moral blind spots

[Mirannan]

FOOD WASTAGE

I hesitated to cite this one. Is this really a moral blind spot now? I suppose a fair number of people are already vaguely aware that a great deal of food is thrown away in certain parts of the world such as the US -- e.g. past-the-date produce, uneaten food from large restaurant portions, etc. But perhaps this is something that, for most people, is still a blind spot. It isn't hard to imagine a hungry future in which people would look back at our time and condemn it.

EARTHQUAKE VULNERABILITY

This is another one I thought about, didn't write, then decided to go ahead and mention. Again, many people are aware of the apparently likelihood of a catastrophic earthquake(s) along the West Coast of the US, etc. If this occurs, then people will denounce the foolishness (moral blindness, even) of having built and lived there. Conversely, if, a century from now, no serious earthquakes have occurred since Big One(s) became a topic, the foolishness of "hysterical" people who predicted terrible things might be denounced. The common element is that people foolishly like to point out the foolishness of previous generations.

Earthquake vulnerability is an interesting one. Of course, obviously prone areas tend to have that fact taken account of in their building codes, and most people living there are aware of the problem. However, there are some areas where this is not the case. The area around New Madrid in the centre of the continent is a good example of this.

I can think of another moral blind spot. There is at least one source of disaster ranging all the way from losing a city to an extinction-level event, for which it can be said that at least getting advance warning would be cheap - at least on the scale usually addressed by governments. I speak of near-Earth asteroids. Currently, the best estimate is that we don't even know about the existence of better than 90% of these. And we aren't even looking for them!

 

[Brian G Turner]

There is a prohibition on this site about talking about abortion (among a few other things) because they have often led to flame wars. I've corresponded with Brian (site owner) about this hoping to get it allowed, but it was not an option then, and I suspect now. So I suggest that any further discussion be done via PM's or somewhere else.

Indeed, that topic has never been allowed here, so I've had to remove a post above and edit another to remove the topic.

 

[Extollager]

No complaints, Brian.

 

[Extollager]

Earthquake vulnerability is an interesting one. Of course, obviously prone areas tend to have that fact taken account of in their building codes, and most people living there are aware of the problem.

I should have been more precise. For places I used to live in -- Coos bay and Seaside, Oregon -- the most alarming thing about earthquake danger is not tremors that would shake buildings into rubble so much as damage to bridges and roads, and flooding from tsunamis.

There's been a whole lot of building in those places since I lived there, meaning that, whatever happened to the buildings, a lot of people would be affected by impassable roads, bridges dropping, and waves rushing in. If such things happen, likely moral culpability will be attributed to city planning commissions, developers, etc. I remember Coos Bay especially with a lot of affection, but I don't think I'd want to live there now, which is convenient, since I couldn't afford to.

 

[Extollager]

FALLING SPERM COUNTS

If the trend continues, it could be that, in future, today's focus on innumerable other things, perceived as crises, will be regarded as having been morally obtuse.

----a widely cited study published in 2017 by researchers from the Hebrew University and Mount Sinai’s medical school found that among nearly 43,000 men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, sperm counts per milliliter of semen had declined more than 50 percent from 1973 to 2011.-----

Study: Men's Sperm Counts Continue to Decline - The Atlantic

 

[Extollager]

STEEL AND GLASS ARCHITECTURE

They keep building them, don't they? -- those enormous buildings with faces of steel and glass and that are horrendously expensive to heat in winter or cool in summer.

UGLY BUILDINGS IN GENERAL

They keep building these, too. Look at any campus, for example.

May 2018 - Kunstler

OPEN PLAN OFFICES

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...s-are-bad-you-thought/?utm_term=.d87a73414fdb

HORRID PUBLIC ART

The 10 Most Hated Public Sculptures - artnet News

The thing that looks like a bunch of intestines has to be seen to be believed.

Brian's charge wasn't to find contemporary things we dislike, but to suggest things of the present that future folk might find immoral. In the case of art, our descendants may be wondering what moral defects had us in thrall, that we had people in charge of art and architecture who designed such hideous, profligate eyesores, year after year, that people had to live with. Can't anyone see that such things are not conducive to human flourishing?

Not that I am recommending that people resort of violence in protest against modern architecture, though Roger Scruton has contended that some of the rage coming out of the Arab world relates to the defiling of the skyline by brutal Western architecture:

How Western Urban Planning Fueled War in the Middle East

 

[RJM Corbet]

LOSS OF THE NIGHT SKY

Here too, people here and there perceive something that's at least a borderline moral issue, the encroachment of light pollution such that most people and animals have a seriously compromised view of the stars and planets. My guess is that many people are still inclined to think the photos from space of the earth all lit up are lovely. Others look and think how horrible, to be living at the bottom of a wide, deep well of artificial light. People in the future may look at our time with pity and horror (if they have found good solutions to light pollution).

