Slavery is so obviously wrong. So is beating your wife and kids. So is lynching ethnics. So is torturing dissidents. These things happen nowadays, but not by us. We’re better than that.
But ask yourself
This book, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, examines our notions of honor and changes in morality.
What are we all doing today that will be looked upon with disdain by our descendants? Kwame Appiah dares us to ask this very question in a recent Washington Post article.
We might see ourselves at the top of a moral pyramid, but history begs to differ. In asking this question, Appiah provides three clues that a practice we take for granted is headed for the historical dustbin:
First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)
And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks. (Appiah, emphasis mine)
Prime contenders
These clues in hand, Appiah identifies four possible traditions that may be condemned by the generations that follow us.
- The prison system
A large proportion of the populace is incarcerated and suffering persistent, violent sodomy. - Industrial meat production
Animals suffer in a claustrophobic, shit-covered existence before being cruelly put down. - The isolated, institutionalized elderly
Shoving old folks into homes so we don’t have to deal with them seems pretty cold. - The environment
Even under a not-so-worst case scenario, our grandchildren are likely to be awful angry with us.
But what else? Questions like these stretch the mind into uncomfortable corners. But, what the hell, I’ll give it a go.
Driving around in cars
At least 30,000 Americans die yearly in automobile accidents. 
What’s more it’s common and accepted – the price of freedom, apparently. But advances in sensors and robotics could make the idea of a human-driven automobile seem positively quaint. The underlying technology is maturing surprisingly fast. 
Our grandchildren might be amazed that we were perfectly content to allow tens of thousands of our countrymen die because we were busy talking on cell phones, applying lip gloss, or just plain drunk. Taking direct control of our automobiles would still happen, but it would be the exception (alongside much higher insurance premiums), not the rule.
Excesses of Capitalism
What if we determine that a cheap $1.50 box of binder-clips comes at too high a cost? What if we developed feelings about the role of impoverished third-world factory workers? Our economic calculus could change.
We may talk a lot about freedom and self determination, but psychological and sociological studies continue to identify that we are not equal in access to opportunities. 
And while we’re not powerless, we are herded toward ends that are not our intention.
It turns out that the poor aren’t like that because they don’t work hard enough. Chance plays as much of a role as genetics in shaping our future. And like our inherited genetic traits, we can’t actually do a damned thing about it.
It’s somewhat controversial to say right now, but future Americans may not accept the primacy of our (often crony) capitalism as a given. It may be the best of a bunch of bad options, but that’s only because we can’t see the future.
Conventional meat eating
Expanding upon another of Appiah’s earlier points, there are reasons to question industrial meat production’s future. We might grow our meat instead. 
Three cultural/technical forces could converge:
- The environmental requirements of sustaining large numbers of pasture animals is extreme.
- The animal rights movement, while not exactly mainstream, isn’t an outsider concern anymore.
- The development of biotechnology could make meat without animals a reality.
Vat grown meats would assuage the concerns of animal rights folks and reduce the environmental impact considerably. Assuming the technology steadily matures, wide-scale adoption would have to overcome the ewww factor. And while we might find the idea of consuming the stuff to be unnatural, successive generations would accept the tech more readily.
What else?
These are shots in the dark, of course. Nobody can predict the future, but it’s naive to assume that our inherited notions of what’s right are going to freeze in place. Many of us take pride in the notion that we’re improving ourselves, even if it’s based in delusion.
But, however clumsy, misguided, and stupid we might appear, we’ll try to correct our course. So much of contemporary political discourse is predicated on What Is Truly American, but each generation refashions that conception for themselves. There is no quantifiable, unchanging American ethos. We’re making it up as we go.
Footnotes
: Source – Early Estimate of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities in 2009 (NTSA, 2010)
: DARPA’s Urban Challenge continues to drive competition in this area. It could be here faster than we think.
: Citations? Please. This is a central point of debate – if by debate you mean loud arguments where advocates and opponents shout past each other. I think that potential remedies will come from people well outside our own narrow partisan perspectives. We’ll be dead by then.
: You can learn the basics about in vitro meat at Wikipedia.
It may seem alien, but there are lots of reasons to wonder if we’ll grow our meat. First,
I’d suggest gay rights.
1. People definitely have heard arguments in favour of gay rights.
2. The recent court case in California demonstrates pretty convincingly that the case against same-sex marriage isn’t based at all in fact, with applications for gay rights in general.
