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by autoexec 928 days ago
> Historically, almost every country that has "developed" into an "industrialized" nation has had a very difficult, dangerous, violent learning curve.

Historically, countries that industrialized didn't have an extensive history of examples to learn from and they had to figure it out for themselves. Every currently developing country doesn't get their own turn at being horrible to people or the environment.

The developed world should expect developing nations to learn from history and avoid the errors made in the past just as we'd expect them to take advantage of the advances in science and technology that have been reached.

1 comments

Are you saying rich countries should force poor countries to adopt to their ethical and moral codes? Should they adopt all of them, like our stringent building codes? What about minimum wages? Vehicle safety standards?

I'm being supercilious, but hopefully you can see the problem.

I'm saying that rich countries shouldn't enable or accept poor countries exploiting child slaves and polluting the planet we all share because "it's their turn now". That's flawed logic.

We certainly shouldn't force other countries to follow our morals, but we shouldn't give them our money and support or make excuses for them while they act like monsters either. We should encourage them to do better, help them when we can, and lead by example. At a minimum we should be holding our own nation's corporations accountable when they're knowingly profiting from children being trafficked and enslaved.

Ok, but the article this discussion is about didn't show examples of child slavery, but of child labour, with a coverup being performed by locals, and suggestions of a large corp not doing enough to verify things independently.

Rich countries should help poorer countries lift themselves out of poverty, but let's not pretend everything is clear cut and simple. How do you deal with corruption? What is an acceptable level of violations is acceptable? How do you measure the good you do vs the harm you're causing?