Sex. We’d all be a lot better-off without it. Yea, yea… make the joke that none of us would be here without it. That’s not the point. We have other ways of propagating our species.
I think it’s responsible for much more heartbreak than love. It over-complicates relationships… even forges relationships that, otherwise, shouldn’t be. Sex-appeal is an archaic value system that can’t die quick enough.
The problem with extending that idea too far isn’t that ‘everyone’ would pay for it through taxes (it’s obviously far from everyone, but that’s not the main point). The problem is that these goods consume real, scarce resources, and making them ‘free’ (as in marginal cost to an individual to use a little more is zero) leads to wasting them.
So there are actually legitimate countervailing factors. One legitimate idea is that people shouldn’t be in need if society as a whole has the means to prevent it. Another is that waste should not be encouraged. And the second influences the first. A society that encourages waste will be less able to provide for everyone.
So it depends on the specifics. The original post said people ‘shouldn’t pay’ for electricity or water. That’s absurd. The latter is a real environmental menace as things stand (many dry places in the world where water is heavily subsidized so overused and aquifers drawn down more and more). And I’d hope those in favor of encouraging more waste of electricity wouldn’t in the next breath invoke a moral imperative to limit GHG emissions. You can subsidize people with money and have them decide what it’s worth to pay for simple commodities at market prices. If a ‘future society’ was able to lower the real marginal cost (including environmental impact) of greater electricity and water consumption close to zero, that would be different, but as of now making water and electricity ‘free’ to individual consumers is a stupid idea, there’s no polite way around it.
You focused mainly on healthcare. In that case it’s more plausible to say it should be a public good because of the greater complexity of supply/demand dynamics, lack of information to consumers, the skewed consumption depending on personal need (you get really sick or not), etc. But any real plan must ration care to avoid waste, all such real plans do. I think it’s unproductive to the debate to cast socialized medicine as a moral imperative. I think it’s an example of the over-moralizing of a lot of public policy debate now. But one can make a plausible argument that (more) socialized medicine would advance public well being.
While I won’t engage in that old debate, I will say this:
I don’t know you or your life situation. But if you end up needing care and are unable to contribute toward it, I’ll continue to support the existence of a system that helps you. I’ll do it gladly, I’ll be cognizant of it when I sign my tax form, and I won’t ask for an accounting of whether you merit such help.
Guessing we will all come to this agreement eventually. But we currently have a lot of people who are unable to get over the idea that someone, somewhere might be getting something they don’t “deserve”.
Edit: Posted before seeing Corry’s contribution. Just quickly, I’d say it focuses disproportionately on waste in the system. I think that’s become the sole focus of many who oppose a national health system, but rather cynically IMHO. There’s always going to be waste in any human designed system. While of course it should be minimized, I have the sense that many people are intolerant of the fact that some waste will always exist, and it means that sometimes resources will go to those who aren’t “deserving”.
I’m advocating getting away from that mindset and doing what’s right anyway. I’m willing to pay for it.
Religion, eating meat, football, not having UHC, etc. The future will be far, far left.
One issue which I’ve wondered about is the issue of racism in dating preferences. This seems to be one form of racism that may never go away. Most forms of racism are firmly on the way out, but not this one - the reason being that it requires immense personal sacrifice, one that many people just consider too much to make.
For an employer to hire an employee of a race that he/she dislikes, does not require *that *great of a personal sacrifice, for instance. Nor does it put a big burden on a school administrator if he/she has to give admission to students of a disliked race. But…dating or marrying someone of a race that you do not like, would be an *immense *personal burden to most people. And so for that reason, I suspect racial preferences in dating are here to stay, for a long time to come. They may be publicly silent about it, but deep down, people will discriminate on this. The personal stakes are so high that people just won’t stop discrimination in this regard.
Libertarians.
I wonder if that’s tongue in cheek. I hope so. Or maybe it’s a coincidence that on a generally left leaning forum almost all the suggestions for future moral imperative are current left leaning ideas. 
A contrary plausible one IMO is that abortion comes to be more broadly viewed as morally wrong.
People’s attitudes toward race are IMO a matter of assessing facts and probabilities as they appear through a clouded lens subject to distortion by irrational fears and prejudices. A theory of racial attitudes which insists any ‘incorrect’ view on race is wholly irrational, coupled with a belief in the ‘arc of history’ toward more rationality, means ‘racism’ disappears eventually. OTOH if racial attitudes are in part a reflection of rationally processed reality, some attitudes called ‘racist’ may not disappear ever.
And you can believe the latter at least to some degree from either a ‘left’ or ‘right’ POV. The Ta Neisi Coates type view AIUI is basically that (white, anti-black) racism has and continues to make sense for white people: it’s not some fever dream they are going to wake up from. And from a right leaning perspective, as I think is implicit in your point whether or not intended, if there really is a high expected cost to certain behavior, rational people are going to steer away from it. Just hectoring them that their choice is ‘immoral’ because ‘racist’ has real limits*. You have to show it is really is irrational.
