Michael Huemer – TRANSCRIPT
I’m a philosopher and as a philosopher, I sometimes hear people complain that there hasn’t been any progress in philosophy, that philosophers are still debating the same questions they were debating 2,000 years ago. Well, this is completely false, actually there’s been enormous progress and in particular, there’s been progress in moral philosophy, so I want to talk about that.
I’m going to talk about how human values have progressed over time, and what does this can tell us about the nature and source of values. Most of this progress has been in a direction we could call a liberalization of values. I don’t mean this in the sense of contemporary American politics, I mean, liberal and a broader philosophical sense which is characterized by these 3 things.
First, we see increasing respect for the dignity and the rights of the individual over time. Second, we see an increasing recognition of the moral equality of persons as opposed to the earlier idea that there were some people or groups who are inherently superior to others and therefore, entitled to rule over them.
And the third thing is we see an increasing aversion to violence, and an aversion to resorting to physical force to solve human problems. I’m just going to talk about some examples of this moral progress. Several examples: first start with the issue of slavery. Slavery was very widely practiced throughout human history – throughout history and across the world – not only that but it was actually explicitly endorsed by some of the moral thinkers of the past. This is a quotation from Aristotle: “But the art of acquiring slaves, I mean of justly acquiring them, differs both from the art of the master and the art of the slave, being a species of hunting or war.” Try to imagine somebody today saying that we need to go to war to capture some slaves.
Second, this is from the Bible: “If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod, and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.” You’ll appreciate that these are not minor or obscure sources, this is Aristotle who is one of the leading figures, possibly the leading figure in the history of Western philosophy, and the Bible, which is considered by many to be the leading source of moral wisdom for human beings. Fortunately, attitudes have changed dramatically over the past 200 years. This is the timeline for when slavery was abolished in each of 49 different countries.
Slavery is now illegal everywhere in the world. The last country to abolish it was Mauritania in 1981. War was also a worse and more commonly practice in the past than it’s today, and it was also endorsed by some of the moral thinkers of the past. This is a quotation from the famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.” And elsewhere he says: “One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.” And then this is from the famous French author Emile Zola: “Would not the end of war be the end of humanity? War is life itself. Nothing exists in nature, is born, grows, or multiplies except by combat.”
In the past, more people as a percentage of the population died as a result of war; this graph is based upon anthropological studies of 7 different primitive tribes, this is the estimated percentage of people who end their lives as a result of war. You can see that it ranges from around 10% to around 30%. The tiny bar at the bottom that you can barely see is Europe and the United States in the 20th century, that’s including both World Wars. This other graph, this is the same idea except this is based on prehistoric primitive societies.
This is from archaeological sites where the archaeologist dug out human remains and they looked for signs of death at the hands of other human beings, such as weapon marks on the bones. So this is an estimate of how many people, what percentage of people in these societies, died at the hands of other human beings. And again, the tiny bar at the bottom that you can barely see, that’s Europe and the United States in the 20th century. Torture and execution were also much more popular in the past, so these are medieval torture devices. This one is a chair that you could be asked to sit in; actual torture device.
This one is known as the Judas cradle, the victim was forced to sit on the point of that pyramid. This is how they used to execute people in the Ancient Rome as you all know about that, and this is how the witches were executed during the Middle Ages. And by the way, these are only two of the many horrific ways of killing people that human beings have developed over the centuries, and those were just a couple of the many horrible torture devices. Those aren’t even the most horrific pictures that I could have shown. During the French Revolution they came up with this new humane method of execution; it was the guillotine, and after the execution, the executioner would hold up the head for the crowd to look at, because this was a former public entertainment, became this great spectacle and people would be entertained by looking at that.
OK, this is when judicial torture was abolished in each of 19 different countries; it’s now been abolished throughout Europe and much of the world. Mostly between 1600 and the year 2000, torture has become much less popular. Execution has also become much less popular. This is the US execution rate from the year 1700 until 2000. This is the number of executions per 100,000 population per year, so, your probability of being executed in the US has gone down dramatically.
Throughout history, the overwhelming majority of societies have been dictatorships, the overwhelming majority of governments had been dictatorial, only in about the last 200 years that has changed dramatically.