An animal raised kindly and slaughtered painlessly seems to me fairly harvested - though I am in the minority in my own pescatarian family and may, someday soon, convert. The next moral outrage the future may condemn is cruelty to children in schooling. This may seem like much the lesser sin - certainly not getting any schooling at all, like so many girls in Islamic countries, is far worse. But the Western school day and school regimen we accept uncritically, are, on the whole, remnants of an earlier time, living symptoms of the regimentation of life in the 19th Century that also brought us mass conscription and military drill.
We've outgrown mass conscription, but we still too often teach our children to a military timetable. We take it for granted that long school days, and much homework, will benefit them, though there is not a scrap of evidence that this is true, and a large body of evidence that it is false. We take it for granted that waking teenagers in the early morning, then having them sit still and listen to lectures for eight hours, and then doing three or four more hours of homework at home, is essential and profitable.
All the evidence suggests that this is the worst possible way of educating anybody, much less a year-old in need of much sleep, freedom of mind, and abundant creative escape-time - of the kind that John and Paul found by skipping school to play guitars in the front room, or that Steve Jobs found when, in a California high school, he tells us he discovered Shakespeare and got stoned, at the same time and presumably in equal measure.
We are taught that the over-regimented Asian societies with their tiger mothers will overtake us, but it is Apple, invented by that stoned Shakespearean high schooler, that sends its phones to be made in China, not the other way round. Genuine entrepreneurial advance comes from strange people and places. In the future, when kids arrive at school in the late morning, and we teach math the way we now teach sports, as an open-ended, self-regulating group activity, we may well recognise that each mind bends its own peculiar way, and our current method of teaching, I think, will seem quite mad.
The third moral outrage I imagine the future espying is our cruelty to the ill and aged in our fetish for surgical intervention. Modern scientific medicine is a mostly unmixed blessing, and anyone who longs for the metaphysical certainties of medieval times should be compelled to have medieval medicine for his family.
But no blessing is entirely unmixed, and I suspect that our insistence on massive interventions for late-arriving ills - our appetite for heart valves and knee replacements, artificial hips and endlessly retuned pacemakers - will seem to our descendants as fetishistic and bewildering as the medieval appetite for bleeding and cupping and leeching looks to us now.
Yes, of course, we all know people whose lives have been blessedly extended and improved by artificial joints and by those wi-fi pacemakers. But our health system is designed to make doctors see the benefits of intervention far more clearly than their costs. Not long ago I was reading these words from a doctor about the seemingly benign practice of angioplasty procedures for heart patients: "It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day, let alone 10 years - and it's done a million times a year in this country.
Finally, I suspect the future will frown on any form of sexual rule-making, aside from ones based entirely on the abuse of power. Gay and straight or bi or trans - numbers and kinds and kinks - all that really matters is the empowered consent of two people capable of being empowered and informed.
When Oscar Wilde was condemned by society more than a century ago in London for having sex with underage male prostitutes, he became a figure of evil, his life and career destroyed. Within half a century this persecution seemed to us intolerable - and for most of the second half of the 20th Century Oscar was seen as a saint of gay liberation.
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? Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity.
Anyway, on this basis, his top four candidates for future shame are the prison system, the institutionalisation of the elderly, industrial meat production and environmental abuse, including climate change. Good list. Feel free to add your candidates ………. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please see our.
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The recipient of many prizes, honors and awards, he is generally recognized as one of the foremost thinkers in the world on the problems faced by a world growing ever closer to itself. He answers the question posed by the title of his article by first stating three criteria by which we can discern what the issues our descendants will wonder about, then giving four examples of issues he thinks fit the criteria. Appiah does not defend his reasons for thinking the three criteria he suggests are valid, but he hardly could in a piece of this length.
They are 1 the issue has been around for awhile, as have the arguments against it.
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