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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?
It seems I've miscommunicated what I meant by "moral status." Maybe most people call it "moral value."
I am not saying that this society thinks that smarter people are better people. I am saying it thinks smarter people are worth more as human beings. It is rude to call people stupid, because in this society it is like calling them worthless, or not-human. This is horrible, maybe even evil. Specifically, "this" is the moral valuation of society that sneaks in the ought. Other things like beauty, athletic ability, kindness -- these afford people status, and are celebrated of course. But the reason it's not very taboo to insult people along those dimensions, I think is evidence that society's actual moral valuation rule is intelligence.
(Another way you see this is in laypeoples' discussions of consciousness, in that some people start talking about moral value at all, which is quite strange. But it makes perfect sense that intelligence and consciousness are both fuzzy signs of human exceptionalism.)
Some people are pointing out specifics of the thought experiment, like that its unrealistic. Yes, its not our world. It would require height to actually be functional and useful to all domains, the way intelligence seems to be. That world would be very strange. To give an example, everything would have to be on very high shelves for inexplicable reasons. In fact the rest of the society would be completely alien indeed. I was not interested in those details -- who cares why intelligence is useful in nearly all domains in our world? I am more interested in how the taboos ironically uphold the moral valuation rule, and with a focus on who specifically upholds the taboos.
There are a couple of strange personal attacks toward me, accusing me of being racist, or that I live in a bubble. "Rationalists are weirdos who talk about IQ all the time" is a very standard attack. Of course, in this society, discussion of intelligence (not that IQ measures that exactly, although it is certainly the closest proxy we have) is like discussing who is human and who is sub-human. Attacks of these nature are once again examples of upholding the moral valuation rule. Do people get attacked for "talking about beauty" or "talking about athleticism?"
But the real evil here lies in society's arbitrary moral valuation rule, not in the facts, right?
I wasn't attacking you. I was disagreeing with you.
Whether I'm properly a rationalist or not, I am at least rat adjacent. I've read the Sequences, kept up with Scott Alexander, and I believe that IQ is largely genetic and not everyone is born with the same endowment of it. I wasn't saying "boo IQ" or "boo smartness" or anything of the sort.
I was saying what I thought to be the case: that you might have lived most of your life in a bubble. I was saying this because I believe on some level I have lived in such a bubble. I was a gifted and talented kid, took honors and AP classes, and my parents both worked in a STEM field. I know that I internalized the idea that intelligence was very important, if not the most important thing. But I try not to be an elitist or a misanthrope. At a very basic level, I like people, and there are plenty of virtues I value besides intelligence such as kindness, civic virtue, or industriousness.
I'm not offended or surprised at the idea that some people might have lower natural endowments of intelligence. I don't view discussing it as the same thing as discussing whether some people are sub-human or not. I just thought you might be living in a bubble of sorts, without any judgement. If I'm wrong, I apologize for my incorrect assessment of your situation.
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