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There is an unresolvable tension between the quantitative and the qualitative, and it's hard to imagine a more extreme example than erasing ineffable human dign

There is an unresolvable tension between the quantitative and the qualitative, and it's hard to imagine a more extreme example than erasing ineffable human dignity in order to turn a human into a commodity. Let's flip this around to today: imagine a hypothetical future 100 years from now, that honors the qualitative dignity of all animal life, and views factory farming with the same horror that we view slavery now. From this moral vantage point (even as a meat eater, I concede this position the high ground), a phased approach seems appalling. We currently slaughter roughly one Holocaust's worth of animals every hour; how about reducing it to one Holocaust per two hours? Maybe a new law to give cows an hour in the sunshine before they're herded back into pens? What about voluntary buyback programs? Taxes on meat to subsidize cheaper vegetables? These are all quantitative solutions to a qualitative problem: either cows have inalienable value as conscious beings, or they don't; and if they do, shouldn't we stop at nothing to defend that sacred value and eliminate all human-caused animal suffering, rather than wishy-washy incrementalism? The unfortunate reality then and now is that we're stuck in quantitative games, directly or indirectly. There are no shortage of highly motivated consumers and producers who benefit from factory farming, just as as there was for slavery. There was clear justification to go to war to end slavery, to forcibly grind the game entirely to a halt; but it was not without cost, not only in lives lost, but in a consequential cultural rift that persists to this day. I'm both ignorant and curious how culture played out in those societies that use phased approaches; do they have equivalents to the "Southern Strategy" and Nixon's racially-motivated War on Drugs (which is rightly, I think, compared to modern-day slavery)? I don't claim to know the answers to any of these things; but until a given moral phase-shift takes place, it's not always obvious how to get there, and a hardline stance can run the risk that the system kicks back, opponents are strengthened and galvanized, and nothing is accomplished. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony and offense of invoking a comparison to farm animals in a discussion of slavery, when slaves were once viewed as livestock. I'm attempting to draw the opposite point: of humanizing animals, in the same way that we now humanize all homo sapiens regardless of ethnicity.)

bilbo0s 7y ago
But we did take a non-incrementalist approach to slavery, and it worked. Sherman smashing through Georgia was not, by any stretch of the imagination, "moderate". And it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Travel to Asia or Africa, and ask who the leader of the US was when the slaves were freed? Then ask who the leader of the British Empire was when their slaves were freed? Or the leader of Brazil? There's a reason people in Asia revere Lincoln and not the leader of the British Empire, or the leader of Brazil at the time, or the leader of Cuba, or what have you. That reason is because Lincoln is viewed as having done the right thing in the face of enormous risk. We did the right thing in a way that transcended America. It even transcended the slaves to be perfectly frank. What we did has inspired humanity ever since. Whether you are at an elite University in Beijing, Shanghai, or Singapore, Lincoln is a leader all of the most promising students are drawn to. This is not simply the result of marketing either. For instance, the king of Siam was famously drawn to Lincoln over all of the others as well. The Czar lamented his comparison to Lincoln. Insisting people should instead venerate him, because he had done more for the serfs than Lincoln did for the slaves. And he felt he'd certainly done more than the British or the Portuguese, who he felt had done nothing at all. All of this was long before professional marketing really existed. Even long before the US was really even a power. So our solution to slavery paid us off over a thousandfold in untold influence and soft power alone. Influence and soft power throughout the world. Now, I'll concede that it's influence and soft power that we seem to have squandered, but it's also influence these wishy washy incrementalist approaches never conferred on their proponents. You say it was a cost, (and presumably a loss?). I think you might believe that because you haven't properly accounted for the many benefits we've enjoyed in your cost-benefit analysis.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Only if you consider a million lives lost, and many more wounded, "better" than the solution other countries with slavery, like Great Britain, adopted: they paid off the slaveowners and freed their slaves without any violence at all.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >without any violence at all... Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, and global scale violence. It was kind of a necessity for that kind of thing to work.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery then paying off the slaveowners. Not to mention the fact that all those other countries that didn't have to fight a war to end slavery ended it sooner than the US did; so actually we should be considering the costs of slavery itself--for all the extra years that it existed in the US compared to those other countries. Which just makes the "fight a war to end slavery" option look even worse by comparison.
      - bilbo0s 7y ago
        This is the US man. We didn't pay the British Crown a cent, and no one saw any reason to change that policy for southerners. Paying for freedom is not something America as a nation was given to doing in the Late 18th and 19th century. Heck, vast majority of us wouldn't do it today. This country was literally founded on the principle of not paying for freedoms. And this history is the very reason we carried so much caché and influence through the 20h century. People knew our history and admired it. Historically, the incrementalists have taken a back seat to us, not the other way around. And I mean come on guy? What's with these ideas? Any violence against slaves just "drops out". But other violence does not? We should pay off slaver owners? A million lives is too much to pay to end slavery? A million lives is far less than the body count of 400 years of the slave trade. How many lived and died as slaves? How many were killed, beaten, or left for dead? Or maybe just thrown overboard? etc etc etc. As to the question of paying off slave owners, what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom? You either didn't pay attention in history class, or you are willfully ignoring the nature of how we got our start. Presumably because it is inconvenient, and doesn't fit with your narrative. And, yeah, on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves, that's just not even worth commentary. But hey man, we can just agree to disagree. Obviously we're just different people. You have a nice rest of the day.

