| How would you know if you had a utopian society yet? Who gets to define what is a "thought of evil"? Is freeing slaves evil, or against the natural order of things? What about considering interracial marriage? Or living an openly homosexual lifestyle? Would it be better if the police put a stop to it before such people started doing such horrible things? Locked up people before they had a chance to make their morally corrupting case to society? Suppressed discussion so that ideas could not be thrashed out, improved, built upon and weaponised in a memetic fashion to spread like some awful disease through the minds of right-thinking folks? We may think we're incredibly moral, because we've got to the point where we now recognise these past beliefs as wrong, even if we're still a few steps from getting everyone to accept them. But for those growing up now who realise the importance of LGBT rights, the generation before you were convinced of their morality for recognising mixed-marriage rights over their predecessors, who were convinced of their morality for recognising the evil of slavery over their predecessors. If history is any guide at all, it's likely there are things which you think are just the natural order, that will in the future be successfully argued to be morally reprehensible. Our descendants will wonder how we ever let ourselves do such things. I've no idea what those things will be; it might be environmental destruction, or carnivorism, laws/mores against public nudity. But I'm pretty sure we want those thinkers out there, as we're no where near utopia yet. |