Horrifying Ethical Truths

Philosophical possibilities that haunt me

Philosophy papers don’t usually make a big impact on the public consciousness, but there are exceptions. One of the most famous is Evan Williams’ The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe, which argues that there’s a serious risk that modern society is complicit in profound evil. He gives two main arguments for this.

The first is a disjunctive argument: there are many different ways to be engaged in serious moral catastrophe and only one way not to. Because there are so many different possible atrocities, the odds we’d deftly avoid them all are relatively low.

The second argument is inductive: historically, almost all societies have permitted actions that now strike us as profoundly immoral. Most societies have violated at least one of the following obvious-seeming maxims:

• Don’t own slaves.

• Especially not sex slaves.

• Women should have the same rights as men.

• Don’t do human sacrifice.

• Especially not to get nicer weather. This will not work!

• You shouldn’t take over an enemy village and then kill everyone in it.

• Children shouldn’t be savagely beaten.

• Especially not with things that have spikes.

• Don’t do genocide, conquering, crusading, or anything else that involves killing large numbers of people for trivial reasons.

• Don’t burn people you suspect to be witches.

Now, it would be awfully suspicious if our society was the first in history to solve ethics and not be involved in any major wrongdoing. The mere fact that we don’t think we’re doing anything that bad doesn’t tell us much about whether we are—societies never recognize their own moral error. We should think it’s pretty likely, therefore, that as a society we do some stupendously evil things, on the level of slavery or genocide.

As it happens, I think this is correct. The clearest case of such an atrocity is factory farming, where billions of animals are kept in brutal, horrendous conditions, given short lives of intense suffering. Every year, more animals are tortured for their entire lives and killed than humans have existed in all of history. All human suffering in the history of the world pales in comparison to the tortures we routinely dole out on helpless animals.

Factory farming strikes me as similar to the other atrocities in that it’s hard to fathom how people don’t grasp its wrongness. Just as it seems super obvious that you shouldn’t beat children with spiked bats for mild infractions, it seems obvious you shouldn’t torture animals so that you can eat them later.

But there’s a category of even more dramatic moral failing. We shouldn’t expect every moral truth to be obvious. Some are likely to be subtle, only grasped by a few very clever people. Some horrifying conclusions might be ones we’ve never thought of.

It would be surprising if all the truths about ethics were obvious in hindsight. Certainly this isn’t true in most other areas. Much about quantum physics is so counterintuitive that it’s hard to even get one’s head around it! We should expect ethics to be the same—likely much of it is so strange and hideous that it would never occur to the average person even after 100 years of careful reflection.

Richard Y Chappell

has recently written about creepy philosophy—ethical truths that are highly disturbing if true, but that we can’t confidently rule out. I won’t spoil the example Richard gives, but it doesn’t strike me as super disturbing. The horror of factory farming, insect welfare being the most important thing in the world—these are disturbing and likely true.

But there are some possibilities that are even more disturbing. There are a number of ethical results that are probably false, but still reasonably plausible. Many of these have wild and terrifying ethical implications—totally inverting otherwise obvious-seeming judgments. So without further ado, here are some of the extremely disturbing ethical judgments that strike me as reasonably plausible. Be warned, finding these plausible often causes me non-trivial distress and many of them have consequences that are deeply offensive—read at your own peril.