*one view is perhaps that it doesn’t, that you can shame people into going against their own interests if you push hard enough, and that’s the future. I guess this is more likely on the part of left leaning people and they could give various recent examples they believe prove the point. But for example most people had only a limited and indirect personal rational reason to care about the redefinition of marriage. It was sold as a moral feel good: people would rather say ‘I’m a good person so I changed my mind on the issue’ than ‘you’ve succeeding in convincing me I’ve no real reason to care’. That doesn’t work as well when there’s a real rational self interest opposing the change.
I haven’t thought through the exact details but it will be in terms of mental health. Just as we look back at the state hospital system, and before that just leaving the mentally and physically challenged to roam the outskirts of settlements, I think the Future Us will see our return (in a manner of speaking) to abandonment to the streets and poorly operated/uncontrolled shelters as being the great sin of our day.
I was answering the original point, which included ‘free’ electricity, water and public transport, which points more starkly to the general existence of the countervailing need to avoid excessive waste. In case of ‘free’ water or electricity it is (or should be) obvious to any reasonable person the waste consideration overwhelms any benefit. Especially considering again that with water or electricity you can tax some people to give other people enough money to purchase necessary amounts of basic goods (including those) at market prices, and avoid that particular distortion*. The moral issue if any is how much money (I still think moralizing is highly likely to cause more heat than light about any of this stuff).
As I also already conceded, health care is more complicated. It’s not a simple commodity, big info asymmetries, big variation in how much a given person will need, etc. But that’s the main difference IMO, that it might practically be better to make it a public good with rationing than use price signals. OTOH in the US there’s a system that’s about 50% socialized without the political will for necessary rationing on the socialized side (Medicare headed for unsustainability for example), and poor price signaling on the ‘private’ side. But again I think making it out a simple moral issue to ‘do the right thing’ is not very helpful.
*the disincentive effect of subsidizing people is still real though. You might be right some people are obsessed with who ‘deserves’ public aid, but there can in fact be a net cost to taxing some people more to give others more, a smaller total pie can result, beyond a certain point at least. It’s not a simple moral issue.
The idea that you should have a private life might go. I can imagine people who choose not to post everything about themselves online in an easily searchable format being viewed as dodgy and not to be trusted.
As an extension of the that point, either people will conform their opinions to what they think the group thinks to avoid being a pariah *or * the concept of shame/embarrassment will disappear and no-one will care about being pariahed because they can find a new group of friends by asking GoogleBook to hook them up.
I’m surprised to see nobody has mentioned Neapolitan ice cream. Well, now it has been mentioned.
Either that, or it’s fully socialized so everyone gets their fair share.
To be clear, I’m not saying that our descendants will have a hard time forgiving us for using fossil fuels. That’s a necessary stepping stone to get to the point where we won’t need them any more. I’m saying that they’ll have a hard time forgiving us for using them in heat engines. There are a lot of ways you can go from chemical energy in a fuel to kinetic energy in a car, but the method we’ve chosen is to turn all of that chemical energy into low-quality heat, and then to scrounge in that heat for what scraps of useful work we can salvage from it. And there’s almost no research to even change that. At least we’re finally starting to move away from producing visible light via incandescence.
Throwing food away.
I fully disagree with this. I have my morals. You have yours. We almost certainly don’t completely agree on them, nor do either of us agree 100% with societal mores.
Slavery was as morally wrong in 1850 as it is today. And if in 150 years society becomes brutally, uncompromisingly authoritarian, it will be just as wrong that day as it would be today.
Actually, that might work. My point was to exclude sex from clouding our decisions or influencing our value system. But your idea could possibly cheapen it to the same end.
There are many medical treatments that were considered advantageous not so many years ago that horrify us now. The same thing will be true in the future about modern medicine.
Abortion and eating meat. In ten thousand years they will look at us similar to the Nazi death camps.
I eat meat and really don’t care if women get abortions as long as I’m not paying for it as a taxpayer.
Was it also immoral to own horse and make them pull plows all day? Is it still immoral, even in cultures where it is still practiced? Last year, in Addis Ababa, some construction work was taking place at my hotel. The concrete blocks arrived strapped to the backs of donkeys. Economically, it was cheaper than hiring a truck.
Really, slavery still exists in modified form. In the early USA, the slaves were cheap labor, for which the owner assumed responsibility for the feeding, housing and health care of the workers. Now, we just offshore the cheap labor, exploit those who are healthy enough to work, and leave the welfare of the rejects to fall where they may, resorting to crime or begging, unless their feeble national economies can provide social assurances, for which our industrialists take no responsibility. The difference is trivial. The labor has no realistic alternative – be productive to wealthy masters in exchange for marginal existence, of fall off the edge.
As for eating meat, there will be replacements that are indistinguishable from the real stuff, so the issue will be about as moot as whether radio operators should learn morse code.
Some form of abortion will probably be around as long as human-borne pregnancy is. However, in 10,000 years (!) there would very likely be artificial pregnancy – artificial wombs – and nobody will need to do it biologically any longer.
re the back-formation of opinion, shrug: no way to know. They may be suffering from such overpopulation as to hold a popular view that abortion should have been much more wide-spread. It’s impossible to predict the future, and doubly impossible to predict what the future will think of the past.
(But I think you’re wrong about the Nazi comparison.)
Divorce rate in the US near a 40-year low.
What will future societies think about spreading misinformation when evidence is so easily within reach?