The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe
Maybe the best paper ever
I mostly believe in the possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe because I believe in the actuality of an ongoing moral catastrophe (e.g. I think the giant animal torture facilities that produce nearly all of our meat qualify). But Evan Williams has a great paper called The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe that argues that everyone should think it pretty likely that their society is engaged in horrendous evil. It’s easy to look back at those benighted fools who owned slaves. But probably we are doing something comparable.
Why think this?
Williams gives two main arguments for it: a disjunctive argument and an inductive argument. The inductive argument: almost every society in human history has engaged in uncontroversial acts of horrendous evil. Most owned slaves. Brutal conquest was routine. Women and children were repressed and subjugated. Even the U.S. just a few decades ago tolerated naked displays of racism, prohibiting black children from using the same drinking fountains as white children.
These people have mostly been unaware that what they were doing was wrong. Antebellum slave-owners and conquering Vikings saw no moral problem with their behavior. Are we uniquely civilized? As the Romans owned slaves and conquered foreign lands, they too thought they were uniquely civilized and moral. So did the ancient Greeks as they left infants to freeze to death and the British imperialists as they starved millions in India. Williams puts the core point very well:
I think it is probable that we have serious blind spots. After all, just about every other society in history has had them. Show me one society, other than our own, that did not engage in systematic and oppressive discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, parentage, or other irrelevancy, that did not launch unnecessary wars or generally treat foreigners as a resource to be mercilessly exploited, and that did not sanction the torturing of criminals, witnesses, and/or POWs as a matter of course. I doubt that there is even one; certainly there are not many.
Or, in one sentence: almost every society in history has done stuff that is uncontroversially evil—probably we are doing great evil too.
The mere fact that it doesn’t look to us like we’re doing great evil doesn’t tell us much. Societies rarely see the horrors they carry out, and eliminating them is typically outside the Overton window. In the first several thousand years of civilization, we don’t have a single record of anyone proposing the abolition of slavery. Moral catastrophes are like breath: you never smell your own.
The second argument is disjunctive. There are lots of conceivable ways one might do enormous evil. Thus, the odds that we’d manage to avoid doing evil in any of those ways are fairly low. If there were just one potential atrocity, it wouldn’t be too hard to avoid it. But when there are many different ones, even if there’s a 90% chance of avoiding any particular one, the odds we’d avoid them all are low.
All sorts of errors could lead to a catastrophe. If we’re wrong about which beings matter, then probably we’ll neglect the interests of many morally important entities. If we’re wrong about which actions cause harm, this too could lead to catastrophe. Specific examples of possible moral catastrophes include:
Factory farming.
Wild animal suffering.
Neglect for foreigners.
Neglect for future generations.
Abortion.
Mass incarceration.
Declining birth rates.
Natural mass fetus death.
Animal slaughter.
Secularism leading to many people going to hell.
Destruction of nature.
Child-bearing.
Some of these I believe are genuine atrocities, others I don’t. But given that there are so many—and this list is non-exhaustive—the odds we’d get everything right, even though we generally don’t do much moral reflection before taking hugely consequential actions, are low. The world did not reflect before building the first factory farm. If the world doesn’t do much moral reflection before taking significant and irreversible actions, then what are the odds we’d be right about everything morally?
What are the takeaways from this?
A first one is that the world should be awake to this very serious moral possibility. If we might be, as a society, doing evil on the order of owning slaves, that merits extremely careful reflection. In a slave-owning society, ending slavery would be much more important than whichever random political issues dominate the newspapers. Ending our society’s atrocities is similarly a much bigger deal than the comparatively unimportant issues that we tend to discuss.
This is a reason for students to take philosophy classes in school. It’s a reason for society to broadly reflect on the atrocities we might be committing. If you can’t point to a specific atrocity that we’re committing—likely one outside the political Overton window—probably that isn’t because we’re not committing any. It’s instead because you can’t see the ones we are committing.
It’s also a reason to take seriously precautionary principle reasoning. My best guess is that abortion isn’t murder. But if there were some way to majorly reduce the number of abortions at low cost, I’d strongly support that. Even a 5% chance that society is butchering millions of babies is cause for alarm.
I wish meat-eaters would treat the issue of factory farming with the same kind of seriousness, rather than the all-too-common blasé attitude of mockery and scorn. If your response to someone suggesting that eating meat is morally horrendous is to say “haha, I’m going to eat twice as much meat to offset your impact,” then that is an extreme failure to take morality seriously. One who behaves in such a way has revealed themself not to be a serious person.
There is a common throughline in past atrocities. Most of them have come from a moral circle that is too limited. Slavery and conquest were only tolerated because the victims’ interests were neglected. Reflection on our past errors should lead us to expand our moral circle and include the interests of every being who has interests. If other societies did evil because they discounted the interests of morally important sentient beings, we should think we probably are as well.
Lastly—and this one could turn out to be the most important one long-term—we should take the time to carefully reflect before taking hugely consequential actions. In a better world, there would have been careful reflection before building the first factory farm. We may be in the process of creating ungodly numbers of morally significant digital minds—with interests. We shouldn’t do this blind and let the fate of trillions be subject to the whims of profit-maximizing AI companies.
Similarly, before we allow a small number of powerful people to dictate how space resources are used, we ought to have a lengthy period of moral reflection. If we’re dictating the fate of the universe—making decisions that could reverberate for billions of years—we had better take the time to reflect carefully before proceeding. Otherwise, most value could be lost.
It’s easy to remark on the moral errors of past societies. But if we take seriously Williams’ arguments, then we must face up to the fact that we might be just as bad. Taking that seriously—taking seriously that we may be like slavers, genocidaires, and conquerors—ought to change how we see the world and make us less likely to carry out acts of unspeakable evil. The first step in dealing with a problem, after all, is recognizing its existence. In this case, the problem we face might eliminate most of what is good about the entire future, and it is time the world woke up.
Animal welfare is the most obvious willfull blindsight. There's enough factory farming videos out there, and farmed mammals have enough shared behaviors with humans that nobody can deny the suffering.
The most honest stance is for people to say, "I don't care." Few do.
Provocative as usual, thanks. Important not to lose sight of the parallel possibility that things are massively better for a lot of people, which is a moral good. I've seen huge improvements in many Southeast Asian countries over the decades. This can be quantified by life expectancy, rise in income, etc. I've mentioned before that I don't buy the wild-animal bit, except that we ought to preserve as much of the environment as close to its natural state for the maximal thriving of animals who can then duke it out on their own bloody terms. But totally agree about factory farming, and I'm completely rethinking my shrimp consumption, and some other issues you raise. One huge issue in the US is the sequestering of capital away from the public good, as if the market had "rights," as if punishingly low wages in the service sector were justified by market efficiency alone. The struggle of the poor in the world's wealthiest nation is a huge moral failing.