Trope-a-Day: Genius Breeding Act

Genius Breeding Act: Averted, despite the tremendous respect for intelligence – as you might expect from the civilization that considers Arranged Marriages an unpleasant subclass of slavery.  (Which, as I said back then, doesn’t mean that friends and relatives aren’t happy to engage in generous quantities of Shipper on Deck…)

…actually, more inverted, in a sense. The Reproductive Statutes do do the opposite, since while fully recognizing the rights, etc., of those with hereditary disabilities, since ethics is time-directional, that does not extend to deliberately or negligently creating more of them, respecting the right of the potential sophont to be well-created. And for a sufficiently advanced society, “hereditary disabilities” includes “functional amentia” to a degree that goes a long way farther than anything anyone in our history would have classed as even mild intellectual disability or other related conditions.

So if your genes aren’t up to scratch in this area, no reproduction for you! That’d be felony dysgenesis.

One thought on “Trope-a-Day: Genius Breeding Act

  1. Two of the core worlds of my “Federation of Parahuman Species” (aka the Para-Imperium) are very dynastic and justify arranged marriage as “familial duty”. And the Praetor’s House has an outright eugenics program because they’re trying to corner the market on telepaths and are badly inbred.

    On the other hand, they’re so allergic to slavery (due to being descended from biodroid slaves) that indentured servitude is illegal and those same two planets have trouble grasping the concept of a joint-stock corporation. “So, you own fractions of an organization of people that itself is considered a person? Isn’t that like owning people?”

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