Would you take a morality pill?

Put me down for the low-dose version. Jesus-like morality seems like it could be pretty boring, at least until Mary Magdalene and her friends stop by.

 

I think the quotation marks around the word should answer this question quite sufficiently.

 

I don't know if we should, but I imagine that we could, at least in the United States.

Forced sterility is still very much on the table here, for example.

 

Whose morals are we talking about here? Will there be different blends for specific locales?

In the meantime, I prefer to take my cues from the Wheel of Morality:

 

In a society predicated on being "free," how would forcing someone else to take a pill be sticking with that same edict? When I read this, I thought it was interesting but laughable. A morality pill sounds like a basic placebo, and who is to judge someone else's morality to begin with?

 

I've been researching eugenics in the U.S. for the past four months or so and this discussion has a lot of the early-20th century eugenics quality to it. The term moron was actually made up by a eugenicist (Goddard) and had a moral aspect to its original connotation. Morons were those who were just below "normal" and therefore not easy to spot. One of the ways Goddard said they could be spotted was by finding those who were immoral. He posited that only those who are of adult-level intelligence actually develop morals.

At the time, men were trying to figure out what to do with women who were no longer sticking to Victorian ideals of what they "should" be. One of the ways, then, of dealing with this was by saying that all prostitutes and women having sex outside of marriage were immoral and pushing for (at first) segregation. It was assumed then that these women were of lower classes. This distinction stopped holding weight in the 1920s when many more middle and upper class women were stepping out of those Victorian ideals.

Segregation eventually gave way to sterilization as the main way to deal with those of low intelligence. There were/are sterilization laws on the books and Buck v. Bell made compulsory sterilization of those deemed mentally retarded legal. The main place where sterilization was somewhat widespread was California.

 

It would be fascinating to see them given to Gingrich, Romney, Norquist and Cantor.

 

Yeah, and it's essentially still on the books. There's some quote from the decision about how they spared the country generations full of invalids or something like that.

Lots of stuff out there about how eugenics - which this also reminded me of - in the United States empowered the Holocaust.

 

Sounds like you've been having a hell of a time since leaving our fair city.

 

Yeah, despite the fact that there was research coming out at the time that it would take many thousands of years for sterilization to make even a negligible difference.

And to your second point, I just finished a book called "The Nazi Connection" which deals with that. The U.S. and German eugenicists/racial hygienists had very close relationships in the 1920s and through most of the 1930s. The Nazi regime gave American eugenicists honorary doctorates as part of a propaganda program to show to the world/their people how we approved of their methods. And really, many eugenicists did approve, especially in the mid-1930s, and were jealous of the carte blanche the Nazi racial hygienists had to implement their programs.

Also, STG, this shouldn't come as a surprise, but I'm actually doing this as side research for a professor because I find the subject, while repulsive, quite fascinating and something that isn't really covered at all in schools.

 

And yet again, One Trick Pony chimes in. FFS, give it a rest. We get it already.

 

I'd trick everyone else into taking it while I took a sugar pill.