3. Opponents of gay rights have been able to make whatever successes they have because, until quite recently, most people didn’t know out gays. Now that they do, and know them to be decent people, the idea of supporting sanctions against them seems foolish. The sufferings of gay people are becoming increasingly prominent, as evidenced by the media coverage of several gay teen suicides and the whole “It Gets Better” movement on YouTube.
Thanks for contributing. I’m embarrassed that I omitted that from my list, since it’s the most obvious one. Wide scale acceptance of homosexual citizens is the one that will happen the fastest, too (among the three I noted). The demographic trends certainly support the notion. I’m already pre-embarrassed for my time-period.
The more I think about it, the surer I am that Appiah’s second criterion doesn’t stand up. There _were_ moral arguments made in favor of most, if not all, of the past evils he cites:
Slavery — “The blacks are an inferior race who are doomed to savagery if left to their own devices; we are protecting them, bringing them the blessings of Christianity, and at the same time making them productive members of society.”
Lynching — “If we didn’t do this, the nigras would rape all the white wimmin.”
Child-beating — “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
Male-only suffrage — “Women are of a delicate nature not suitable to the rough and tumble of politics, which will only degrade them.”
Although I can’t be bothered to look it up right now, I’m certain that similar arguments were made in favor of wife-beating, centering on the hysterical and childlike nature of women combined with the father’s duty as head of the family to maintain discipline. Whatever we may think of these arguments today, they were couched in terms of advancing a perceived good or preventing a perceived evil, which makes them moral in nature.
The same is true of the modern examples cited by Appiah and, to a certain extent, by yourself. Prisons: “they are necessary to deter crime and incapacitate offenders.” Industrial meat production: “this way, we produce meat most efficiently and cheaply, and make it affordable and available to millions who might otherwise starve.” Nursing homes: “through economies of scale, we can give skilled care to the elderly at low cost, prolong their lives, and place them in an environment where they are surrounded by their peers.” Environmental damage: “some damage in the short term is necessary to ensure growth and lift the Third World out of poverty, and this very growth will ultimately provide the technologies and resources to restore the planet over the long term.” Capitalism: “if not for $5 T-shirts, more poor families might have to choose between food and clothing.”
(Your autopilot-car and vat-grown-meat examples depend on the existence of a technology not available now; their absence in the here and now may make us _poor_ from the perspective of the future, but I don’t think it would make us _evil_).
The moral arguments for the nineteenth-century examples are, of course, based on premises now universally believed to be false (at least in the West), i.e., the myth of Africans as inferior and rape-crazed, or that of women as inherently corrupt and in need of male discipline. I suspect that the arguments against homosexuality will soon be recognized as based on similarly false premises.
The validity of the moral arguments for the modern examples is more debatable. It’s clear, for instance, that Appiah doesn’t recognize economy-of-scale arguments, whereas I would posit that in an urbanized world of nearly seven billion people, _ignoring_ economies of scale is immoral. Some of the modern arguments — particularly the environmental one, which is contingent on hypothetical future developments — may someday be as discredited as the arguments for slavery are today. But I don’t know if we can reliably predict which ones.
And this is even before we get into the issue of what a “moral argument” is. For instance, Appiah differentiates moral arguments from those based on tradition, but could it be argued that cultural diversity is itself a positive good and that some amount of cultural preservation is moral? And what about religious arguments — if one subscribes to a religious moral code and considers divine commandment to be the source of good, then is “God says so” a moral argument?
It seems that what Appiah’s thesis comes down to is that there are no moral arguments in favor of prisons, nursing homes, etc. _that he recognizes as valid_. This viewpoint is arrogant, and it also puts him in no different a position from the early twentieth-century crusaders against alcohol or racy novels: they also did not recognize as valid any countervailing moral arguments. I don’t think that the presence or absence of moral arguments is a useful way to distinguish the modern equivalents of the anti-slavery movement from the equivalents of prohibitionism.
