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As I wrote recently, scientists – bioethics professors, no less – have published a paper touting the moral obligation to infect humans with alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne infection that produces a debilitating allergy to red meat. The scientists argued that inducing such an allergy is “is strongly pro tanto morally obligatory”, using the philosophical term to mean an act is required unless outweighed by stronger moral reasons against it. Their utilitarian argument is that the consequences of eating red meat are “morally impermissible”, on animal rights and ecological grounds.
The academics suggest we solve climate change and animal welfare by letting ticks turn us into lifelong vegetarians against our will. “We then defend what we call the Convergence Argument: If x-ing prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place, doesn’t violate anyone’s rights and promotes virtuous action or character, then x-ing is strongly pro tanto obligatory; promoting tick-borne AGS satisfies each of these conditions.”
Tick-borne AGS, they say, is a “moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat”.
Realising, one suspects, just how odious their argument really is, the scientists insist that their paper is merely a ‘thought experiment’. Well, OK: we can all play that game.
In that ‘I’m just saying…’ spirit of free intellectual inquiry, allow me to suggest a few thought-experiments of my own. Call them ‘modest proposals’.
Let’s start with:
Three Strikes and You’re Dead
All the available data show that only a tiny minority of people are responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes. A large Swedish study showed that just one per cent of the population accounted for a staggering 63 per cent of all violent crime convictions. US data shows much the same: five per cent of people commit nearly two-thirds of all violent crimes. The pattern is clear: violent crime is not diffusely distributed across all people, but clustered heavily among a small percentage of repeat offenders.
While there is no single ‘crime gene’, twin, adoption and molecular genetic studies show a substantial genetic contribution to aggressive and antisocial behaviour, including violent crime. Of course, not all people with elevated genetic risk commit serious violence, and environmental factors can mitigate tendencies to violent criminality. But the fact remains that the ‘Bad Seed’ is a very real thing. Those who are genetically predisposed, and who embark on a recidivist criminal career, are responsible for the overwhelming amount of violent crime.
The solution, then, is obvious: repeat violent offenders should be put to death.
If this sounds appalling, just remember: if executing repeat violent offenders prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place and promotes virtuous action or character, then it is morally obligatory. There is, of course, the objection that it violates the offenders’ rights. At which point, we can simply fall back on the utilitarian calculus: does unhappiness of a tiny minority of the population outweigh the happiness of the 95–99 per cent of the population who will see most violent crime disappear within a generation?
If you still find this objectionable, just consider that several places, including Iceland, have virtually eliminated certain severe genetic disabilities by the expedient of aborting all foetuses identified in utero as carrying the genetic markers of such disabilities. If a society can accept the execution of the innocent unborn, then it must surely accept the execution of the criminally guilty.
Those of you familiar with violent crime statistics will also have noticed some other patterns: namely, that violent crimes (indeed, in some cases, all crimes) are overwhelmingly concentrated in certain groups.
Africans or those of African descent seem particularly disposed. In the USA, despite representing just 13 per cent of the population, African-Americans are responsible for more than half of all crimes. In particular, violent crimes. African-Americans are at least twice as likely to commit crimes as even Caucasians, and nine times as likely as Asians. Murder rates are five times higher for black Americans than whites. Even on the stereotypically ‘white’ crime of mass shooting, blacks are twice as likely as whites to be mass shooters.
In Australia, data on crime and ethnicity are much more sparse than in the USA. Australia does not record crime by ethnicity, but it does by country of origin. Once again, Africans lead in crime rates by a long margin. Africans are more than four times overrepresented in overall crime rates than others. When it comes to violent crimes, the disparities are even more stark: 30 times higher for Africans than others for assaults and nearly 90 times higher for aggravated burglaries.
This is almost certainly an understatement of the link between Africans and violent crime in Australia. Given that data only include country of origin, it thus carefully excludes the ethnic African children of African immigrants.
