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Comment by stiff | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest problem humanity currently has in general is that morality only kicks-in in most people when there is a very direct link between their actions and some negative consequences. Once there is enough degrees of separation and abstraction nobody cares anymore. Most people would not slaughter an animal without really having to do it, but once it becomes a cheeseburger or a fur clothing nobody gives it a second thought. The problem is that the world of human affairs is getting more and more abstract as we specialize more and more and develop more complex technology, so more and more things get affected by this.

It is especially sad given that sometimes sacrificing a small convenience for one person would be able to make a huge change in somebody else's life. But again, once there are enough degrees of separation, we do not feel "in position" to help and we do not view it as our problem to do it.

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We can talk about the psychological factors or we can simply tell it the way it is which is that economic growth increases the need for energy. Most production of energy and production of things cause by-products that are not a natural part of the system, in another words pollution. Pollution interferes with the natural functioning of the system. If we did not need to support such a large population or economic growth we would not be creating all this pollution. Therefore we could as a species inhabit the planet much longer (there are obviously natural sources of pollution that work on much longer time scales). Because we don't act responsibly and instead of taming our psychology we have let it loose on the world in the name of economic growth (and power of the current ruling elite) we will as a matter of course cause more and more pollution which will at some point start reducing the carrying capacity of the planet which will lead to smaller and smaller population until our species goes extinct. That's the natural course of humanity. Many people believe that more technology will save us, but is life really worth living being hooked up to a respirator with a miserable polluted planet barely capable of supporting life? Many people in the third world seem to think so, they keep producing even more misery.

I am with you up to the moment you talk about people in the third world, where I completely don't understand what you are up to, care to explain?

In the third world there is lots of pollution, over population, lack of food... But all of that does not keep people from producing yet more people. In a similar way the entire world does not stop and reconsider what they are doing instead it just keeps going hoping that technology will come in and save us from whatever problems we have created for ourselves. In fact that's really all humans do on the planet, create problems. They are problem engines.

I would have made almost the reverse claim: humanity has a well-defined threat-response instinct and we are constantly on the lookout for threats to ourselves, our family, our society. Like a social immune system. If there aren't any serious threats we can't just relax and live our lives - we have to invent some problems to worry about. Hence the never-ending stream of overblown largely imaginary threats - killer bees, crack babies, flag-burning, overpopulation, declining fertility, pesticides (eg, alar), GMOs, global cooling, global warming, "peak oil", fracking.

There is almost no correlation between how serious a threat is and how much we worry about it. In fact, the correlation is often inverse - we worry far more about child abductions and school shootings now that they almost never happen than we did when they happened more. Because if something happens all the time it's not "news". So a school shooting in any crappy city anywhere in the US prompts national headlines and gets us ALL worrying about whether our children are safe, whereas kids dying in auto accidents or house fires or drowning in swimming pools in much larger numbers don't even make the local newscast.

This would have made more sense if your example wasn't one so painfully biased in presentism. Animal slaughter was sort of a commonplace until we industrialized it; people weren't squeamish about it until the last few hundred years. Being squeamish is a status marker.

It would have made much more sense if you put a bit more effort into trying to interpret what I said and didn't assume I think animal-eating was invented 200 years ago...

People certainly have a different emotional reaction from watching an animal die, this reaction being almost completely unknown those days, than from buying a hamburger in the supermarket, which doesn't provoke any emotion whatsoever. Do I have to convince you very much that emotions play a big role in the so called "morality" and especially being able to act on it?

Obviously there are historical examples that there were people a very long time ago already that were concerned about the sad fate of the killed animals, for example Native Americans used to "thank" the animals they killed for providing food and ask them for forgiveness, Buddhist say "might you be reborn as a buddha" before eating meat etc., you will see this aspect of human life very carefully regulated by most religions, indicating it was a problem that concerned people from a very long time ago.

For another, more general example, try to convince someone of sacrificing a very, very minor modern convenience of theirs for some greater good. I often have to go to terrible pains to explain that I am perfectly fine with my current phone and I don't want to waste it to just get a new toy, and I am far from being any kind of ecology freak. When I buy crips and coke at a grocery 50m from my flat and don't want a plastic bag, the seller assures me that it's for free so I don't have to worry :) The people who actually use any more substantial effort to not deprive too much resources are very often gravely ridiculed, because most of society seems to view resources as unlimited.

>and didn't assume I think animal-eating was invented 200 years ago...

Sorry to jump here, but he clearly did not wrote that. He wrote in fact the opposite. He said we have been killing animals to survive for a very long time.

It is you who attach some kind of moral meaning to the act of killing and eating an animal. Some people have to do it, for them to feel purer (in the past) or hipsterer (now). I would prefer to become food at the end of my life, Soylent Green style, instead of such mind shenanigan‎s.

It's good that you don't ask for bags in the grocery, but in the end this means little if human population keeps growing and growing.

Well, if by few hundred years you mean at least ~2.2 millenia then yes, because Buddhism's dont-take-life preaching is at least that old.

And since when did the ethics and normalities of past become the standards by which our present should be governed? If animal slaughter is alright because it was okay a few hundred years ago then slavery, child marriage and hundred other nonsensical stuff should be alright as well. What we do now should be determined by how our society feels now and how it wants to invest in the future. Arguing that that our present actions should be governed by medieval ethics is lazy.

Your parent didn't talk about ethics at all, only about the supposed squeamishness that people have towards killing animals. If I am afraid of killing animals, that has nothing to do with my ethical stance on killing animals.

Um. I didn't make a value judgement on animal slaughter. I said he picked an ineffective example.

> Being squeamish is a status marker.

Bingo. Because if you're squeamish, that means you have someone else do it for you.

> Most people would not slaughter an animal without really having to do it,

Are you sure? The biggest problem I have with rod-fishing is that it is boring - not that the fish has to die (and I don't give less value to the life of a fish than, say, a pig, as some people tend to do). Sure, I haven't needed to slaughter my own livestock, but if I imagine that I have of only eaten oatmeal and potatoes for the last fourteen days, slaughtering some animal for its meat doesn't seem like such a terrible sacrifice. Now, I am not a farmer or a hunter, but if I were you could just argue that most people are not farmers and/or hunters.

The modern man may be squeamish, but the thing about humans are that we are great at adapting. A modern urban person might recoil at the thought of not getting at least one shower a day, getting to sleep in a comfortable bed and have food in the fridge at all times, but if push comes to shove and she has to for some reason survive in the wilderness or out on a farm, I'd say she would get used to that reality relatively quickly. And she might have been previously reserved towards killing animals since the reality of it was so removed for her, but again if the need arose she would probably not have much problem with it unless she already had some established ethical opposition to using animals for their meat, hide etc. After all, a good chunk of her ancestors probably had to have a hand in slaughtering animals.

One of the biggest problem humanity currently has in general is that morality only kicks-in in most people when there is a very direct link between their actions and some negative consequences.

Absolutely. We need to feel pain, otherwise we're lost.

And: We are the Boiling Frogs:

Increase the heat (=pain) slowly enough and we'll accept it as "The New Normal".

Increase the pain quickly enough, and we'll reject it and fight for our lives.

Should our action therefor be to concentrate on preparing for the "rebuiliding"?

The problem with the "boiling frog" analogy is that it's false. No actual frogs work like that. If you think humans work like that, it's fine to claim this, but referring to the behavior of imaginary frogs doesn't add anything to one's understanding.

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

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