disease, and famine, the country must enforce a maximum population limit. This shall be done by requiring anybody who wants to have children to acquire a reproduction license for each child that they want to have. A reproduction license will be granted to every couple of parents who manages to meet all of the following requirements:

• The parent must be law-abiding and have no criminal record.
• The parent must have a high school education [at least] and be a legal adult.
• The parents must sign a contractual legal agreement with the government pledging responsibility for raising the child by themselves, and both parents must meet all of these requirements.
• One of the parents in the child-bearing agreement must be employed in a full-time job.
• A degree of consanguinity between the parents that is too low is forbidden (incest is prohibited).
• The parent must have paid all their taxes (if any).
• The parent must pay the reproduction tax for having a child, which is set according to market rates with respect to the supply, demand, and price of reproduction licenses.²

The social control of reproduction is not a new idea. It is a very old and almost universal practice. In the past, reproduction was controlled by the institution of marriage. Almost every society had some form of marriage that regulated human sexual behavior. Sex outside marriage was not allowed. We abandoned the traditional control of reproduction without understanding its function or the consequences of abandoning it. We are now seeing the consequences (and paying the costs) of abandoning marriage. It is time to replace marriage with a modern form of reproduction control.

Read More: Why Laissez Faire Eugenics Is Best.

The parents don’t have to be married necessarily, but they do have to sign a contractual child-bearing agreement together with the government pledging responsibility for raising the child by themselves. As long as they satisfy the contract, they can do whatever they want with romantic / sex lives.

Of course, if someone wants to raise someone else’s child, there would certainly be a legal procedure for arranging that and assigning them the responsibilities for the child’s care instead.

Main Article: Georgism And Population Control

• It’s necessary to enforce population control. The reproduction tax rates are determined by supply and demand, with the supply being fixed. This ensures that only a finite number of people will have children.
• It is the fairest and least authoritarian way to determine who can have children and who cannot.
• It has positive eugenic effects on the population, since the most productive members of society would be able to afford the most reproduction licenses, assuming that the society completely eliminates rent-seeking.
• It eliminates the need to directly prohibit people from breeding due to genetic reasons, and it would essentially be a modern-day replacement to the pre-industrial competition in nature that selected for fitness in organisms (humans in this case).

Side Note: If people only have to pay the reproduction tax just once, then it’d be better to call it a reproduction license fee (like a driver’s license fee), instead of a reproduction tax. Taxing only once per child is probably the best way to go about that, but it’s probably also not the only way that it could be done. “Tax” is more general than “fee”, so I think that’s why it was chosen for these FAQs, since there’s multiple options for creating a reproduction tax.

This depends on the child’s cause of death. If the criteria are met, the parents can get a refund on the Reproduction Tax that they paid for the year that the child was conceived. If the parents are still eligible, they may have another child using the reproduction license that authorized the deceased child’s birth.

This depends on the parent’s cause of death. If a parent(s) dies while their children are still minors, then it’s debatable whether the government should provide welfare and/or orphanage support to help raise their children. If the parent(s) died due to environmental causes or causes that are unrelated to their lifestyle choices, then there’s a better (eugenic) case for the government providing welfare to their children.

For accidental or unintentional causes of death, anybody who kills a parent will be legally liable to pay child support for all of that parent’s child’s expenses until the children become legal adults or 18 years old. This includes drunk drivers and people who text while driving, if they accidentally kill a parent.

Genetic engineering has many potential benefits, and one of them is that it tends to conflict less with people’s moral values, since people are less likely to associate Nazism and racism with genetic engineering as they typically would for eugenics.

Genetic engineering could affect human evolution to a limited extent, but even if it does, genetic engineering is still more expensive than natural reproduction, so it would be limited mostly to the educated middle/upper classes of society, who have lower fertility rates. Designer babies will probably never become the most common way of having kids, especially not among the poorer, less intelligent factions of society who have higher fertility rates. Genetic engineering won’t eliminate the need for some form of laissez-faire eugenics, because we cannot transcend evolution.

Designer babies still require top-down regulation of reproduction, since most parents are unlikely to make good choices about their designer babies. Whatever traits parents do choose would probably have unforeseen consequences as people compete in Tragedies of the Commons to have the most beautiful children, the most athletic children, obedient children, or whatever other arbitrary qualities people would select for in designer babies. It would be similar to how people have selectively bred dogs for thousands of years to have all sorts of different traits across hundreds of different dog breeds. Many of those dog breeds would die out without human support since the selected traits are actually dysgenic to their natural survival in the wild. Similarly, the offspring of uncontrolled genetic engineering would probably have many maladaptive traits that would cause their eventual extinction due to below replacement fertility rates.

Parents, governments, and society all have different desires for what specific traits they would select designer babies to have, so that’s another problem. Dirigiste eugenics doesn’t work.

Lastly, genetic engineering would not solve overpopulation, whereas reproduction licenses would. Instead of trying to circumvent the moral stigmas associated with eugenics and introducing an innumerous list of unforeseen consequences, it would just be better to institute the this proposed list of requirements for having children.

Read More: Gwern’s Page On Embryo Selection For Intelligence.

Eugenics

See: What is Eugenics?

Dysgenics

The opposite of eugenics. The accumulation of traits that make people/organisms less adaptive to their environments, thus resulting in Evolutionary Mismatch. Dysgenics usually arises when selectionary pressures are removed.

