Imagine that an extreme and unrealistically-honest racist says the following (OBVIOUSLY NOT MY ACTUAL VIEWS):
"""Lynching a few black people is *robustly good*. No one is like “Black people? They're great! I want my town to be overrun by black people!” (The black people themselves of course think otherwise, but I am a racist and don't care about their opinion any more than you cared about the hookworms' opinion.) Meanwhile even if you are a hookworm-hater, it should be pretty obvious that, much of the time, when you genocide a whole species, that is a bad thing to do."""
In a logical-formal sense, this seems to be the exact same argument that you made. So can you differentiate the two *without* falling back on object-level arguments about how racism is bad whereas eliminating parasites is good? (Because while racism is in fact bad and eliminating parasites is in fact good, it sounded to me like your point here was to highlight some heuristic other than such object-level arguments, as a supplement for when our moral compass turns out to be wrong.)
That's true *now*, but this heuristic isn't that useful if it needs the present to decide what *would have been* a robustly good move in the past. So assume our hypothetical racist writer is writing in a part of pre Civil War South where it's an empirical fact that he's surrounded by a whole lot of other racists who also don't want (non-enslaved) black people in their town.
There were lots of anti-lynching people in the South during the time period discussed in this post. There were also lots of anti-lynching people in the North. And if you take a historical view, there are any number of cultures in which it would be considered morally wrong to form an extrajudicial organization which tortures people to death (including various cultures that believe that only the state has the right to torture people!). There are also any number of cultures that don't mind living next to black people (ancient Rome!).
Conversely, please find me one single pro-hookworm-infection advocacy group in any culture throughout history.
I have a general rule of thumb: There's no wrong reason for doing a good thing. If you're giving money to a poor person, or tutoring a child who's confused about his homework, or preventing a mob from killing someone, those are good things, and it doesn't make sense to criticize you because your reasons are bad.
If you're giving money to that homeless guy because he's white and you feel bad that white people are brought to such a low point, I'm not going to criticize you for it. If you're only willing to tutor that child because he's black and you want to help black kids do better in school, okay, fine. If you're only hiding that guy from the angry mob because he's a Jew and you feel an identity with him, that's alright. Criticizing someone for doing good because you think they did it for the wrong reason just seems like it makes the world a worse place.
On the other hand, it seems pretty plausible to me that the advocates for hookworm elimination you found were simply making the case in the way they believed would convince the biggest audience. I've often read the claim that welfare policies are easier to get public support for in relatively homogenous societies, where the recipients code as "us" rather than as "them." It wouldn't be a shock if that was also true for the hookworm elimination effort.
I have a question about the historical eugenicist movement that I haven't heard an answer to from other people, and which I think you might be able to answer: To what extent were things like forced sterilizations due to democratically decided policy, vs due to individual decisions made by eugenicists in positions of power?
I used to be puzzled by the tendency for opponents of eugenics to target even vaguely related things like proponents of wmbryo selection and so on. However, I recently realized that I had assumed eugenics to be a democratically decided policy with broad support, whereas the eugenicist purging makes a lot of sense if it is much more unilateral. I could imagine e.g. a high-ranking doctor who is committed to eugenics deciding to sterilize disabled people, and then being protected by faking consent documents, or by medical malpractice insurance, or by sympathetic eugenicist judges. If this sort of thing applies, then the eugenicist purging makes a lot more sense, as disabled people then can't trust systems that permit eugenicists to be in positions of power, because of the unilateral actions they might take. Things that might secretly indicate eugenics sympathies (such as talking about genetics too much), or memes which might be exploited to defend unilateral eugenicists (such as endorsement of genetic enhancement), suddenly become huge red flags because they might indicate danger despite official policies.
But I don't know enough about the history of eugenics to know if this is the answer to my puzzles.
