In chapter VII section xvi of The Politics, Aristotle talks about marriage and eugenics. He writes that if one marries too young or too old, children are not healthy. And therefore one should get married at the right age to beget good children. For female, the appropriate age to get married is 18 and for male, it's 37. Aristotle think that this is also good particularly because by the time the man gets weak and old at around 70, the child, if born as planned, would be of marriageable age.
Aristotle also writes, ' with regard to the choice between abandoning an infant or rearing it, let there be a law that no cripple child be reared.' Aristotle society was not in a position to rear deformed child. They would leave deformed child out in the open to die. To control population, they would even sometimes leave a healthy child to die. Unlike Plato who fixed an exact number for an ideal state, Aristotle does put an exact number for an idea state. But he says that it should be large enough to be self sustaining and yet not too large that the state cannot 'survey' the number.
This reminds me of a dialogue in a movie called The Mission. One can find the plot of the movie here. A wonderful movie! In this movie, before the transfer of the land where the mission work was being undertaken, from Spanish control to Portuguese control, there was a debate for and against this transfer of land. The one defending the transfer of the land from the Spanish to the Portuguese wanted to capture the native people and sell them as slave. There is handsome money involved in slave trading and under Portuguese law slavery was okay then. But the one arguing against the transfer, the Christian Priest, feared that such transfer would enslave the native people; and since Spanish law did not allow slave trading, he wanted the land to be under Spanish control. The one defending the transfer says something to the effect that the Guarani people are not fully human; they are rather like animal; they even killed their children... and therefore using them as slave was fine. To this the priest retorted that they had to keep their population under control... and to run away from slave traders, they could not even raise so many children because that made it difficult form them to escape being caught and then sold as slave.
But the point is that leaving deformed children to die was not uncommon in the past. That was there in the Roman society too. And we read of Christians in the first century picking up discarded children from dung heaps and raising them. There might have been other social/religious/ethnic communities having done similar thing; maybe my reading is limited and therefore I am not aware of such stories. But the point is that discarding deformed children was common then. Today all sorts of societies have made such thing illegal. Though we read stories of female foeticide specially in certain part of the world, and the stories are being confirmed through skewed sex ratio, but there is possibly no state/kingdom that does not prohibit such thing officially. Let alone discarding disabled people, the world today strives to invent new machines/tools to enhance their capability to perform different activities as live as normal life as far as possible.
Is the fact that discarding the deformed and the weak being acceptable in the ancient society but not acceptable now one aspect of moral progress? I think it is!
This reminds me of a dialogue in a movie called The Mission. One can find the plot of the movie here. A wonderful movie! In this movie, before the transfer of the land where the mission work was being undertaken, from Spanish control to Portuguese control, there was a debate for and against this transfer of land. The one defending the transfer of the land from the Spanish to the Portuguese wanted to capture the native people and sell them as slave. There is handsome money involved in slave trading and under Portuguese law slavery was okay then. But the one arguing against the transfer, the Christian Priest, feared that such transfer would enslave the native people; and since Spanish law did not allow slave trading, he wanted the land to be under Spanish control. The one defending the transfer says something to the effect that the Guarani people are not fully human; they are rather like animal; they even killed their children... and therefore using them as slave was fine. To this the priest retorted that they had to keep their population under control... and to run away from slave traders, they could not even raise so many children because that made it difficult form them to escape being caught and then sold as slave.
But the point is that leaving deformed children to die was not uncommon in the past. That was there in the Roman society too. And we read of Christians in the first century picking up discarded children from dung heaps and raising them. There might have been other social/religious/ethnic communities having done similar thing; maybe my reading is limited and therefore I am not aware of such stories. But the point is that discarding deformed children was common then. Today all sorts of societies have made such thing illegal. Though we read stories of female foeticide specially in certain part of the world, and the stories are being confirmed through skewed sex ratio, but there is possibly no state/kingdom that does not prohibit such thing officially. Let alone discarding disabled people, the world today strives to invent new machines/tools to enhance their capability to perform different activities as live as normal life as far as possible.
Is the fact that discarding the deformed and the weak being acceptable in the ancient society but not acceptable now one aspect of moral progress? I think it is!
No comments:
Post a Comment