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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?
Intelligence isn't related to moral status at all according to most people's moralities. Almost everyone is an explicit egalitarian. Denying intelligence differences ironically seems more to be rooted in unintelligence. It's a complex topic and unintelligence people say silly things about complex topics all the time. They know intelligence differences exist, almost everyone I know intuitively understands that the Arby's employee and the MIT Physics professor are at two completely different levels of intelligence, most even like to call the latter genius and could be prodded into describing the former as dull, not very bright, learning disabled, or whatever. They just can't wrap their heads around how a 1 hour test of vocabulary and puzzles is supposed to measure that. Proving that to them actually requires them to be maybe in the top 10% of intelligence, because they need to know a decent amount of math and statistics. But regarding the intelligence differences they know to exist, they're just egalitarian so if you suggest that the Arby's employee should lose the right to vote or to have children or to own property which is more than personal, they will say that is wrong because everyone has equal moral worth independent of their intelligence. You might say this is inconsistent with how people treat animals, but normal people are not very bright and don't notice inconsistencies, and rarely reason at the level where they would notice them or care. That's probably why they think perfect moral equality happens around their own level of intelligence, even if they admit Einstein was smarter than them by a lot. They're simply almost blatantly self-serving.
I don’t think this is true. We make the appropriate noises, but Theres just no way to say that we treat the Arby’s employee as an equal to the MIT professor. The latter is given all sorts of deference in most situations.
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