Imagine that an extreme and unrealistically-honest racist says the following (OBVIOUSLY NOT MY ACTUAL VIEWS):
"""Lynching a few black people is *robustly good*. No one is like “Black people? They're great! I want my town to be overrun by black people!” (The black people themselves of course think otherwise, but I am a racist and don't care about their opinion any more than you cared about the hookworms' opinion.) Meanwhile even if you are a hookworm-hater, it should be pretty obvious that, much of the time, when you genocide a whole species, that is a bad thing to do."""
In a logical-formal sense, this seems to be the exact same argument that you made. So can you differentiate the two *without* falling back on object-level arguments about how racism is bad whereas eliminating parasites is good? (Because while racism is in fact bad and eliminating parasites is in fact good, it sounded to me like your point here was to highlight some heuristic other than such object-level arguments, as a supplement for when our moral compass turns out to be wrong.)
I mean, as an empirical fact, lots of people don't mind black people being in their towns, and nearly everyone minds getting hookworm.
That's true *now*, but this heuristic isn't that useful if it needs the present to decide what *would have been* a robustly good move in the past. So assume our hypothetical racist writer is writing in a part of pre Civil War South where it's an empirical fact that he's surrounded by a whole lot of other racists who also don't want (non-enslaved) black people in their town.
There were lots of anti-lynching people in the South during the time period discussed in this post. There were also lots of anti-lynching people in the North. And if you take a historical view, there are any number of cultures in which it would be considered morally wrong to form an extrajudicial organization which tortures people to death (including various cultures that believe that only the state has the right to torture people!). There are also any number of cultures that don't mind living next to black people (ancient Rome!).
Conversely, please find me one single pro-hookworm-infection advocacy group in any culture throughout history.
I have a general rule of thumb: There's no wrong reason for doing a good thing. If you're giving money to a poor person, or tutoring a child who's confused about his homework, or preventing a mob from killing someone, those are good things, and it doesn't make sense to criticize you because your reasons are bad.
If you're giving money to that homeless guy because he's white and you feel bad that white people are brought to such a low point, I'm not going to criticize you for it. If you're only willing to tutor that child because he's black and you want to help black kids do better in school, okay, fine. If you're only hiding that guy from the angry mob because he's a Jew and you feel an identity with him, that's alright. Criticizing someone for doing good because you think they did it for the wrong reason just seems like it makes the world a worse place.
On the other hand, it seems pretty plausible to me that the advocates for hookworm elimination you found were simply making the case in the way they believed would convince the biggest audience. I've often read the claim that welfare policies are easier to get public support for in relatively homogenous societies, where the recipients code as "us" rather than as "them." It wouldn't be a shock if that was also true for the hookworm elimination effort.
I have a question about the historical eugenicist movement that I haven't heard an answer to from other people, and which I think you might be able to answer: To what extent were things like forced sterilizations due to democratically decided policy, vs due to individual decisions made by eugenicists in positions of power?
I used to be puzzled by the tendency for opponents of eugenics to target even vaguely related things like proponents of wmbryo selection and so on. However, I recently realized that I had assumed eugenics to be a democratically decided policy with broad support, whereas the eugenicist purging makes a lot of sense if it is much more unilateral. I could imagine e.g. a high-ranking doctor who is committed to eugenics deciding to sterilize disabled people, and then being protected by faking consent documents, or by medical malpractice insurance, or by sympathetic eugenicist judges. If this sort of thing applies, then the eugenicist purging makes a lot more sense, as disabled people then can't trust systems that permit eugenicists to be in positions of power, because of the unilateral actions they might take. Things that might secretly indicate eugenics sympathies (such as talking about genetics too much), or memes which might be exploited to defend unilateral eugenicists (such as endorsement of genetic enhancement), suddenly become huge red flags because they might indicate danger despite official policies.
But I don't know enough about the history of eugenics to know if this is the answer to my puzzles.
The fact that this post neglects the perspective of the hookworms is troublesome.
> No one is like “hookworm? Hookworm is great! I want to be infected with hookworm!”
Believe it or not, this is a thing some people with autoimmune diseases say, and some go to a bit of trouble to get infected.
If you do a good thing for a bad reason, you still did a good thing.