Kwame Anthony Appiah

September 29, 2010

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offence, and waterboarding was approved. Through the middle of the 19th century, slavery was condoned and women were forbidden to vote. Well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in America stripped, tortured, hanged and burnt 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 practices? A look at the past suggests three signs that a particular activity is destined for condemnation.

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counter-arguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that may force them to face the evils in which they are complicit.

With these signs in mind, here are four contenders for future moral condemnation.

America’s prison system: we already know that the massive waste of life in our prisons is morally troubling; those who defend the conditions of incarceration usually do so in non-moral terms (citing costs or the administrative difficulty of reforms); and we’re inclined to avert our eyes from the details.

Roughly 3 per cent of adults in America are incarcerated. It has 4 per cent of the world’s population but 25 per cent of its prisoners. More than 100,000 inmates suffer sexual abuse, including rape, each year; some contract HIV as a result. America holds at least 25,000 prisoners in isolation, under conditions that many psychologists say amount to torture.

Industrial meat production: the arguments against the cruelty of factory farming have certainly been around a long time. People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they are doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in industrial abattoirs.

Of the more than 90 million cattle in America, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own faeces, their nostrils filled with the smell of their own urine. Picture it – and then imagine your grandchildren seeing that picture. In the European Union, many of the most inhumane conditions America allows are already illegal or – like the sow stalls into which pregnant pigs are often crammed in the US – will be illegal soon.

The institutionalised and isolated elderly: nearly 2 million of America’s elderly are warehoused in nursing homes, out of sight and, to some extent, out of mind. Some 10,000 for-profit facilities have arisen across the country in recent decades to hold them. Other elderly people may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The US is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heatwave that hit France in 2003: while many families were enjoying their summer holidays, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures).

Keeping ageing parents and their children closer is a challenge, particularly in a society where almost everybody has a job outside the home. When we see old people who, despite many living relatives, suffering growing isolation, we know something is wrong. We scarcely try to defend the situation; when we can, we put it out of our minds.

Self-interest, if nothing else, should make us hope that our descendants will have worked out a better way.

The environment: of course, most transgenerational obligations run the other way – from parents to children – and of these the most obvious candidate for opprobrium is our wasteful attitude towards the planet’s natural resources and ecology.

Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you will see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier there was a verdant landscape. That is the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognised in the 1990s as Europe’s first man-made desert. Desertification, which is primarily the result of destructive, land-management practices, threatens a third of the Earth’s surface; tens of thousands of Chinese villages have been overrun by sand drifts in the past few decades.

It is not as though we are unaware of what we are doing to the planet. We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions, the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they will not be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to.

Let us not stop there, though. We will all have our own suspicions about which practices will someday prompt people to ask, in dismay: what were they thinking?

Even when we do not have a good answer, we will be better off for anticipating the question.

WASHINGTON POST

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosophy professor at Princeton University and author of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/future-generations-will-wonder-what-were-they-thinking-20100928-15vpz.html