View attachment 48728

That's a good one. Keep going, lol ...

EDIT: Oh sorry, the several posts since that one have just landed on my page. There must have been an Internet glitch. I'll keep reading

...some of the rage coming out of the Arab world relates to the defiling of the skyline by brutal Western architecture:

How Western Urban Planning Fueled War in the Middle East

Oh, wow!

 

[RJM Corbet]

Religion in the home will be 'child abuse' and children will be removed to state care homes?

 

[CTRandall]

The use of AI to perform tediously mundane tasks, such as focusing the camera on your phone and managing the exposure levels. Our future robot overlords might consider this a particularly sadistic form of slavery.

 

[Extollager]

UNDIGNIFIED

I could see a not-far-in-the-future scenario in which people will be amazed by the way people in our time would go on television shows & so on and talk about their private lives. Compared to most historical periods & most cultures, we are amazingly shameless about such things: talking about suffering from debilitating illnesses, sexual activities, our anxieties, etc. so publicly (or in various classrooms & so on). We would be thought of as lacking in self-respect and a sense of the dignity proper for a human being. Our buying of faded jeans sold expensively with tears may astonish them.

 

[Mirannan]

Okay, I'll say this again:

If you want to use wasteland to grow cattle, you have to transport the cattle to where the people are. People mainly congregate where high quality vegetation grows. So how are cows - that spew methane AND require fossil fuel transport to market better than vegetables that require either one or none of those two things?

Well, it's not necessarily inevitable that transporting livestock requires fossil fuel. Electric trucks (or even driving the livestock on its own feet!) and electrically powered trains solve that problem. As long as the electricity is created using carbon-neutral methods, of course.

 

[MWagner]

UNDIGNIFIED
I could see a not-far-in-the-future scenario in which people will be amazed by the way people in our time would go on television shows & so on and talk about their private lives. Compared to most historical periods & most cultures, we are amazingly shameless about such things: talking about suffering from debilitating illnesses, sexual activities, our anxieties, etc. so publicly (or in various classrooms & so on). We would be thought of as lacking in self-respect and a sense of the dignity proper for a human being. Our buying of faded jeans sold expensively with tears may astonish them.

That sort of narcissistic behaviour seems an inevitable consequence of modernity. Our sense of self is no longer rooted in the generational continuity of community and family, so many seek validation in the wider world of celebrity - even if 'celebrity' in the era of social media means your 282 friends on Facebook.

However, I'm not sure how a return to dignity culture could be be brought about. Technology continues to make performative acts easier and more superficially satisfying. And unless we return to much more authoritarian social systems, there will always be people who defy norms for the cachet of being a rebel. The norms and the form of rebellion will keep changing, but if many people in 2050 believe X is proper and upright, others will conspicuously defy X, regardless of what X is.

As with any trend fostered by technology + individual freedom, any counter to them will have to be explained by the reining in of one or both.

Ultimately, I suspect we're in the twilight of mass, collective values and norms altogether. People will continue to have values and norms. But as mass media and mass identities die away, I expect we'll see a proliferation of sub-cultures, manifesting mainly in the digital world, that co-exist with one another. In many cases the co-existence of these sub-cultures will be fractious (we're seeing this already). But as more sub-cultures grow, and even the memory of mass culture fades, people will become oblivious to what many of their fellows believe and value.

 

[Parson]

. But as more sub-cultures grow, and even the memory of mass culture fades, people will become oblivious to what many of their fellows believe and value.

I'm with you up to the above point. If we use the present situation as our guide I can't see people becoming oblivious to what many of their fellows believe and value. Rather I think the more likely direction is that people will find stereotypes reinforced to an incredible degree by listening to those people with whom they agree and are therefore led. The more we find our socializing to be defined by electronic social networking, the easier it will be to be appalled and frightened by what we "know" about other groups.

You can see that easily today. It is easy to think that gay, Muslim, black, Roma et. al. are really dangerous to you and your way of life until you know some of these people personally, than the stereotype becomes much harder to swallow. --- I've experienced more than one of stereotypes being utterly smashed by people I've come to know personally.

 

[CTRandall]

But as mass media and mass identities die away, I expect we'll see a proliferation of sub-cultures, manifesting mainly in the digital world, that co-exist with one another.

