Makes one reflect on how much do we take for granted when it comes to ethics.
I remember a (googleable) exchange of letters between the former owner and an ex-slave. The former was genuinely hurt by slave's betrayal and urged them to go back.
There were people for whom owning other people was so normalized that they were actually angry at their former slaves. I wonder if any of our current practices will be viewed as barbaric. Or maybe we'll go back and the future generations will laugh at our idealistic concept of "human rights", while sipping drinks served by their slaves.
Ethical philosopher Peter Singer presents and expands on the following argument in his book:[1]
"First Premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad.
Second Premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
Third Premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.
Conclusion: Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong."
I think the way we treat animals today will be viewed as very barbaric within a generation or two. We are everyday learning more about how much intelligence and consciousness something like cows posses.
Agreed; mass production and slaughter of animals at the expense of the environment and generally our health will become frowned upon as alternatives become more available.
„Wage slavery“ and „factory farming“ (aka as concentration camps for other sentient beings) will be viewed unkindly by future generations. Actually, some if us already view it as barbaric but it will need more of us to finally do away with them.
The acceptance of slavery was not universal. Back then there were already people, abolitionists, striving to end slavery. So looking at what small but vocal groups protest now can give a hint at what future people could find wrong or evil.
It's not at all arrogant to think future people will share my ethics, just like abolitionists were not arrogant to hope for a world without slavery. Arrogance would be believing they'd share all of your ethics, and just as well I'm sure most abolitionists were still very racist, sexist, homophobic, ...
Ethic shifts don't come out of the blue; they start as a growing sentiment within a population, which at some point (whether through growth or things being shaken up by e.g. war) reaches critical mass.
>Sure but that's no reason to expect yourself in specific to be on the right side of the shift.
Everyone from Caesar to the crusaders to Martin Luther to the American revolutionaries to the KKK to the Amish to the imperial Japanese to the 1960s hippies to the Taliban to the IRA is on the right side of the shift as they see/saw it.
We can't all be right, some people have to be wrong. Some people will be right on some things and wrong on others. Some people will be so right or wrong on particular things that it will overshadow how right/wrong they were on others.
Clean in vitro meat might be the technology that ends factory farming. An interesting question is how future generations will look at us if they still eat clean meat.
Describing lab-created genetically-modified "Frankenmeat" as "clean" might be one of those things not looked on favorably in the future... Bill Joy is quite likely right that genetic engineering is probably the most dangerous technology ever created, and the one that almost certainly has the highest probability of killing us all.
It may be the most dangerous of technologies currently on the horizons, but it can also have the biggest payoff - it's not just about things like curing diseases, test tube babies, or selective pathogens - it's also the first stop on the way to building living machines, living materials, and cracking molecular nanotechnology, which life is nothing but.
Compared to factory farmed meat it is most certaly clean. No unnecessary suffering of concious animals and far smaller impact on the environment make it that.
I'm not even sure that clean meat relies on genetic modifications, but even if, so what? There is no reason to believe that targeted changes are more harmfull than random mutations.
> I remember a (googleable) exchange of letters between the former owner and an ex-slave. The former was genuinely hurt by slave's betrayal and urged them to go back.
We treat children like that. Largely for the economic value they can provide by making them spend most of their awake life at school. If school wasn't needed, it would look barbaric.
I'm always baffled by the way US (and on a lesser degree UK) people see schools. My (EU/Italian) point of view is that's something that could be improved (like anything) but not the evil I see through your words. There must be some significant difference in the school experience that I don't understand (for lack of knowledge, probably).
Conservatives here actually make things worse in public life as a policy decision...public schools are a perfect example...then run for election based on things being bad in public life.
Since public education became a thing for all the states, conservative Christians have been opposed to it. They will moderate their message depending on the audience, but when discussed among themselves they talk about abolishing it. The really ridiculous thing is how schools are funded. I won't go into it here, but it guarantees that poor people will have a bad education.
Yes, of course. It's visible in many subtle ways. One example is uniforms. Another is how "social studies" now stands where "history" once stood. Nearly 20% of high school graduates are illiterate. A highs school diploma signals something, but it's not being educated.
Some amount of education does occur, but it's incidental to social indoctrination, keeping parents' wages high by forcing kids out of the job market, etc.
A universal property of state run schooling is that schools are literal prisons for children and for many people is the only place they'll experience violence first hand. The finer details will vary by location.
I've been to multiple prisons for children to visit people, they aren't like schools. Also, many children are sent to adult prison and those aren't like school either.
Both public and private schools can be places where people experience violence, but many more people experience violence at home first.
Students are not free to leave and will literally be thrown in a cage for truancy if they do. They don't choose the curriculum, don't get to choose who they work with, and are frequently submitted to dehumanizing treatment like having to ask permission to use the restroom.
Very few countries jail children for simple truancy. Most will let you opt out of the system if you can prove you're maintaining standards in the process and not homeschooling for abusive purposes.
