The Forgotten Trillions

A note on profound societal apathy

Introduction

Peter Singer, in his book the Expanding Moral Circle, argues persuasively that, throughout history, our moral circle — the set of entities that we care about — has expanded. Singer argues that this is the cause of much moral progress. Over time we’ve come to realize that people in other tribes, countries, women, gay people, black people, and many other groups matter morally. This contributed to decreased oppression.

There’s a reason that in modern societies it’s taboo to be openly racist or sexist. Society does not tolerate those — for it realizes that gay people matter, as do black people and women. Yet our moral circle is not done expanding — there are more who are outside of our circle of moral concern.

There are many on whom the light of our moral concern does not shine, many who live in darkness. Many who waste away, tormented, stricken by disease, and miserable — all because of deliberate choices that we make.

The march of moral progress is a slow one. It took thousands of years for the world to agree that slavery was a crime against humanity. Yet the moral progress has come too slow for many, many more, many victims of current atrocities. An expansion of our humanity cannot come to soon for these victims, for these forgotten trillions.

Most valuable beings are not widely valued. Most people lack compassion for most of those who waste away.

We are like Omelas. But instead of one child wasting in the basement, it is trillions that waste away in the basements. And unlike in Omelas, none walk away — few even consider the trillions wasting away to be a tragedy. They whose screams are not heard in public are ignored.

Some of the forgotten trillion scream, yet they shriek behind closed doors, where they cannot be heard. Others do not scream at all. Some cannot scream, and some choose not to. Some have no mouths to scream with. And yet some scream with alien tongues, such that their screams are not recognized.

Many of the forgotten trillions are cared about slightly — though far less than those nearer to the center of our moral circle. These are not entirely forgotten but are mostly ignored in most decisions. Some are considered to matter only under certain circumstances. And some aren’t considered to matter at all.

Foreigners

I was recently having a conversation about immigration with a conservative. When I pointed out that remittances make up 27% of the GDP of developing countries, he thought that this was a reason to prohibit immigration. After all, if money is being sent overseas, it’s not being spent on Americans.

Put aside the obvious illogic of this — American dollars have a habit of making their way back to America. As any good economist will tell you, changing the flow of money, in ways that don’t destroy goods, will not, in general, cause economic devastation. This person — whose views are, by no means, non-standard — was perfectly fine with wiping out a quarter of the economy of developing nations because of erroneous fears about slight economic decline. As he said, “American policy ought to put America first.”

This is roughly the prevailing view about foreigners. I remember hearing Buttigieg, at one point, argue that the reason to oppose foreign wars is purely because it’s bad for America — that our foreign policy should be entirely about making the US better off. People seem to think that there’s a magic line, just around the Canadian and Texan borders, that causes one’s moral worth to magically switch off. The only reason not to bomb foreign children, on this mainstream account, is because it may not be in the interests of the United States. One must be a bleeding-heart lunatic to think that the reason not to firebomb kids has more to do with the firebombing of kids than it does with the marginal backlash.

There’s a reason that the United States casually carries out 9/11-esque atrocities at the drop of a hat — sometimes to distract from sex scandals. The US would never commit an Al-Sheifa-esque strike on domestic soil, but on foreign soil, murderous bombing regimes are tolerated wholeheartedly. Presidents who kill tens of thousands of innocents face no backlash for it.

Just consider the immigration debate. Immigration debates mainly focus on the impact of immigration restrictions on the US. The immigrants’ interests are almost entirely ignored. Virtually no-one challenges the psychopathic dogma that a slight decline of wages of US citizens is bad enough to outweigh a 20 fold increase in the wages of immigrants — as well as a dramatic boosting of the quality of life of both them and their kids.

Foreign aid soaks up less than 1% of the federal budget — the richest country in world history can’t be bothered to improve the lives of people living on a dollar a day. So immense is our neglect for foreigners, that the low-hanging fruit has not been picked — one can still save lives for a few thousand dollars. And yet despite this — despite the average person’s ability to save hundreds of lives, very few give money to these effective charities. Those who lay outside our country did not also lie outside our moral circles, we’d save their lives, for minimal personal costs.

I remember at one point hearing a leaked political statement from some American official who greenlighted the Rwandan genocide describing the lives of an American as being worth the lives of hundreds or thousands of lives in other countries. She was widely condemned. Yet her statements seem to be roughly the prevailing view — few are blunt enough to say it. Yet this seems to explain how we generally treat those in other countries.

Non-offending pedophiles

Pedophiles are those that are sexually attracted to children. This is outside of their control — much like gay people cannot control their attraction to the same sex, neither can pedophiles control their attraction to children.

