Thank you so much for your comment! I think this is roughly the view I held before writing this post, although you did it better than I could have.
There are two issues that come to mind.
Is it not also the case that these social democracies and their welfare states benefit from, and perhaps even rely on for their high standard of living, the suffering of others? Whether that’s suffering of others in the past (colonialism), present (think horrendous labor standards at the bottom of Western supply chains), or future (extractivism/general profit over planet markets often effectively take welfare from the future’s poor and give it to the present’s rich). Finland would be much poorer if it were not part of a larger global market in which a lot of the existing wealth was accrued via oppression. Bottom line: if it is the case that social democracies with high standards of living can exist only by distributing fairly among its citizens wealth which was partly created unfairly (even if not directly by the Finns but by someone else and then paid for by Finns, e.g. cobalt mining in Congo), then it’s not clear to me that a world in which every country becomes like Finland is just. And perhaps it is not even possible, in that the extraction of resources necessary to give the entire world a standard of living similar to that of European social democracies may well be unsustainable (e.g. it seems very unlikely 88% of the world could own an electric car as is the case in Norway).
If we retroactively apply the idea that radically different system would have to exist and be superior according to your value system, we seemingly miss out on most of the world’s great cases of moral progress. Athenian democracy, the abolishment of slavery, the introduction of voting rights for women, perhaps most cases of great moral progress came at the expense of a status quo for which much more evidence was available. Could you not make the case that a similar move would be necessary to end what we might call global apartheid?
Thank you so much for your comment! I think this is roughly the view I held before writing this post, although you did it better than I could have.
There are two issues that come to mind.
Is it not also the case that these social democracies and their welfare states benefit from, and perhaps even rely on for their high standard of living, the suffering of others? Whether that’s suffering of others in the past (colonialism), present (think horrendous labor standards at the bottom of Western supply chains), or future (extractivism/general profit over planet markets often effectively take welfare from the future’s poor and give it to the present’s rich). Finland would be much poorer if it were not part of a larger global market in which a lot of the existing wealth was accrued via oppression. Bottom line: if it is the case that social democracies with high standards of living can exist only by distributing fairly among its citizens wealth which was partly created unfairly (even if not directly by the Finns but by someone else and then paid for by Finns, e.g. cobalt mining in Congo), then it’s not clear to me that a world in which every country becomes like Finland is just. And perhaps it is not even possible, in that the extraction of resources necessary to give the entire world a standard of living similar to that of European social democracies may well be unsustainable (e.g. it seems very unlikely 88% of the world could own an electric car as is the case in Norway).
If we retroactively apply the idea that radically different system would have to exist and be superior according to your value system, we seemingly miss out on most of the world’s great cases of moral progress. Athenian democracy, the abolishment of slavery, the introduction of voting rights for women, perhaps most cases of great moral progress came at the expense of a status quo for which much more evidence was available. Could you not make the case that a similar move would be necessary to end what we might call global apartheid?