From Darwin to Hitler: evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in Germany

Abstract

Survival of the fittest means that might—wisely used—is right. And we thus invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection (or of demand and supply), when exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races, and we appropriate their patrimony as coolly as Ahab did the vineyard of Naboth, though in diametrical opposition to all our favourite theories of right and justice—thus proved to be unnatural and false. The world is better for it; and would be incalculably better still, were we loyally to accept the lesson thus taught by nature, and consistently to apply the same principle to our conventional practice; by preserving the varieties most perfect in every way, instead of actually promoting the non-survival of the fittest by protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal.