What Will Future Generations Condemn us For?
posted by Frank Pasquale
In the Washington Post, Anthony Appiah takes up this topic. He mentions the US prison system, the treatment of animals in things like CAFOs, and isolation of the elderly. The article reminded me of a recent podcast with William Gibson, where the renowned futurist would predict only that future generations would “regard us with contempt” for all the opportunities we missed.
Projecting future mores is a difficult task. Consider this prophecy from 1918, authored by sociologist Herbert Stewart:
It may turn out that the life of idiotic ostentation makes humanity quite as despicable as the life of a drunkard, and that the image of God is less defaced in a saloon of the Bowery than in those jeweled birthday parties for dogs with which the New York Four Hundred disgust all civilized mankind. That much of this is, in the face of the world’s needs, an enormity for which all defense is mere shamelessness no conscientious person will deny. . . . Take the advertisement of a present-day ‘millionaire’s hotel,’ with the assurance it gives of ‘the very last word in sumptuousness.’ Is this not one of the features of our time upon which we all trust that a wiser age will look back, not only with condemnation, but with a sense of nausea?
We’re still waiting for that wiser age to arrive.
September 27, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Humanities, Law and Inequality, Uncategorized
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Responses (3)
Brett Bellmore - September 28, 2010 at 6:46 am
Well, assuming medical progress continues, eventually they’ll condemn us for failing to resort to cryonics when people ‘die’, because billions will have really died, unnecessarily.
On a more political front, possibly the crudest injustice of our ‘justice’ system is the fact that we don’t lift a finger to make acquitted defendants whole again. They frequently walk out of the courtroom free, and financially ruined for life. It’s as though we’ve entrusted prosecutors with the power to levy massive fines on anybody they feel like. Why shouldn’t they view this the way we view bills of attainder?
Technologically? They’ll hate our guts for throwing away a precious resource that accumulated over eons: Helium. We used to save it away as a strategic resource, but some years ago our government made a deliberate, inexplicable decision to dump it, and the Earth’s supply of Helium in easily extracted forms will be gone in possibly as little as another decade, to fill children’s balloons. While they must laborously extract a few parts per million from the atmosphere, or sift the solar wind, to fill their needs.
Rick Garnett - September 28, 2010 at 3:59 pm
I think there’s a slight mismatch between some of the things that Appiah says later generations will find abhorrent (the way we marginalize the elderly, and our prison system, for example) and the criteria he offers for identifying the things that later generations will find abhorrent. Both of these two examples, it seems to me, are related more to “modern” innovations and thinking than to long-held, unreflective traditionalism.
It was, for me, sad to note that industrial farming, and the cruelty-to-animals (that I agree) it involves, seemed to Appiah (and, I suspect, to most of us) more likely to result in downstream moral condemnation than, say, the fact that we identify and abort nearly all unborn children who have Down’s Syndrome.
Shaun G - September 28, 2010 at 5:15 pm
I think the three indicators Appiah arrives upon based on those historical examples are all pretty decent — but after reviewing his four predictions of practices that will be condemned in the future, I think a fourth indicator is needed, which may exclude some of his predictions.
The fourth indicator, I suggest, is that the mere cessation of the practice solves the moral problem.
Stop enslaving people? The moral problem of slavery is solved.
Allow women to vote? The moral problem of disenfranchisement is solved.
Stop beating your wife? The moral problem of wife-beating is solved.
But in the case of at least two of the practices Appiah mentions — our prison system and our environmental policies — there is not really any switch to flip.
You can say that we don’t treat our prisoners as well as we should, or that our environmental policies aren’t as stringent as they ought to be, but those are both moral issues that seem more suited to incremental improvements rather than any sort of sudden act of abolishment.
Now, if Appiah had been more specific and said something like “sustained solitary confinement” instead of “our prison system,” then I think he might meet that fourth criteria. But merely saying “our prison system” is too vague.
He’s more on the mark with the practice of industrial meat production. That’s something that could be abolished, and the mere cessation of the practice would solve the moral problem.
Regarding the institutionalization of the elderly, I suppose it could be argued either way — that it’s possible to “switch off” the practice entirely, or that it’s more likely a candidate for incremental improvements.
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