I would agree that most people would say the united states is a comparatively better place to live, but I would also argue that those numbers would look wildly different if the question was instead: “Would you prefer a world where the united states exists or western colonialism never occurred throughout North America”. Under that question, I would place a reasonably high probability your preference sampling argument would no longer provide a moral justification for that system under the same global population base.
I would take that bet, and consider it somewhat of a crux[1]. Indeed, I am honestly surprised you think it would come out the other way. I would be happy to make a bet about a survey on Positly or something.
If you want to claim that the normative evaluation only applies to the in-group, then sure. But I’d argue that’s the exact kind of self-exemption I don’t morally agree with.
Yep, I totally agree. My current beliefs here are (without total confidence) that everyone involved here would prefer a course of history where the US was established across the North American continent (my guess is also everyone would agree that you should make a lot lot of changes to how it was colonized).
I think the question of “from what moral reference frame should you evaluate whether something was worth it” is a pretty tricky one. You clearly can’t say “from the perspective of whoever was there first”, since, I do think I feel quite fine replacing insect populations and plankton from my oceans and using them for better stuff (I also think it’s obviously worth it to convert wild forests into arable land, but I might already be losing some people here).
You also clearly can’t say “just evaluate the consequences from the perspective from wherever you are now”, since that creates selection effects.
I again don’t actually think it would be a crux for this case (since I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people who lived on the US northern continent would prefer a future in which the US exists), and that seems like a better crux to go into, but I could go into the game theory here and how I would currently resolve these issues.
It would be a very straightforward crux in as much as we could elicit people’s enlightened and endorsed opinions here. The big issue seems to me just that people’s instinctual moral judgement often sucks and doesn’t correlate that much with what they would endorse after a lot of thinking, and the later seems much harder to get data on.
My current beliefs here are (without total confidence) that everyone involved here would prefer a course of history where the US was established across the North American continent (my guess is also everyone would agree that you should make a lot lot of changes to how it was colonized).
Hmmm… this is tricky. Like, how constrained are the courses of history you say that people would prefer?
Suppose the counterfactual world where people said no to Europeans genociding non-Christians on other continents, and so colonialism as I currently understand it doesn’t happen. What happens then? It sounds like you’re thinking there’s no US, and democracy worldwide is thus much weakened. I figure what would happen is, the New World still gets discovered by Europeans, and open land still gets populated with an agricultural society, one way or another. Maybe European powers take a more peaceful path in the New World, but still populate it, and there’s still a rebellion against colonial taxation, and the founding of something like the US still happens, maybe European ideas around agriculture transfer over and are adopted by those living in the Americas, as they watch Europe grow and industrialize, but we don’t have a vast empty continent, one way or another. And if the ideas of the founders hadn’t taken root in America, if we assume those people still existed, they might have taken root somewhere else. So to my mind, the counterfactual is we still have a populated North America, and democracy, we just have one less really bad thing in our history, and the “shining city on a hill” is on a different hill. Does the country or countries that exists on the landmass the US occupies today, in that counterfactual, count as the US, though? Unclear.
Personally, I’m less attached to the United States than I am to the ideals that an ideal United States would attempt to strive for. As long as those ideals are instantiated somewhere, I’m OK with that counterfactual. And I don’t see a strong logical or conceptual link between the ideals of the United States that I think are good, and colonialism, which was driven by very different ideas.
There are, in other words, a whole lot of possible counterfactuals I could imagine that keep the good I associate with US culture, while ditching colonialism. And I’m not super attached to the giant country to my south, as a political entity, if it was a bunch of small countries that might even be fun.
Yep, the exact counterfactual here is pretty tricky.
I think the trickiest moral part is how you relate in terms of interfacing with the existing legal system and existing property rights.
I think if you try to respect either of these, you are in for a really bad time, and my guess is the default outcome is that the Northern American continent roughly ends up similar to the Southern American continent. I think that would be quite bad! North America really is in a much better place than South America.
