Erich_Grunewald
Well, I don’t disagree! I tried to make up the distance in the parenthetical statement, but I didn’t mean to imply that treatment of humans & animals ought to be judged by the exact same standard. What I was getting at was more something like this, quoting Christine Korsgaard:
Then there is the disturbing use of the phrase “treated like an animal.” People whose rights are violated, people whose interests are ignored or overridden, people who are used, harmed, neglected, starved or unjustly imprisoned standardly complain that they are being treated like animals, or protest that after all they are not just animals. Of course, rhetorically, complaining that you are being treated like an animal is more effective than complaining that you are being treated like a thing or an object or a stone, for a thing or an object or a stone has no interests that can be ignored or overridden. In the sense intended, an object can’t be treated badly, while an animal can. But then the curious implication seems to be that animals are the beings that it’s all right to treat badly, and the complainant is saying that he is not one of those.
That is, there’s a kind of tension in that sort of complaint. It implies that animals are mistreated by some standard, but that, whereas humans can be mistreated in that way, animals can’t. So I meant to say that, if we do think that animals can be mistreated in that way (& many do, of course) then that sort of complaint is almost contradictory.
Two Inadequate Arguments against Moral Vegetarianism
Tolstoy’s Famine Relief Work in Ryazan & Considering Moral Intuitions
Hmm, I use effektiv-spenden.org & that’s the only option I know of. Maybe you could try emailing them to ask about EA Funds? The Effective Altruism Foundation, which used to offer this service, were always responsive & helpful when I contacted them.
Art? I haven’t looked into it much, but I don’t really know of any significant improvement in fine arts for a very long time—not in style/technique and not even in the technology (e.g., methods of casting a bronze sculpture). I’d also suggest that music has gotten less sophisticated, but this is super-subjective and treads in culture-war territory, so I’m just going to throw it out there as a wild-ass hypothesis for someone to follow up on at some point.
I’m a little bit late to the party here, but there are examples of improvements in sculpture technology/technique/style leading to new (& very beautiful) works of art, see e.g. Barry X Ball’s works made with a combination of 3d-scanning, CAD software, CNC mills & traditional techniques. Not to mention he has a wide variety of stone available to him thanks to the global trade system.
As for music, I guess that totally depends on what you’re comparing. The proper comparison for today’s popular music isn’t Beethoven or Bach but folk music & perhaps music for drawing rooms & salons, which, although they had their own beauties, were nowhere near as complex & intricate as the traditional European art music that is most listened to today. Of the past, only the best survives, but in the present the good & the bad coexist. That said, I think maybe there’s a kernel of truth in what you suggest. But we shouldn’t trust our intuitive judgment on this.
Thanks, this was an interesting write-up. I have one, well, let’s call it a concern or maybe caveat. You write:
I think this relies on all perspective-havers having some shared norms that enable them to find truth collectively. Philosophy, for example, which while not a science benefits enormously from diverse viewpoints, has norms of logic, reasoning & charity that are essential to finding truth. More generally, my impression is that groups & teams function better when they have some shared values, goals & norms. So that’s the caveat that I would add – that there still need to be shared norms, at least truth-seeking norms.