In an unrelated, but completely relevant article, the Washington Post's Kwame Anthony Appiah triggered a debate over moral progress and history with his recent "What will future generations condemn us for?" His guesses are that our prison system, the industrial meat complex, elderly care, and environmental damage will bring the most intense "how could they do that?" from history students. Will Wilkinson adds that nation-states dividing up the world with their borders, tariffs, and limits on freedom of movement will look pretty awful to citizens of the next century. Tyler Cowen (who teaches at my alma matter) tried to figure out what we might condemn future generations for, worrying that torture, pre-emptive war, and anti-gay sentiment may make a comeback. What is going to help determine whether we're moving towards utopia or dystopia?
The most interesting twist on Appiah's original idea, and a potential answer to my query, comes from conservative op-ed writer Ross Douthat at the New York Times. Douthat's eye-grabbing point is that technology itself helps to drive our moral shifts, in that often a new technology is able to disconnect two things that were once inextricable:
"Note, though, that I'm envisioning a technological leap as the catalyst for this shift. It's true that deterministic arguments can go too far, and that human agency matters enormously to moral change ... but it's still the case that technological and economic trends play an enormous role in determining which moral arguments gain ground, which achieve dominance, and which slip toward eccentricity. The cotton gin launched a thousand pro-slavery polemics. The birth control pill convinced millions of people that the old moral consensus on sex and marriage was outdated and even absurd."
Just which taboos will become tolerable in the future based on technology is, I think, grist for another post. What is worth discussing now is how technology enables these sea changes in our moral thinking. Bailey's "yuck-to-yippie" thesis dovetails nicely with Douthat's "tech can drive moral change" thesis. Let's imagine a new example: designer babies. We first hear about a brand new technology and everybody from religious leaders to scientific experts to your grandmother stands up and denounces it—"Yuck!" says Grandma; "Eugenics will bring back Hitler armies!" says the politician who has no grasp of science (a redundant statement, I know); "God doesn't approve!" says the Vatican; "all people will all be the same!" says the worried science philosopher. "The genetic engineering of people could have lots of things go wrong with it, and it's just unnatural, so we probably shouldn't do it," says the general consensus.
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