I've been wondering about the possibility of this, too. I agree with Parson that people may have less and less direct contact with anyone with different opinions and values, and there is a danger of descending into harmful stereotypes. (With any luck, the future will be full of places like the Chrons where people with different opinions can communicate peacably with each other!)

One wacky idea of mine is that, if society continues to fracture into subcultures, governments may lose their role as cultural icons and sources of identity. In other words, concepts like nationalism and national identity may lose much of their potency and governments might be reduced to the role of social service providers: basic education, sanitation, health care, etc.

In such a world, large scale war could become very rare or even impossible. Violence might occur between members of different subcultures but, being subcultures, they would lack the population and resources to wage the kind of total war seen in Syria or Yemen now.

This is very wishful thinking on my part but, hey, it's almost Christmas, so give me a break.

 

[Extollager]

FASCINATION WITH CELEBRITIES, DEFERENCE TO YOUTH

It seems that it was in the 1960s and 1970s that this really took off -- the attention given to celebrities who might be regarded as icons of youth. This was probably partly done simply because it was "good for ratings." But what I'm thinking of is the sort of thing in which a popular musician might be interviewed and asked to expound his (usually) or her political ideas, etc. There was a lot of this for John Lennon, for example.

Yet there is really no reason anyone should think that Lennon was well-informed about current events, let alone that he commanded a knowledge of history helping him to have perspective on them. It didn't necessarily make much more sense than it would have, to have Henry Kissinger on TV and ask him about his taste for popular music. Of course, no one did the latter. Henry was not young. Lennon was, if not as young as he'd been a few years before, still hardly a man who'd obviously acquired a lot of the wisdom sometimes acquired by people as they've grown older.

Some of this relates to the sense that young people are more attractive than older people and, so, are more pleasing objects for the television camera.

Such things go along with, say, the readiness of university presidents to give in to demands of (a minority of) university students today, that speakers representing opinions they don't like should be kept off campus, etc.

There is a moral component here, surely. It might be that it will be more obvious to people inthe future than it appears to be now.

 

[Extollager]

Like... Everywhere it has been tried.

Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Venetzuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria....

Every time, everywhere results have been about the same and for the same reasons. Those reasons are: communism, communism and communism.

Communism we have seen has been the true communism. And the results it has had tell us everything important we need to know about communism.

Saying that it has not been tried is like saying religion has never been tried.

Utopias don't exist in real world. You can't build utopia because it is utopia. You can't build what is not possible and what is possible has been tried many times and we have seen the results.

Everybody can make their own conclusions about those results - and about the morality that seeks that kind of results. And communist moral orders are really seeking & building that kind of results. Results are not a surprise, byproduct or error in that trajectory.

I'm not gonna say more about this here.

In agreeing with this post, I cited the Harvard University Press book The Black Book of Communism. To Alan's list of countries may be added Jonestown, Guyana. Jones preached communism and had people use sheets of the Bible as toilet paper, for all his "Reverend" schtick. See Flynn's Cult City on the remarkable approval Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple received -- even after publication of investigative journalism -- from left-leaning politicians and celebrities ranging from Harvey Milk to Jane Fonda and Mayor Moscone. But 900 died; then Harvey Milk quipped, "What's purple, lies on the ground, and has 1,800 legs?" (Flynn, p. 204, citing Randy Shilts)

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Making the North Pole The Top Of The World complimented by globes that have the South Pole bolted to the base.

 

[Alan Aspie]

In agreeing with this post...

If you want to seek moral blind spots, there are several good clues:

- When identities get more attention than bare self, you are in the real of moral blind spots & dishonesty.
- When psychological defensies get started, you are in getting close to moral blind spots and selfbetrayal.
- When argumentation techniques become more important than truth, you are among lies.
- Straw men point to the direction of moral blind spots.
- Projection...

And every time you hear words "social construction" you know that a bunch of dishonest and selfish people are trying to fool everybody else.

And every time someone tries to point that a category is a construction, she is building moral blind spots and hoping you are intellectually and morally too lazy and stupid to notice it.

 

[CTRandall]

Future generations will wonder why we care so much for our dogs that we microchip them, yet have so little affection for our kids that we let them run wild and unmonitored. TAKE YOUR KIDS TO THE VET!

 

[Cathbad]

Future generations will wonder why we care so much for our dogs that we microchip them, yet have so little affection for our kids that we let them run wild and unmonitored. TAKE YOUR KIDS TO THE VET!

AND LEAVE THEM!!