The bad news is that, ignoring the minority of proactive rescuers, there were no moral supermen.
If you’re looking for moral supermen, why would you ignore the minority of proactive rescuers? Aren’t they exactly what you’re looking for? The fact that they’re a small minority isn’t a reason to ignore them—no one expects “supermen” to be common.
Given that the post starts out by framing the issue in terms of “moral supermen” and saying it would be good to understand who they are and how they got that way, it seems a bit odd that it ends by deciding to ignore the only candidates we have for moral supermen, and saying that if you ignore those then there are no moral supermen.
(It may well be that in fact to an excellent approximation there weren’t any moral supermen, and that even those proactive morally-motivated rescuers were that way for some specific reason that doesn’t have much to do with generally better morality on their part. But why not at least look?)
There’s something odd about this:
If you’re looking for moral supermen, why would you ignore the minority of proactive rescuers? Aren’t they exactly what you’re looking for? The fact that they’re a small minority isn’t a reason to ignore them—no one expects “supermen” to be common.
Given that the post starts out by framing the issue in terms of “moral supermen” and saying it would be good to understand who they are and how they got that way, it seems a bit odd that it ends by deciding to ignore the only candidates we have for moral supermen, and saying that if you ignore those then there are no moral supermen.
(It may well be that in fact to an excellent approximation there weren’t any moral supermen, and that even those proactive morally-motivated rescuers were that way for some specific reason that doesn’t have much to do with generally better morality on their part. But why not at least look?)