Hi Fai, I agree with whoever encouraged you to post more. I always enjoy and appreciate your stuff even when we don’t 100% agree.
The below sentence is difficult to parse, what do you actually mean? That it was economic reasons, or that it was not economic reasons, or something else entirely?
>Well, I personally did not have much hope in humanity’s moral progress, until I recently got moderately convinced that it’s less likely than not that we abolished slavery mainly for economic reasons. And in case you think that it is impossible to have moral progress without economic reasons. I tend to disagree, and Will Macaskill also. He wrote in What We Owe The Future that the view that it was economic incentives caused by new technologies that cause slavery to be abolished, is now out of fashion in academia. He thinks that it was pretty much the triumph of the abolitionists. So there’s a reason to think that moral progress is a genuine alternative to technologically forced social progress.
The below sentence is difficult to parse, what do you actually mean? That it was economic reasons, or that it was not economic reasons, or something else entirely?
What I said there was that Will convinced me that it is mostly non-economic reasons that abolished slavery.
Hi Fai, I agree with whoever encouraged you to post more. I always enjoy and appreciate your stuff even when we don’t 100% agree.
The below sentence is difficult to parse, what do you actually mean? That it was economic reasons, or that it was not economic reasons, or something else entirely?
>Well, I personally did not have much hope in humanity’s moral progress, until I recently got moderately convinced that it’s less likely than not that we abolished slavery mainly for economic reasons. And in case you think that it is impossible to have moral progress without economic reasons. I tend to disagree, and Will Macaskill also. He wrote in What We Owe The Future that the view that it was economic incentives caused by new technologies that cause slavery to be abolished, is now out of fashion in academia. He thinks that it was pretty much the triumph of the abolitionists. So there’s a reason to think that moral progress is a genuine alternative to technologically forced social progress.
Cheers
Thanks Tyner!
What I said there was that Will convinced me that it is mostly non-economic reasons that abolished slavery.
I had to re-read too, but I read it as “Slavery was not primarily abolished for economic reasons.”