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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?
This is why I am strongly against the laity getting too involved in anything intelligence adjacent, be it IQ head measuring or HBD "Race Realism":
At the end of the day, 50% of the population is going to be subaverage, and 70% of the population is going to get a failing grade, and 98% of the population will be locked out of the upper echelons of anything but lifting and dropping heavy rocks.
It doesn't matter if X race produces X% more of this or that measurement Goodhartism, because You Won't Be Him.
The purpose of society is to produce a stable living arrangement where as many people as possible feel that it is not worth it for them to for example, burn your shit down and then kill you, where you is every member of society. You can achieve this through force, but that is an unstable equilibrium. It is better to do this through consent.
If you implicitly tell people "Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages", what they will hear is "I am placing myself above you, and everyone like you, and your children, forever. So, what you should do is fucking kill me".
It behoves us all to preserve the fiction: most stupid people end up away from the controls (except when a populist spasm makes one president), generally only rich people get to be truly stupid and then they lose all their shit and are replaced; it's only our historically permissive state that allows the idiots of the world their power at the moment, it will pass.
Then there is something wrong with them that was not wrong with medieval peasants. Nobility places themselves and their children above peasants, but peasants did not react with "I can't tolerate hierarchy, so I'm going to kill my superior." They just wanted a little noblesse oblige, which is reasonable.
Our society has completely different bas fundamental philosophies then the Medievals? The web of different rights and obligations for different classes of society has been dead a while now and was on the way out once the modern period got going.
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Recall what happened to the aristocrats who didn't get with the program once the situation evolved, and the bargain no longer held.
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Those peasants still would have considered themselves as "on the same team" as their nobility, with interlinked interests and fortunes. Empirically, it is much harder to extend that sentiment across racial lines, especially with as stark a difference as that between Europeans and Africans and doubly so when the labor of the underclass isn't required for the persistence of the upperclass.
There is no way Africans could kill off Europeans. The opposite is very plausible, it's just that Europeans are too nice. If Africans try because they get the "red eye" as Jamaicans like to say, it will probably not turn out so well.
Sure, but enslaved Jamaicans and modern African-Americans definitely do not just want "a little noblesse oblige". I don't know how much medieval peasants resented their social superiors, but it had to have been orders of magnitude less than black resentment towards whites.
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