field notes

I'm snowed in at The Hastings Center, looking out the window at the Hudson, and I'm thinking a lot about words. At a recent lunchtime talk, the term “eugenics” came up. The implication was that if something is “eugenics,” then it's wrong—end of story. But as somebody pointed out, that kind of rhetoric is too easy. It becomes a stand‐in for an ethical argument and allows us to skip the actual thinking. Why is eugenics bad? What kind of eugenics are we even talking about? Surely the Nazi model is not the only game in town; is there a sense in which simple mate choice could be a form of eugenics? I won't attempt to answer these questions here. My point is only that we should remember to ask them. Something similar occurs in science and medicine. All too often, suggestive phrases are used instead of step‐by‐step reasoning .