Evolutionary Mismatch

When evolved traits that were once advantageous become maladaptive due to changes in the environment. As it relates to humans, nearly all the evolutionary mismatch in the modern world is caused by rapid technological advancements that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. See: Catepillars and Philosophy.

Dirigiste (Top-down) “Eugenics”

The supposed improvement of human hereditary qualities through overly selective breeding, thus causing a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity. It can be done by either positive eugenics or negative eugenics. Ironically, top-down “eugenics” would actually make people less adaptive to their environments, hence why the term is used with quotes.

Laissez-Faire (Bottom-up) Eugenics

The improvement of human hereditary qualities by requiring reproduction licenses (which have minimal requirements) in order for people to have children. Laissez-Faire Eugenics during Modernity would be the re-introduction of reasonable selectionary pressures on the human genome.

Positive Eugenics

Encouraging or subsidizing people with good genetic qualities to reproduce more.

Negative Eugenics

Preventing or discouraging people with bad genetic qualities from reproducing.

Eugenostate

A state that enforces Eugenic Population Control, Laissez-Faire Eugenics, and Immigration restrictions, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Ethnostate (v1)

A country populated by, or dominated by the interests of, a single racial or ethnic group.

Ethnostate (v2)

A sovereign state of which citizenship is restricted to members of a particular racial or ethnic group.

Ethnostate (v3)

An ethnonationalist state that enforces racial or ethnic homogeneity.

Ethnocracy

The same thing as an ethnostate, except there doesn’t necessarily have to be a single ethnic group that populates the majority of the country.

Geostate

A state with a Georgist economic policy and taxation system.

Welfare State

A state that provides welfare by taxing productive citizens in order to subsidize unproductive citizens. Welfare states have dysgenic and unsustainable practices.

Racism

Irrational prejudice or discrimination based upon race or ethnicity.

Reproduction License

A legal document that affirms that the citizen who possesses the title is legally authorized to have X number of children, given that they meet the legal requirements and have paid for the license.

Georgism

An economic philosophy stating that natural resources belong equally to all. It achieves this by placing a single tax on the value of natural resources, which pays for all government expenses. See this page for more info.

The West

Countries that have majority European populations and/or have been influenced by Western Culture, including Europe, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Sometimes I use this term more generally to also include Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan since those countries have also been influenced by Western culture, and have decent genetics for modernity, as far as our policy objectives are concerned.

The Great Replacement (of White People)

The phenomenon where white people are being replaced by foreign ethnicities within Western countries. It is very real and in several decades, it is projected to be finished by the end of the 21st century.

White Preservationism

A movement to counter the Great Replacement by increasing white fertility rates in the Western World. From a eugenics standpoint, the goal of white preservationism is to preserve (most of) the (good) genes of Europeans, not necessarily to preserve white people as a distinctive race.

White Nationalism

An ideology that promotes ethnostates for white people, perhaps as a way to support white preservationism.

White Supremacy

The racist belief that white people are superior to all other races.

Malthusianism

The theory that potentially exponential population growth can surpass the linear growth of an environment’s carrying capacity (including its food supply and other resources), which eventually causes members of the population to die off until settling back down to the carrying capacity.

Neo-Malthusianism

The theory and concern that overpopulation (and overconsumption) may increase resource depletion and/or environmental degradation and lead to ecological collapse or other hazards. Neo-Malthusianism is often coupled with advocacy of human population planning to ensure sufficient resources for current and future human populations as well as for other species.

Cornucopianism

The pseudo-scientific theory that overpopulation, overconsumption, and environmental problems faced by society either do not exist or can be solved by technology and/or the free market.

Overpopulation

An excessive number of occupants (people, animals, plants, etc.) in a particular area; specifically, when the number of occupants exceeds the ability of that area to provide for them.

War, Disease, and Famine

The main traditional ways how overpopulation have historically been solved in human societies. The vast majority of deaths throughout human history can be attributed to War, Disease, and Famine.

Birth Control / Contraception

The main force of population control in Modernity. Birth Control is responsible for causing countries all over the world to have below replacement fertility rates, temporarily in the grand scheme of things.

Population Control

The practice of preventing the size of a population from growing past the carrying capacity, in the interest of avoiding an Overpopulation Crisis. For humans specifically, population control must be done by either artificially via Birth Control (and immigration restrictions), or naturally via War, Disease, and Famine.

Eugenic Population Control (EPC)

Population Control via mandatory Birth Control and (Laissez-Faire) Eugenics via Reproduction Licenses.

Overpopulation Crisis

When the carrying capacity is so high above the carrying capacity, that War, Disease, and Famine start to occur.

Carrying Capacity

The maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available.

Population Buffer Space (PBS)

The estimated difference between the Carrying Capacity and the LMPL.

Legal Maximum Population Limit (LMPL)

The maximum population limit of the society that the population must avoid exceeding, in the interest of avoiding an Overpopulation Crisis, as set by a eugenostate. The LMPL is always lower than the Carrying Capacity, with the Population Buffer Space being the quantitative difference between them. The LMPL is meant to be a target population the society should stay below, but if the population does rise above it, the Population Buffer Space gives the eugenostate some flexibility, as it still avoids exceeding the Carrying Capacity.