Lookism, racism, ageism, and more

Lookism: the problem of beauty

Start with Ted Chiang's observation on beauty

Psychologists once conducted an experiment where they repeatedly left a fake college application in an airport, supposedly forgotten by a traveler. The answers on the application were always the same, but each time they included a different photo of the fictitious applicant. It turned out people were more likely to mail in the application if the applicant was attractive. This is perhaps not surprising, but it illustrates just how thoroughly we're influenced by appearances; we favor attractive people even in a situation where we'll never meet them. 

Yet any discussion of beauty's advantages is usually accompanied by a mention of the burden of beauty. I don't doubt that beauty has its drawbacks, but so does everything else. Why do people seem more sympathetic to the idea of burdensome beauty than to, say, the idea of burdensome wealth? It's because beauty is working its magic again: even in a discussion of its drawbacks, beauty is providing its possessors with an advantage.

Nothing is sacred and everything can be traded

I was at a vegan meeting and a speaker mentioned that changing to a pure vegetarian diet is a major decision in life, like changing a political party.

The aversion to new kinds of foods is unreasonable, and putting so much meaning to diet is too. I would eat meat and torture and kill whatever creature that I get the meat from if it would reduce $CO_2$ in the atmosphere by 1ppm. Meat is not sacred, nothing is. A creature killed accidentally is okay to eat, unless it would be better used not eaten.

For example, humans are not eaten since they are more valuable buried. Dead buried humans, covered in coffin planks, and decorated with protruding marble gravestones, engraved with magical incantations (epitaphs), are valuable magical artifices for keeping the human cultural system functioning.

The ghost of morality in science

Simply put, morality is a ghost that doesn't like to be scienced, and science has been trying its best to make morality go away.

The basic point from the scientific viewpoint on morality is that it does not do anything. Morality by its definition resists scientific explanation. If there's an explanation to why we do things morally, it becomes imaginable that we do something else morally, or not, and either way, "morality" can be seen as a ghost that doesn't do anything.

Think of the marital morality of the praying mantis. Is it moral, or not, for the female mantis to eat the male mantis after marriage? It is in their nature, with a deep reason. Praying mantis evolved to have this kind of strange and cruel (viewed by a human) morality. If they evolved in some other way, they would have a different morality.