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This thought experiment is perhaps "overfitting to a desired conclusion," (and is certainly an unsubtle allegory) but I want to see what other people think. Where else has this comparison been drawn?
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
Well one thing is it would be very rude to point out that people have different heights. To minimize cognitive dissonance, we would notice that rulers and yardsticks are banned, or at least tabooed. The taboo of course has justification:
I think they definitely would not go around saying "tall people are morally better." And if you tried to gently tell them "Well you certainly act like they are: tall people make more money and have better life outcomes! And you don't call it unjust!" they will probably get angry and call you evil for suggesting that people have different heights. They will say, the injustice is that life outcomes are inequal among the abled and disabled; between men and women; between supposed racial groups; and so many other axes.
They seem to be making a category error. How can a fact of height differences be evil? So you smuggle a ruler into the room. And you point out that Alice is in fact taller than Bob. "It is just an empirical fact" you say. Of course the reply will be something like, "You think your words are disentangled from context, but the social function of your sentence makes a moral claim." This response is inevitable, even if you bookend your remarks with the notice: "THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THIS CLAIM IS TO POINT OUT EMPIRICAL FACT"
At first you think, well its society's social context that is smuggling in the moral "oughts." The problem is certainly not with reality. But then you realize they are kind of right? The social function of this claim, indeed has moral content. In this society, height simply is the gauge of moral status. Stating otherwise doesn't make it go away, just like saying 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't make it true -- that's reality for you. It's at this point you realize your neck is getting a bit strained, because you're constantly looking up -- everyone else in this room is very, very tall. These arguments evolved in Tall Clubs around the nation and are handed down from the credentialed Tall to the less-credentialed mid-statures.
It makes you wonder why all of their interventions to the low-status involve treating symptoms and correlates, instead of identifying how to change the moral valuation, which is the root cause of it all.
So by now most of you are thoroughly short on patience, having realized immediately that "height = intelligence." But the real point: the academic and intellectual authorities that are loudest about the problem are the ones stringently enforcing the taboo holding it all up! Is that a coincidence?
I think that the ending of this allegory, where you point out that the council enforcing the taboo are all tall people, is a nice point that is helped by the allegory making it more obvious that this is about self interest rather than intelligent people simply knowing more and helpfully explaining truth to others (the way they portray themselves in real life where it's about intelligence).
However, your opening to the allegory is weak:
We would not expect this. It's an allegory because it's taking things to an absurd extreme that would not persist in the face of reality. People's heights are immediately visually obvious. They can gaslight people about intelligence because it's hidden in your brain. When you look at someone, it's not usually obvious how smart they are. People have different skills and talents which are correlated with intelligence but vary greatly. Smart people often do stupid things and stupid people often do smart things. The opacity makes it possible to thread intelligence and morality together because each person can imagine themselves to be smarter than they are, and others to not have the confidence to contradict them when they pretend to be smart. If a short person pretended to be tall, even if everyone pretended to agree with them they would know it to be false. They would know that everyone else knows, as Common Knowledge. Not even trans people pretend that they're biologically identical to the other sex pre-transition, they have to invent a separate "Gender" which exists in your head and is a platonic ideal of what a "true" man/woman is, because then it can be opaque and exploit the lack of certainty to start gaslighting.
Your allegory is an exaggerated caricature that requires us to suspend our disbelief on multiple levels and deliberately construct it as a parallel to our own society, it does not logically follow from the one single premise.
And yet, I've seen extremely charismatic short kings, where the women around him said things like "I just never noticed that he wasn't that tall. He seemed taller".
"Seen"? From what I've heard, historical accounts of short leaders and kings were often exaggerated; Napoleon, for example, was just short compared to his unusually tall elite soldiers, not in general. Even those that were genuinely short in the below-average-male-aristocrat sense usually were not so short that they got close in height to women, especially since the aristocracy already had an height advantage and could in addition use shoes and clothing to hide the differences somewhat.
Though somewhat in agreement, I remember having seen a paper showing that if a person is attracted to someone, they are more liable to ascribe to them all sorts of qualities beyond their objective merit, which included women claiming an attractive man is tall even when he was merely average. But, well, social studies and replication crisis and all that.
"Seen", as in "perceived with my own two eyes" that the short king was indeed short, and that my female friends didn't seem to notice.
Interesting. Which king, if I may ask? Since there really aren't that many left.
"Short king" is modern slang for short guys and doesn't refer to actual monarchs.
Thanks, now I feel old. I've never heard this as a slang term, not even online.
All good, it's not worth trying to keep up with the latest skibidi Ohio rizz grimace shakes.
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