Still, even the most ardent utilitarian is going to baulk at actual genocide. As they should: as with the previous data on violent crime, the majority of Africans don’t commit violent crimes. Fortunately, there is a non-lethal, and in fact constructive alternative.
Mass Deportation Back to Africa
Instead of the horrific alternative of genocide, simply ship all descendants of Africans back to their homelands. This will be a boon for not just for countries like the US, with substantial African-descended populations, who will see crime rates plummet overnight. For Africa itself, it will be an immense boon for the poorest continent in the world.
After all, while African-Americans might be the poorest Americans, they’re the richest blacks in the world. Black American buying power is estimated at roughly $2 trillion dollars. Compare this with the total GDP of Africa at $2.81 trillion, which necessarily included the ultra-wealthy oil states of Arabia. Sub-Saharan, or ‘black’ Africa’s GDP is just under $2 trillion dollars. The maths are clear: ship all African-Americans back to Africa and sub-Saharan Africa’s wealth would double at a stroke.
Stopping all African migration and re-homing the global African diaspora would also stop the West benefitting at Africa’s expense. After all, mass-migration advocates constantly exhort us that the Africans flooding across the Mediterranean in dinghies are not welfare-freeloaders, but doctors and engineers. As it happens, Africa has a chronic shortage of both. The West is thus greedily profiteering from Africa’s losses. This is morally indefensible.
Mass remigration, then, is the most morally virtuous act the West could take. The West would benefit from the immense happiness of crime rates suddenly plunging, and Africa would unlock a golden age of accelerated wealth and economic growth. Win-win.
Finally:
Complete Religious and Cultural Equality
Most Western constitutions emphasise the right to the free exercise of religion. Any religion, in the words of Australia’s constitution.
But what of the worshippers of many indigenous religions? Aboriginal law, for instance, inseparable from traditional Aboriginal religions, mandates punishments such as spearing for many offences. Yet, Australian law strictly forbids corporal punishment. How dare Commonwealth law thus abrogate their rights to the free exercise of their traditional religious practices?
And what of the devotees of indigenous American gods, such as Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, or Tláloc? While their religions were brutally suppressed by white settler-colonialists in the American genocide, small neo-Mexicayotl groups have either continued or revived such traditional religions.
But, what of their traditional religious practices, such as flaying alive, or removing the still-beating hearts of human sacrifices? Western law, and the Western-style laws imposed on indigenous communities, strictly forbid them. Is this not a grotesque violation of their freedom of religion?
You will object, no doubt, that these practices violate the rights of their victims, but is this necessarily true? In many cases, such as ritual flaying, the sacrifices were voluntary. Indeed, there were decided benefits: the intended victim got to live the lifestyle of a living deity, until sacrifice day. Even in the modern West, cases of cannibalism fetishists successfully advertising for willing victims show that there are those for whom being a human sacrifice is distinctly appealing. Who are we to deny the happiness of both sacrifice and worshipper, if the sacrificial contract is freely entered into?
Other religions and cultures receive dispensations that the general population are not entitled to. Sikhs, famously, are allowed to carry bladed weapons where no one else is. Not just in public, but in airports and courtrooms. Aborigines are allowed to ‘culturally’ hunt endangered species, or freely harvest wild foods to which the rest of us are either forbidden, or subject to strict limits.
So, why aren’t Anglo-Saxons permitted to carry seaxes? This sword was so central to their culture that the very name ‘Saxon’ is thought to derive from it: ‘sons of the blade’, some claim it means. Surely, then, modern Anglo-Saxons should be permitted to wear their culturally significant swords everywhere. Scots can have their claymores.
Anything less than all of these is not only grossly culturally inequality, but a constitutionally invalid restriction of free religious practice.
So, there are just three modest proposals to ponder. I didn’t even get around to making the case for euthanising the victims of child abuse.
Remember: it’s just a harmless thought-experiment.
Readers might want to suggest some of their own.
