Thanks for the response. I don’t disagree with anything you say here, and to be clear, I have a lot of both empirical and moral uncertainty about this topic.
It’s also worth noting that many girls resisted being footbound in the first place.
This makes me think of another parallel: parents forcing kids to practice musical instruments, which a lot of kids also resist, and arguably causes real suffering among the kids who hate doing it. (I’m thinking of places like China where this phenomenon is much more widespread than in the US.) How likely is a “moral campaign” for stopping this likely to succeed, without some economic force behind it?
Another parallel might be forcing kids to go to school and to do homework.
Thanks for the response. I don’t disagree with anything you say here, and to be clear, I have a lot of both empirical and moral uncertainty about this topic.
This makes me think of another parallel: parents forcing kids to practice musical instruments, which a lot of kids also resist, and arguably causes real suffering among the kids who hate doing it. (I’m thinking of places like China where this phenomenon is much more widespread than in the US.) How likely is a “moral campaign” for stopping this likely to succeed, without some economic force behind it?
Another parallel might be forcing kids to go to school and to do homework.