And then I also think there is a pretty decent chance that without North America, democracy never actually sweeps the world. Maybe you even get so unlucky that you reverse the industrial revolution (an outcome I don’t consider impossible as things were just brewing around that time), which would of course be maximally catastrophic, though I do think overall unlikely.
Like, the minimum thing that IMO needed to have happened to get good outcomes on the North American continent is for most of the land to be transferred away from native populations and towards the settling nations, and for the legal system of the continent to be replaced by something more like the American legal system (as opposed to whatever patchwork of tribal customs was governing things).
There are some ways this could have happened with very minimal violence. You can imagine buying all the land, but my strong guess is that you would have failed at that and if you had treated the existing population to have property rights over the continent, you would have failed to establish the boundary of an actually new nation. I think the next best choice would have been eminent domain with actually generous compensation, though unfortunately it wasn’t (to my knowledge) actually the case that early settlers, or colonizing nations, were in a good spot to generously compensate the people whose lands they were taking. Colonies generally barely broke even in those early years, and so there wasn’t a lot of surplus to go around.
Ah, ok. My understanding is that the peoples of North America didn’t have a strong sense of land ownership the way Europeans did, it was more “we take care of the land for ourselves and future generations, and the land takes care of us”. I think the peaceful resolution there would have involved a discussion between cultures so they could map and understand each other’s ontologies and ways of thinking. I expect the amount of land the colonists would have wanted to own for their own use would have been trivial for the natives to relinquish at first. And I dunno, if people think charter cities or seasteads or whatnot can have an impact by being an example of better governance --> thriving, why not small colonies with better legal systems? Of course there’s having to, y’know, fight the British. But probably the Native Americans could have helped with that (did help with that, actually? Except mostly on the British side, because they were concerned about colonial expansionism. Imagine a counterfactual where the colonies and the pre-existing population were on good terms, during the American Revolution...)
I certainly think if it had been legally possible at the time to have city-states or charter cities run by the native Americans, that would have been an absolutely amazing outcome.
Unfortunately I think city states and charter cities require really stable government and political borders and this wasn’t feasible at the time. I might be wrong about this. I also don’t think the political theory or political will for this alternative history was there in any meaningful sense (again, I think the closest analog we have is how governance of South America ended up shaking out, though it’s of course not perfect).
Similarly for small states. The US controlling the continent coast-to-coast has been hugely useful for trade and prosperity and governance. I am pretty federalist and think states should have more power, but I don’t think that extends into thinking that multiple nation states on the US continent would have been better (I think South America, and Europe in the 20th century both show different ways of how that would by default go wrong, I think).
I think the question of “from what moral reference frame should you evaluate whether something was worth it” is a pretty tricky one. You clearly can’t say “from the perspective of whoever was there first” ... You also clearly can’t say “just evaluate the consequences from the perspective from wherever you are now”
I’d think you’d want to have a decision method about this that doesn’t give the more powerful party (with the bigger army or the better weapons, etc.) more votes. If you’re making a moral decision and you don’t think might makes right, that implies that power shouldn’t give you more influence in deciding what “right” is, after all. And it’s rather worrisome that “we decide based on how many past, present and future people vote in favour of this plan” has a strategy “so just kill your opponents so your side has many descendants and their side has none”.
I could see weighting it by the number of people affected, and how strongly they prefer or disprefer various outcomes and the methods of getting to those outcomes (potentially including counterfactual people and your best estimate of what they would say in each case). I could also see a simpler decision rule, that allows for vetoes and deontological prohibitions of certain actions (like, say, genocide) and then you have to navigate through possibility-space to an alternative that no present parties veto and doesn’t violate deontological restrictions, and then whichever alternatives pass the bar for “more benefit than harm to all those affected” are worth it. This method, as with many methods that involve vetoes, protects minority interests and doesn’t let 50%+1 of the population do whatever it feels like to 50%-1 of the population under consideration.
In any case, if you’ve got two or more parties in conflict, I think you’d want some method of deciding what’s “worth it” that is impartial.
