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Future-proof ethics

cold-takes.com · 4,965 words · saved by 1 readers

That is: simply going with our intuitions and societal norms has, in the past, meant endorsing all kinds of insanity. To quote an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah: Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones? This post kicks off a series on the approach to eth

Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. Ethics based on "common sense" seems to have a horrible track record. That is: simply going with our intuitions and societal norms has, in the past, meant endorsing all kinds of insanity. To quote an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah : Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations

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