Well... The more radical political philosophies (at any given time) make lots of equivalences (ethical and others) between slavery & other stuff. Wage labour today, and obviously older institutions like tenancy, serfdom, indentured labour, etc. Even many free thinking, but politically mainstream people (eg t cowen) make non-ethical comparisons between slavery and employment.
It's easier to agree with if you widen your concept of slavery, beyond the specific institution of African slavery in the US... during the later years. That system was so brutal and unethical by slavery standards. So, it's hard to compare to.
Before, during & after chattel slavery, the Americas had other systems of "slavery." Most were not that* brutal, but still slavery.
Indentured service was huge, at a certain point. Share croppers. These people probably outnumbered free employees in many times and places.
Serfs were not free to go. Monks were arguably enslaved by abbots. Artisans sometimes bought apprentices as children.
In western Europe, the "tenant" concept that replaced serfdom was often similar to sharecropping.. arguably also a system of slavery.
We know of ancient examples: Greek, Roman, Jewish, Persian, Babylonian... Ancient law codes (including the bible) dedicated a lot of ink to slavery laws. Slaver rights, slave rights, manumission, and such. A Greek slave could be wealthy, and that should help broaden the concept.
Marxism sees slavery in class terms. Ie it's just a name to describe the lowest class, and wage labour is a descendant of slavery.
There are even many modern-economy examples where employers have a say in an employee's marriage or reproductive choices. That arguably is slavery-like.
Anyway... once you widen the concept of slavery with multiple examples that you easily accept as "obviously slavery*, drawing analogies to other institutions is easy.
Indenture, for example, exists, today, in practice, widely... in many forms. Invariably, the "slavers" think it's ethically sound.
By so many metrics our lives are incredible compared to every other period of human history. Of course it's not perfect, there's always room to improve, but there's a stark contrast between how things actually are and how many perceive it to be.
Very few problems are as unambiguous as slavery. A lot of our problems are much more nuanced.
There is almost no "late term" "prophylactic" abortion anywhere. Late term abortion is usually driven by medical necessity. Denying this reality gets women killed by withholding medical treatment from them. It was the death of Savita Halappanavar as a result of this policy that ultimately triggered the liberalisation of abortion in Ireland.
Let's not attack straw men. It's also barbaric to ban medically necessary procedures.
Besides, frequency of an event isn't a defense against charges of barbarism. Lobotomies, the Tuskegee Experiment, and eugenic sterilization weren't all that common, but they were barbaric.
It's easy to make abortion seem barbaric in a HN comment thread. The lives of people are complicated and messy. Your opinion about how other people should conduct their personal lives shouldn't extend to family planning. Period.
If we are being honest, open heart surgery is barbaric. They cut people open and then break all their ribs.
It's not assault or murder, for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into.
Further, experience tells me that granting good faith in these arguments is usually a bad idea. I oppose the right-wing on every issue. Abortion is particularly important in this context because it normalizes state based oppression against women.
Do you grant creationists good faith? How about anti-vaxers? Flat earthers?
People have been using free speech absolutism over the last couple of years to popularize poisonous ideas. Should we keep letting that happen?
EDIT: Maybe they have an opinion, but frankly that lot don't spin this as an opinion. It's barbarism. It's murder. It's evil. Don't act like their isn't a larger context to all of this.
I just think full term fetuses deserve at least as much legal protection as a pet dog. It's pretty awful to kill a pet when animal shelters are a thing.
I understand the desire to group that opinion along with PizzaGate or some other toxic nonsense. That's exactly the sort of cognitive dissonance I'm talking about.
I am actually sympathetic to and support single mothers in all sorts of ways, not that people should have to qualify philosophical opinions with virtue signalling.
"Do you grant creationists good faith? How about anti-vaxers? Flat earthers?"
Yes. All of them.
I've never had to do so with a flat-earther simply because I've never met one.
But the others? Sure, I treat them like human beings.
Marginalizing people for their beliefs will not change their minds but it WILL fracture society. I think some people will side with the "opposing view" simply because they are indignant when they see how the sanctimonious mob treats them.
Like I said, nothing happens in a vacuum. People in the anti-abortion camp routinely call people evil, demon possessed, and immoral. They have killed people. There are bills passing now that force women to undergo unneeded medical procedures.
Somehow I'm being sanctimonious because I'm not going to pretend that there is no historical context to all of this.
That's what they have been doing this whole time. The far-right pushes against the bounds of decency and then the center-right says that you aren't being civil when someone brings it up.
I'm not marginalizing anyone. I'm just not going to pretend that there is no larger context.
Actual “Medical necessity” is extremely rare, but since it must be stated on paperwork a strained excuse is normal - giving an official need where none actually exists.
I wouldn't say censorship, but yes, the Overton window is powerful. Currently, it heavily favors individual liberty at the expense of survival of the society or quality of life for future people.
I remember a (googleable) exchange of letters between the former owner and an ex-slave. The former was genuinely hurt by slave's betrayal and urged them to go back.
There were people for whom owning other people was so normalized that they were actually angry at their former slaves. I wonder if any of our current practices will be viewed as barbaric. Or maybe we'll go back and the future generations will laugh at our idealistic concept of "human rights", while sipping drinks served by their slaves.