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Entry: Saying "No" to Tenured Fascists Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/saying_no_to_tenured_fascists#18137 Post contents: John, We appear to be talking of different things. My focus is your observation " . . . taking actions which seem, on balance, likely to save more lives in the long run." The specific point here is the science that you use to estimate the long-term effect of your actions. This is where the historical glitch has been time after time: The Nazis thought their actions would proudce a superior human via advancement of the Aryan race, and they regarded this goal as so important as to justify the sacrifices; the communists thought eliminating private ownership of the means of production would eliminate conflict from society, and this goal made them see liquidating "harmful" social classes acceptable; the Greens massively misjudged the effects of DDT, and this judgment made them "priviledge" not using DDT to extending millions of Africans' lives. It looks very probable that scientific progress will continue, and that people hundred years from now will laugh at much of our current reasoning, just like we now laugh at Nazi's racial theories and "scientific" dialectical materialism. (Man-made global warming is one likely source for future entertainment.) This observation raises a question about the reasoning you use to predict the consequenses that form the foundation of your decision about which choice is likely to save most lives in the long run. How accurate can this reasoning be -- after all, we cannot predict innovations, since predicting them would mean making them. (The Nazis, for example, failed to foresee the explosion in agricultural production caused by fertilizers and weed killers. Instead of needing Lebensraum to produce enough food, Germany has for years been struggling with overproduction. Talk about an error with disastrous consequenses!) In your specific example, the question would be: can you really say with certainty that something would destroy all life from the oceans? Can you be sure that our reasoning about the causality is correct, and is it certain that nothing can be invented to prevent this outcome? You are justifying chopping 10 years off from people's lives on what history suggests is a very fragile foundation. It seems to me that precisely this kind of faith in science and its ability to predict long-term consequenses has been the cause of much of the government-produced 20th-century mortality you worried about. It is also at this point of assorted "scientific" rationalizations of future benefits where the Christian rule, thou shalt not kill -- right now, no ifs, ands or buts -- becomes very relevant. Sent at: 2008 07 24