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Notes -
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 can tell you this with absolute certainty. As a much above average man in height, but still on the short end of my extended family, I have experienced absolutely zero in social benefits, moral stature, recognition or anything else on the basis of how tall I am. A lot of people I meet seem to go around thinking this, but it simply isn’t rooted in fact at all.
I always tried having a lot of moral consistency and integrity because I was raised that way, but it doesn’t pay off try to remain a pious and morally upright individual who was built for 1950s America, when that culture has been dead for 70 years. Cruel life experience has taught me that overtime, and even as of recent. “No good deed goes unpunished.” I don’t think I’ll ever understand the mentality of the mass of people I meet in today’s world. Maybe that’s for the better, because there’s definitely no logic to what they do.
One undeniable conclusion I’ve come to though is that most people are completely horrible judges of character. I mean it. Straight up. They’re just very stupid people. I’ve had people say I’m too serious. Others say I’m too immature. Others who can’t detect the most obvious red flags and other shit in people they come across, etc. In reality I’m just an ordinary person.
“It isn’t a measure of health how well adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society.”
Or more likely you have experienced all of those benefits, and your life would really suck if you were 5'5".
That's the problem with both privilege and discrimination, you can't know the counterfactual. The privileged can't know how bad their lives would be without their privilege, and imagine they would be about the same. The victim of discrimination imagines that their lives would be perfect were they privileged, but that's rarely the case.
This reminds me of a joke/meme I saw on /r/AverageHeightDudes, which the Reddit algo recommended to me for a bit when the Minnesota shootings were a hot topic (even Redditors were doing some mass Noticing that progressives were not so body positive when it came to trying to denigrate ICE agents as chubby manlets). It went something like:
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