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67 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury OP 14h \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
I'm sympathetic to both of your points:
- every generation thinks the next is utterly ruined
- right now feels (to me) acutely bad
... but then I think that maybe, wrt #2, I am exquisitely sensitive to certain flavors of ruin, and see it clearly, and see that it's worse than ever. But then I think that every generation may have had their own particularly fine-tuned feature detectors.
For instance, there are people alive now for whom the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times; that worry seems absurd to me, but I have an entirely different mental ecology as a function of my path and era.
It's a foreignness that's hard to simulate, I think.
the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism. It's not like renting their labour. So yeah, end-times is on point.
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Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.
The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
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things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous
Hm. Wrt slavers, I think we can either excuse them because of moral relativism, or not, and say they should have known better.
Do you think we ought not to be excused for our follies on this principle?
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
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Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.
Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.
And I don't know which I think is worse.
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First try to understand why cannibalism is abhorrent, malum in se, and rather than just abnormal.
If you find yourself justifying cannibalism you'll be able to justify buying babies like IKEA furniture.
But the truth is that children from surrogacy tend to feel that their surrogate parent exploited their real mothers. These feelings are gaslit, and in extreme circumstances the surrogate parents cut off the children the way they would never have been cut off by real parents.
Bottom line is that people literally cannot be owned or bought, and if you try to buy a child you're only renting the experience of parenthood, not the real thing, hence those relationships are emotionally easier to sever from both sides.
Renting or buying a person's labour is not exploitation if the person is getting better at something, increasing their own capacity rather than draining it.