bilbo0s 7y ago

But we did take a non-incrementalist approach to slavery, and it worked. Sherman smashing through Georgia was not, by any stretch of the imagination, "moderate". And it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Travel to Asia or Africa, and ask who the leader of the US was when the slaves were freed? Then ask who the leader of the British Empire was when their slaves were freed? Or the leader of Brazil? There's a reason people in Asia revere Lincoln and not the leader of the British Empire, or the leader of Brazil at the time, or the leader of Cuba, or what have you. That reason is because Lincoln is viewed as having done the right thing in the face of enormous risk. We did the right thing in a way that transcended America. It even transcended the slaves to be perfectly frank. What we did has inspired humanity ever since. Whether you are at an elite University in Beijing, Shanghai, or Singapore, Lincoln is a leader all of the most promising students are drawn to. This is not simply the result of marketing either. For instance, the king of Siam was famously drawn to Lincoln over all of the others as well. The Czar lamented his comparison to Lincoln. Insisting people should instead venerate him, because he had done more for the serfs than Lincoln did for the slaves. And he felt he'd certainly done more than the British or the Portuguese, who he felt had done nothing at all. All of this was long before professional marketing really existed. Even long before the US was really even a power. So our solution to slavery paid us off over a thousandfold in untold influence and soft power alone. Influence and soft power throughout the world. Now, I'll concede that it's influence and soft power that we seem to have squandered, but it's also influence these wishy washy incrementalist approaches never conferred on their proponents. You say it was a cost, (and presumably a loss?). I think you might believe that because you haven't properly accounted for the many benefits we've enjoyed in your cost-benefit analysis.

pdonis 7y ago
> it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Only if you consider a million lives lost, and many more wounded, "better" than the solution other countries with slavery, like Great Britain, adopted: they paid off the slaveowners and freed their slaves without any violence at all.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >without any violence at all... Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, and global scale violence. It was kind of a necessity for that kind of thing to work.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery then paying off the slaveowners. Not to mention the fact that all those other countries that didn't have to fight a war to end slavery ended it sooner than the US did; so actually we should be considering the costs of slavery itself--for all the extra years that it existed in the US compared to those other countries. Which just makes the "fight a war to end slavery" option look even worse by comparison.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      This is the US man. We didn't pay the British Crown a cent, and no one saw any reason to change that policy for southerners. Paying for freedom is not something America as a nation was given to doing in the Late 18th and 19th century. Heck, vast majority of us wouldn't do it today. This country was literally founded on the principle of not paying for freedoms. And this history is the very reason we carried so much caché and influence through the 20h century. People knew our history and admired it. Historically, the incrementalists have taken a back seat to us, not the other way around. And I mean come on guy? What's with these ideas? Any violence against slaves just "drops out". But other violence does not? We should pay off slaver owners? A million lives is too much to pay to end slavery? A million lives is far less than the body count of 400 years of the slave trade. How many lived and died as slaves? How many were killed, beaten, or left for dead? Or maybe just thrown overboard? etc etc etc. As to the question of paying off slave owners, what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom? You either didn't pay attention in history class, or you are willfully ignoring the nature of how we got our start. Presumably because it is inconvenient, and doesn't fit with your narrative. And, yeah, on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves, that's just not even worth commentary. But hey man, we can just agree to disagree. Obviously we're just different people. You have a nice rest of the day.