Previous MCE projects like abolitionism or liberal projects like extending suffrage to non-landowning non-whitemales were fighting against the forcible removal of voice from people who had the ability to speak for themselves. Contemporary MCE projects like animals and future people do not share this property; I believe that animals cannot advocate for themselves, and the best proxy for future peoples’ political interests I can think of falls really short. In this light, does it make any sense at all to say that there’s a continuity of MCE activism across domains/problem areas?
I think it makes sense for, say, covid-era vaccine administrators to think of themselves as carrying on the legacy of the groups who put smallpox in the ground, but it may not make the same sense for longtermists to think of themselves as carrying on the legacy of slavery abolition just because both families of projects in some sense look like MCE.
Related, does classifying abolitionism as an MCE project downplay the agency of the slaves and over emphasize the actions of non-enslaved altruists/activists?
In other words, contemporary MCE/liberalism may actually be agents fighting for patients, whereas prior MCE/liberalism was agents who happen to have political recognition fighting with agents who happen to lack recognition. Does this distinction hold water with respect to your research?
Previous MCE projects like abolitionism or liberal projects like extending suffrage to non-landowning non-whitemales were fighting against the forcible removal of voice from people who had the ability to speak for themselves. Contemporary MCE projects like animals and future people do not share this property; I believe that animals cannot advocate for themselves, and the best proxy for future peoples’ political interests I can think of falls really short. In this light, does it make any sense at all to say that there’s a continuity of MCE activism across domains/problem areas?
I think it makes sense for, say, covid-era vaccine administrators to think of themselves as carrying on the legacy of the groups who put smallpox in the ground, but it may not make the same sense for longtermists to think of themselves as carrying on the legacy of slavery abolition just because both families of projects in some sense look like MCE.
Related, does classifying abolitionism as an MCE project downplay the agency of the slaves and over emphasize the actions of non-enslaved altruists/activists?
In other words, contemporary MCE/liberalism may actually be agents fighting for patients, whereas prior MCE/liberalism was agents who happen to have political recognition fighting with agents who happen to lack recognition. Does this distinction hold water with respect to your research?