I’m sure this thread idea has been done before. But what do people do today that in 50-100 years will be considered morally repugnant?
Generally, my hope is each generation is not only wealthier, but more moral than the generation before. I hope this trend continues and stuff we take for granted is seen as disgusting by our grandchildren. I look forward to the day when my grandchildren generation views my generation as backwards and evil.
Examples:
Eating meat. After lab grown meat is widespread, the idea of enslaving animals for food will be seem as horrible.
Circuses and animal shows.
Ignoring homelessness and looking the other way on the issue.
Being tough on crime. Apparently head injuries could play a major role in criminality. So if crime is due more to things like head injuries, mental illness, socioeconomic status or lead exposure, fixing that is superior to building more prisons. They may look at us the way we look at societies that burned epileptics at the stake for being witches.
Pollution?
Ignoring health care and poverty overseas. I tend to think someday we will have a global basic health system that covers all of humanity with some forms of care, and our current system of ignoring it when nations fail to provide basic health care will be abhorrent.
Homophobia, opposition to same-sex marriage in particular. Back when I was still a church-goer, it occurred to me that, from behind the very same pulpit from which the preacher was railing against same-sex marriage, three generations ago the preacher was railing against mixed-race marriage. Even at the conservative church that I used to attend, a pastor who railed against mixed-race marriage from behind the pulpit would be shown the door.
Hopefully bullying, but I posit that there’s something in human nature that causes us to ostracize and torment others, particularly those who aren’t like us. It may never go away.
There was an episode of one of the Star Treks where they travel back in time to our era, with a conversation between the doctor and the captain:
Doctor (looking at tricorder): “I don’t understand: There are people walking around here with curable diseases.”
Captain: Well, you have to remember that their medical technology is much less advanced than ours."
Doctor: “But that’s just it. I mean curable with their technology.”
Another thing that I think that future generations will have a hard time forgiving us is our use of heat engines for everything. Don’t we realize how horribly inefficient those are? It’s one thing to use up irreplaceable fossil fuels, but far worse to use them so wastefully.
I thought about these two but didn’t include them because I felt we are already making progress on them.
I remembered back in the 80s and 90s, using slurs like faggot was perfectly acceptable and Trans people were considered mentally ill.
Plus I remember bullying from 20-30 years ago in school. But my brother who has kids told me it is totally different now. Maybe his kids are in a better school than we were, but bullying like my generation faced in school doesn’t happen in his kids school according to the parents I’ve met. I don’t know if that is a widespread improvement or not. I’d hope so.
We’ve been having this thread for close to twenty years. I really want someone to go back and see if anyone ever said
“I think current attitudes toward sexual harassment will seem absolutely barbaric. As a society, we often dismiss things like groping, self-exposure, forced kisses, lewd suggestions as just boorish at worst and sometimes as a perk of power. I have reason to hope that at some point in the future, that will just be appalling, and we will call assault what it is.”
Because I don’t remember ever seeing that, and if we didn’t see this coming, well, we are really bad at this.
Yeah. I think not living sustainably will be seen as far worse than it is now. Right now using up all the resources and polluting the environment are considered acceptable. I assume in the future that’ll change. In part because they’ll be the ones who have to clean up the pollution and learn to live with fewer resources.
“Things that are considered acceptable today but will be seen as normally repulsive in the future” AKA “What opinions do I have about society now that I wish would change in the future”.
I can’t see people being morally outraged over technological limitations. Are you morally outraged that the first railroads used steam locomotives instead of diesel electric? Are you morally outraged that we used oxen to plow fields for thousands of years? How about the fact that we used plowing methods and schemes that were detrimental to the soil?
True. A century from now biotechnology may advance to the point were it’s a trivial matter to change a person’s physical sex, even to the point of reproductive capacity. Or the standard treatment for gender dysphoria may simply be to use nanotechnology to alter the subject’s neurochemistry to accept whatever sex they were assigned at birth and the whole concept of sex reassignment surgery may be considered an unspeakable misguided & barbaric act. Or the entire issue make be irrelevant because technological civilization has collapsed and most of the surviving humans are back to toiling in the fields.
Doubt it, as it will be their predecessors who will pave the way for these ‘critics’ and realize that it was a necessary step to get them where they are.
Raising animals to then kill and actually eat them! Hunting will be seen as a barbaric practice. Which it is. But these developments as well as the others mentioned above assume that we will continue on in some kind of more technologically “civilized” way, which, as the latest US election has shown and is showing, is not guaranteed.
All of us, through taxes, as we do for roads, schools, police, etc. I have no problem at all adding medical care, public transportation and such to that list. I stand ready to pay toward the care of others in the form of a national health system.
And on that subject, I think in the future it will be very uncool to say, “Why should I contribute money toward the health care of other people?” While this has always been a churlish and selfish argument within our health care debate, I predict that at some point it will actually be seen as downright foolish.
Burying ones enemies without ritually consuming their strength. Voting for ones rulers instead of submitting to the will of the God King. Keeping ones pinky uncovered outdoors where just anyone can see it.
Prefixing the future is hard, because people always assume the future is going to be like the present, but more so. If you look at predictions from 100 years ago, people miss a lot, but because they’re dumb, but because we take for granted stuff they never thought of. Even 50 years ago, who’d predict the Soviet Union would have fallen? Who’s predict the way the Internet changed our lives.
The same is true of values. 100, it was the height of I’ll manners to go outside without a hat. How many people back then do you think predicted, “We’ll see the end of hats”?
It seems to me that ableism is the next one up on the chopping block. In fact, I’d say to look at the “SJWs” of today to find what stuff. Sure, a lot of it won’t make it, but some of it will. And it’s really the best you can do.
If it’s not considered an issue now, you guys are right that predicting it is impossible.
That said, I do suspect the harassment issue was thought up before. It seems like it would fit into the feminist stuff. It is a discrepancy in men vs. women.