A Brief Reflection on Ancestors and Descendants
When we reflect on the past, we are admonished not to judge our historical forebears by the moral standards of our own time. It sometimes cannot be helped, however. We recoil at those who took part in the institution of slavery, or the subjection of women, or any number of crimes against humanity, and we disdain those who stood by in craven or complacent acceptance of the practices we now rightly abhor. We imagine ourselves placed within their milieu, thinking to ourselves, “If I had been in Germany during the war, I would have resisted. I would’ve been like Oskar Schindler.” and “If I had lived in antebellum America, I would’ve been an abolitionist.” Would we have indeed?
The Animal Holocaust
It was once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. How much less morally comprehensible is the statistic of more than a hundred billion deaths? How do you even make something like that real to the mind? Current best estimates have it that humans slaughter over 70 billion land animals per year, not including marine animals or male chicks slaughtered by egg-laying hen hatcheries. This number is an order of magnitude greater than the total human population of Earth. With marine animals and chicks included, the yearly kill count easily exceeds the sum total of humans who have ever lived on Earth at any time in history—over 120 billion.
On Rationality, Correctness, and Expertise
The confusion between rational justification and truth or correctness is common enough in public discourse that it need be noted that beliefs that are rationally justified sometimes turn out untrue, and beliefs without rational justification occasionally turn out to be true. Similarly, the most rational decision is not guaranteed to be the correct decision, and not all decisions that turn out to have been correct were rational decisions. Where this confusion becomes most pernicious is when members of the public run afoul of it when determining what to believe and in whom to place their trust.
Liberalism: What it is and Why it Matters
Liberalism has often been considered the most successful political ideology in modern history, coinciding with vast and measurable improvements in human welfare, but recently new threats have arisen in the form of various anti-liberal populist and nationalist movements, which have gained some notable victories in liberal democracies in Europe and America. At the same time, some who self-apply the label ‘liberal’ have at times advocated decidedly illiberal ideas and policies, making the job of those who would defend liberalism from its critics that much more onerous. In the wake of these upheavals, we liberals must cogently recapitulate the core principles of our philosophy and contextualize its role in contemporary society in order to defend it both from the external and internal challenges it faces.
Basic Income and the Future of Work
There was a time when the word “computer” referred not to the silicon-based digital computer that has revolutionized work in the last half century, but to flesh and blood employees hired to perform rote mathematical calculations. NASA once employed rooms of them to calculate flight trajectories for the emerging space program. These positions disappeared with the advancement of digital computing technologies capable of performing the same calculations with exponentially increasing speed, reducing a bustling warehouse full of employees to the small handful of programmers needed to encode the guidance problems for a digital computer to solve.