“Pedophiles should be tortured and should not be given Human Rights,” declares this reddit thread. This is not an uncommon sentiment. I’ve heard politicians say similar things.

Yet this is barbaric. Even pedophiles who have raped a child shouldn’t be viciously tortured; they’re no worse than murderers. In fact, I’d expect in most cases they’re better — avoiding committing heinous crimes require much more significant sacrifice for pedophiles than for murderers.

Non-offending pedophiles are stigmatized, which increases risks of child sex abuse. This is unsurprising — I think we all know that most people would judge pedophiles, even if they were non-offending. To quote one study

Both studies revealed that nearly all reactions to people with pedophilia were more negative than those to the other groups, including social distance. Fourteen percent (Study 1) and 28 % (Study 2) of the participants agreed that people with pedophilia should better be dead, even if they never had committed criminal acts.

Thus, there is a large group of people subject to horrific mistreatment on the basis of attraction that is outside of their control.

It is very obvious that non-offending pedophiles shouldn’t be stigmatized. They have done nothing immoral. The fact that one finds some immoral act arousing does not make them deserving of death — a fact that between 14 and 28% of people seem not to realize. Some non-significant portion of males would find sex when there’s a power imbalance to be arousing — just as they would find sex when there’s not a power imbalance to be arousing. Sex when there’s a power imbalance is immoral. However, this does not make most males evil.

Non-offending pedophiles are perhaps the most stigmatized group. Very few people would hire one who they knew was a non-offending pedophile. And lots of people want to kill them. Yet they are ignored — those who argue against this repression are condemned for being pro-pedophile. If one has committed no crime, done no immoral act, they oughtn’t be harmed or killed. And yet society seems wholly unable to meet this minimal moral standard. As a result, non-offending pedophiles join the ranks of the forgotten trillions.

Animals

As gas begins to choke their tiny throats they gurgle

These misshapen creatures, so excluded from our moral circle

Their cries ignored, their shrieks unheard

Their face, debased, to taste the taste of bird

Their skin, beat in, their flesh stretched thin

To keep the deeply bloated organs in

Their eyes, so sad, so sharp perceptive still

The mind behind knows nothing of good will

In their mind, their tiny minds, of the world rests a version

Divorced from kindness, divorced from benevolence of any human person

On floors they lay, apart their legs are splayed

Afflicted by parasites, they slowly waste away

Crippled by themselves, their legs cannot maintain

Their weight as they collapse in endless pain

But this sad state was uncaused by hate or malice

We demanded pleasant taste on every plate and chalice

The cost, that which was lost, was not too much, most say

We only had to pay

The lives of the 78 billion that waste away

A poem.

Michael Huemer has wondered whether the average human has a moral conscience. He’s not sure, but one of the primary pieces of evidence they don’t lies in how animals are treated. Nearly every person, every day, does something horrible to animals, and they don’t care. Treatment that would shock and appall us if done to any humans. A prison system that treated child murderers the way we treat factory-farmed animals — the most vulnerable and innocent creatures — would be seen as barbaric. A tour of a factory farm brings back images of Jews being killed in gas chambers, for the conditions are so unfathomably horrific, they resemble the worst atrocities in human history.

Many people know this. Most do nothing about this information. Most people are totally fine with being complicit in inflicting pain and misery on a hitherto unforeseen scale. It’s much easier to see how so many people supported the nazis when one considers the way we treat animals now, and how little most people care.

Whether our treatment of animals is wrong is not a difficult issue, unlike nearly every other philosophical problem. There’s a reason none of the people who replied to Huemer were willing to defend factory farming — the way nearly everyone gets their meat. Factory farming is indefensible.

I’ve previously documented the horrors of the modern meat industry. The meat industry very plausibly causes more suffering than any other industry in the history of the world. When a person eats a hamburger, for example, they are inflicting vast amounts of suffering for trivial gain. Anyone with a conscience realizes that it’s wrong to inflict vast amounts of suffering for trivial personal gain. That’s why, for example, it would be wrong to beat up a baby, even if one slightly enjoyed it.

Most recognize that it’s wrong to be cruel to animals. It’s wrong, for example, to beat a dog. Despite this, most perpetrate far greater harm to animals than even the most vicious of dog-kickers.

The systematic exclusion of animals on factory farms from our moral circle is wholly unjustified. People that try to justify it inevitably say absurd things and justify the worst horrors. For example, people will often say that it’s okay to senselessly slaughter animals because they’re unintelligent. However, this also justifies senselessly slaughtering babies and mentally disabled people. People have lots of other idiotic justifications