johnlawrenceaspden comments on (Moral) Truth in Fiction? - Less Wrong
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"Without that ability to sympathize, we might think that it was perfectly all right* to keep slaves."
Nearly all people for thousands of years thought it was perfectly all right to keep slaves. Are you saying they didn't have the ability to sympathize? This is the sort of profoundly ahistorical "thinking" that irritates so many people. Someone who considers his own society's beliefs to be laws of reality when there is obvious historical evidence in the other direction that they never bothered to think about.
I don't think it's perfectly all right to eat meat. And I consider battery farming to be an obscenity which I'd like to see outlawed.
And yet I do eat meat, guiltlessly, and not all of it is free-range ethics-meat.
It occurs to me that I might have trouble explaining this to some future ethicist, and I wonder if that might be the same sort of moral state that the Romans, say, were in.
It's the same sort of moral state we're all in.
I mock you from the safety of my vegetarianism, while desperately downplaying who made my trainers.