Yep! Much has been written on things like this, here and elsewhere. We could go into a whole deconstruction of moral relativism, but I don’t think it’s the best use of either of our time. For now, I maintain the position that moral relativism poses some challenges to doing analysis like this, but IMO not too much of one, and you can overcome them, and I certainly disavow any analysis of the form “we just count the preferences of current humans, ignoring the fact that they are descendants of the victors”.
I would take that bet, and consider it somewhat of a crux[1]. Indeed, I am honestly surprised you think it would come out the other way. I would be happy to make a bet about a survey on Positly or something.
Yep, I totally agree. My current beliefs here are (without total confidence) that everyone involved here would prefer a course of history where the US was established across the North American continent (my guess is also everyone would agree that you should make a lot lot of changes to how it was colonized).
I think the question of “from what moral reference frame should you evaluate whether something was worth it” is a pretty tricky one. You clearly can’t say “from the perspective of whoever was there first”, since, I do think I feel quite fine replacing insect populations and plankton from my oceans and using them for better stuff (I also think it’s obviously worth it to convert wild forests into arable land, but I might already be losing some people here).
You also clearly can’t say “just evaluate the consequences from the perspective from wherever you are now”, since that creates selection effects.
I again don’t actually think it would be a crux for this case (since I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people who lived on the US northern continent would prefer a future in which the US exists), and that seems like a better crux to go into, but I could go into the game theory here and how I would currently resolve these issues.
It would be a very straightforward crux in as much as we could elicit people’s enlightened and endorsed opinions here. The big issue seems to me just that people’s instinctual moral judgement often sucks and doesn’t correlate that much with what they would endorse after a lot of thinking, and the later seems much harder to get data on.
Hmmm… this is tricky. Like, how constrained are the courses of history you say that people would prefer?
Suppose the counterfactual world where people said no to Europeans genociding non-Christians on other continents, and so colonialism as I currently understand it doesn’t happen. What happens then? It sounds like you’re thinking there’s no US, and democracy worldwide is thus much weakened. I figure what would happen is, the New World still gets discovered by Europeans, and open land still gets populated with an agricultural society, one way or another. Maybe European powers take a more peaceful path in the New World, but still populate it, and there’s still a rebellion against colonial taxation, and the founding of something like the US still happens, maybe European ideas around agriculture transfer over and are adopted by those living in the Americas, as they watch Europe grow and industrialize, but we don’t have a vast empty continent, one way or another. And if the ideas of the founders hadn’t taken root in America, if we assume those people still existed, they might have taken root somewhere else. So to my mind, the counterfactual is we still have a populated North America, and democracy, we just have one less really bad thing in our history, and the “shining city on a hill” is on a different hill. Does the country or countries that exists on the landmass the US occupies today, in that counterfactual, count as the US, though? Unclear.
Personally, I’m less attached to the United States than I am to the ideals that an ideal United States would attempt to strive for. As long as those ideals are instantiated somewhere, I’m OK with that counterfactual. And I don’t see a strong logical or conceptual link between the ideals of the United States that I think are good, and colonialism, which was driven by very different ideas.
There are, in other words, a whole lot of possible counterfactuals I could imagine that keep the good I associate with US culture, while ditching colonialism. And I’m not super attached to the giant country to my south, as a political entity, if it was a bunch of small countries that might even be fun.
Yep, the exact counterfactual here is pretty tricky.
I think the trickiest moral part is how you relate in terms of interfacing with the existing legal system and existing property rights.
I think if you try to respect either of these, you are in for a really bad time, and my guess is the default outcome is that the Northern American continent roughly ends up similar to the Southern American continent. I think that would be quite bad! North America really is in a much better place than South America.
And then I also think there is a pretty decent chance that without North America, democracy never actually sweeps the world. Maybe you even get so unlucky that you reverse the industrial revolution (an outcome I don’t consider impossible as things were just brewing around that time), which would of course be maximally catastrophic, though I do think overall unlikely.
