MetaJess

What does he mean it “works”? Did slavery “work”?

I think in Dawkins's mind, 'works' means he thinks humans can successfully and responsibly guide top-down (read: bio-engineered) human gene optimization, with success criteria determined by utilitarian principles

I'd not say Dawkins thinks we can *responsibly* guide it. That's why he said he does not morally support it. He's just being a modernist, looking at questions in isolation. The extreme negative reaction is PoMo, saying it's meaningless to separate moral and technical questions.

Why does he deplore it? Why does he deplore slavery? It makes me suspicious when people say “of course slavery works. Its just wrong.” I dont think slavery works because its wrong. Does that make me a postmodernist?

When hume said reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions was he a low decoupler? Or a high decoupler because he was able to decouple the arguments for decoupling from context? Moral: decoupling is a dumb idea designed to rename moral blindness as something good.

I don't think the author makes a normative claim about whether decoupling is good or not. Just pointing out the spectrum

For the record, I think that high decoupling is morally problematic and epistemologically suspect