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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 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 almost 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’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.
If someone wants to tell me I have they’re welcome to prove it. To date I see ‘zero’ from it and nobody even willing to try. What advantages are you suggesting I experience solely on the basis of height? I’ll be honest if you’re right or not. I may not know the counterfactual but I can approximate it very well based on how others get treated. If I attain some kind of ‘benefit’ I would be treated the way X is treated. I am not treated the way X is treated, therefore I am not benefitting from it.
If you want to say I can’t know the counterfactual then you can’t know whether I’m benefitting either, because these are all relative value judgments. All I can do is compare experiences. And experience tells me I’m ‘not’ getting treated the same way others are on the basis of height. Yes I get treated very well by some groups of people, but ‘none’ of it is related to height. Zero.
Today I went to BJJ, there were four of us at the 6am open mat, and we rolled for 45 minutes straight of 5 minutes. I rolled with a guy from the local SWAT team, he's 165, and he dog walked me despite my having 30 lbs on him. So clearly size and strength doesn't matter for jiu jitsu! Or maybe it was that he was a college wrestler, and has been training BJJ twice as long as I have, or maybe I'm just not that athletic or coordinated. There's a ton of factors that go into it, so just being big isn't going to tell the story, but ceteris paribus the bigger guy will normally win.
The advantage to height, about 1% lifetime earnings per inch, is one of the best studied theories in economics. The advantage to height in romance is well known and obvious, even if you assume there's no return to attractiveness it's inarguable that the vast majority of women prefer a man taller than they are, so it's pure increased pool of prospects for every inch up to 6'3" or so.
I can't know whether you have a good life or a bad life, a hard life or an easy life, but we can say that your life has likely been easier as a result of being taller than it would have been had you been shorter. No one is saying that everyone over 6' is on easy street, but it's clearly an advantage.
So how you do you figure you haven't had any advantage? No woman has ever admired your height? People don't physically look up to you? You aren't any good at basketball or volleyball?
Among the hardest truths to accept as a human being is that I am both extraordinarily lucky to be who I am, and that I'm nothing really special.
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