Could you elaborate a bit? This part is not clear to me, but seems quite important.
Like, the minimum thing that IMO needed to have happened to get good outcomes on the North American continent is for most of the land to be transferred away from native populations and towards the settling nations, and for the legal system of the continent to be replaced by something more like the American legal system (as opposed to whatever patchwork of tribal customs was governing things).
There are some ways this could have happened with very minimal violence. You can imagine buying all the land, but my strong guess is that you would have failed at that and if you had treated the existing population to have property rights over the continent, you would have failed to establish the boundary of an actually new nation. I think the next best choice would have been eminent domain with actually generous compensation, though unfortunately it wasn’t (to my knowledge) actually the case that early settlers, or colonizing nations, were in a good spot to generously compensate the people whose lands they were taking. Colonies generally barely broke even in those early years, and so there wasn’t a lot of surplus to go around.
Ah, ok. My understanding is that the peoples of North America didn’t have a strong sense of land ownership the way Europeans did, it was more “we take care of the land for ourselves and future generations, and the land takes care of us”. I think the peaceful resolution there would have involved a discussion between cultures so they could map and understand each other’s ontologies and ways of thinking. I expect the amount of land the colonists would have wanted to own for their own use would have been trivial for the natives to relinquish at first. And I dunno, if people think charter cities or seasteads or whatnot can have an impact by being an example of better governance --> thriving, why not small colonies with better legal systems? Of course there’s having to, y’know, fight the British. But probably the Native Americans could have helped with that (did help with that, actually? Except mostly on the British side, because they were concerned about colonial expansionism. Imagine a counterfactual where the colonies and the pre-existing population were on good terms, during the American Revolution...)
I certainly think if it had been legally possible at the time to have city-states or charter cities run by the native Americans, that would have been an absolutely amazing outcome.
Unfortunately I think city states and charter cities require really stable government and political borders and this wasn’t feasible at the time. I might be wrong about this. I also don’t think the political theory or political will for this alternative history was there in any meaningful sense (again, I think the closest analog we have is how governance of South America ended up shaking out, though it’s of course not perfect).
Similarly for small states. The US controlling the continent coast-to-coast has been hugely useful for trade and prosperity and governance. I am pretty federalist and think states should have more power, but I don’t think that extends into thinking that multiple nation states on the US continent would have been better (I think South America, and Europe in the 20th century both show different ways of how that would by default go wrong, I think).
I’d think you’d want to have a decision method about this that doesn’t give the more powerful party (with the bigger army or the better weapons, etc.) more votes. If you’re making a moral decision and you don’t think might makes right, that implies that power shouldn’t give you more influence in deciding what “right” is, after all. And it’s rather worrisome that “we decide based on how many past, present and future people vote in favour of this plan” has a strategy “so just kill your opponents so your side has many descendants and their side has none”.
I could see weighting it by the number of people affected, and how strongly they prefer or disprefer various outcomes and the methods of getting to those outcomes (potentially including counterfactual people and your best estimate of what they would say in each case). I could also see a simpler decision rule, that allows for vetoes and deontological prohibitions of certain actions (like, say, genocide) and then you have to navigate through possibility-space to an alternative that no present parties veto and doesn’t violate deontological restrictions, and then whichever alternatives pass the bar for “more benefit than harm to all those affected” are worth it. This method, as with many methods that involve vetoes, protects minority interests and doesn’t let 50%+1 of the population do whatever it feels like to 50%-1 of the population under consideration.
In any case, if you’ve got two or more parties in conflict, I think you’d want some method of deciding what’s “worth it” that is impartial.
Yep! Much has been written on things like this, here and elsewhere. We could go into a whole deconstruction of moral relativism, but I don’t think it’s the best use of either of our time. For now, I maintain the position that moral relativism poses some challenges to doing analysis like this, but IMO not too much of one, and you can overcome them, and I certainly disavow any analysis of the form “we just count the preferences of current humans, ignoring the fact that they are descendants of the victors”.