I might propose, as a possible substitute criterion, that practice X is likely to be deemed evil in the future if (a) the other two criteria are met, and (b) any moral arguments advanced in its favor are based on myth. But this too is problematic, because it can be hard to separate myth from fact. In the nineteenth century, the racial inferiority of Africans was accepted as scientific fact; who knows what cherished facts of the modern day may someday be exposed as mythical. Alternatively, with respect to another possible future evil — nationalism — does the fact that nations are a construct make them mythical? Something created can still be real, and its self-determination may be a genuine moral good. Or, for that matter, is the existence of certain myths necessary for collective action and solidarity, rendering their propagation potentially moral? I’m afraid we may have to leave it to future generations to decide.
Hi, Warren! I got here via Randy. Appiah’s idea is fascinating, but I think you’re slightly off-base with two of your suggestions.
Consider automobiles. People used to ride stagecoachs, at great danger to themselves. They travelled on sailing ships, with no climate control, and little knowledge of nutrition. They used pack animals to pull heavy loads over unpaved roads. Do we look at any of this with “disdain”? Not at all! We look at it as the unfortunate hardship of the past; if there’s any emotion involved, it’s a vague sense of admiration that people could live with such risks.
If self-controlled automobiles become illegal, it’s hard to imagine anyone thinking that there was anything immoral about it, anymore than you think it was immoral to ride horses or clipper ships. Our children may be amazed that we loved our cars, but the emotion will be very different from one Appiah’s getting at. They won’t look at it the way we look at slavery.
In a different way, I also think you’re a little off-base about the “excesses of capitalism.” After all, what is capitalism? Private property and market exchange? It’s hard to imagine either of those going away as long as humans are still recognizably human. If there is an alternative to , it doesn’t meet Appiah’s criteria, simply because we can’t see it. You can’t have a reasonable “argument against a practice” without an alternative, and the actually-know alternative of giving full central planning another run seems a bit unpalatable.
The current institutional set-up of the United States of America? Well, there I agree with you, but that seems mighty parochial. “America’s top marginal tax rate was too low back in 2010″ or “I can’t believe that they allowed so many financial institutions to borrow short and lend long!” is really not on a par with “I can’t believe that they thought it was okay to own people.” Moreover, there is a lot of evidence in American politics that the practices of the 1870s sit fine with enough people to make a moral revolution pretty damn difficult. If there’re still much more than a fringe after 140 years, what will it take? I suspect that even in the social democratic future, you’ll get a lot of Americans in 2150 arguing that now, finally, the time is ripe for libertarianism.
But meat, that makes sense. Although it kinda makes me unhappy.
Randy: if I may, the significance of the “It Gets Better” movement is precisely that it’s main locus is not on Youtube. Enough with the internet triumphalism, young man!
That said … the fact the Ross Douthat needed to jump through ridiculous hoops to justify his marriage stance is a sign that the debate is over, and we’re just waiting for society catch up. Lots of people (myself included) will continue to support public policy that heavily discriminates in favor of couples with children over other couples, but note the modifiers (one beginning with “h”; the other a compound phrase beginning with “n”) that are not in that sentence.
So much great feedback; let me address a few things.
Regarding much of this, let me note that yes, new technology makes possible options that simply couldn’t have existed earlier. Whether or not it’s fair, I’m inclined to think that contemporaries may still slap an ‘evil’ label on something like that without appreciating our limited options.
I do agree that rather than thinking that, say, human driven automobiles will be something that is deemed evil, later generations will just roll their eyes about it. As Noel notes, we do that when thinking about cattle-drawn wagons. While it’s possible over-reach on my part, consider another possible future look-back:
A ton of people are cruising around the roads, yes, but it’s that we’re ignorant of the enormous power we wield. What I mean is that a future-us may look at our treatment of the technology to have been like fooling around with a loaded gun.
And my thoughts on the “excesses of capitalism” are necessarily vague. This is because there are simply so many practices that may or may not get the evil eye. I am, by no means, anti-capitalist and (quite) agree with Mr. Edelstein that ignoring economies of scale would be a moral evil.
That said, I can’t help but think that the cliche of ‘armies of children’ making T-shirts won’t make it into the lexicon of Very Bad Things that people did in the olden days.
This is notwithstanding the very reasonable arguments made by free market advocates which amount to only counting the bad stuff and none of the good that results (ie – lifted out of dirt-poor poverty by these ‘evil’ jobs), just that the details may not be relevant if the character of future society differs.
Wonderful contributions, gentlemen! Thanks so much for adding to the discussion and noting my errors. I have more cool comments to chew on the next time I revisit the subject. And thanks, Randy, for pointing people toward my odd musings.