Aaron Swartz writes the following, as a lead-in to an argument in favor of vegetarianism:
Imagine you were an early settler of what is now the United States. It seems likely you would have killed native Americans. After all, your parents killed them, your siblings killed them, your friends killed them, the leaders of the community killed them, the President killed them. Chances are, you would have killed them too . . .
Or if you see nothing wrong with killing native Americans, take the example of slavery. Again, everyone had slaves and probably didn’t think too much about the morality of it. . . .
Are these statements true, though? It’s hard for me to believe that most early settlers (from the context, it looks like Swartz is discussing the 1500s-1700s here) killed native Americans. That is, if N is the number of early settlers, and Y is the number of these settlers who killed at least one Indian, I suspect Y/N is much closer to 0 than to 1. Similarly, it’s not even close to the truth that “everyone had slaves” among whites in the pre-1860 South. Sure, Mark Twain’s dad owned a slave, but the Clemenses were a pretty prosperous family.
As with my argument with Gary Becker’s “suicide” quote, you could say I’m missing the point. Swartz’s reasoning doesn’t rely on a majority of white settlers being killers; all that it requires is that you imagine yourself to be one of those settlers who happened to be a killer. Similarly, he doesn’t really ask that you picture yourself as a random prewar southern white; implicitly he’s restricting his claim to people like Mark Twain’s father.
Really I’m just spoiling the joke by taking it too literally. I think there is a point, though. What’s the point of using this sort of analogy if you don’t get it right? I think that little would be lost in Swartz’s argument if he were to be more precise (for example, “many settlers killed Indians”). The telling would be less dramatic, but maybe that’s good. For one thing, it would put some focus on the choice of whose shoes to place oneself in. If you start by considering people who lived in 1700 in what is currently the U.S., why restrict oneself to settlers who killed Indians? Why not all settlers? Or why not all people living there at that time? My point is that getting the details right can sharpen the analysis.
It seems odd to criticize me for being inaccurate without providing a single piece of evidence on any of the points. I could well be wrong — I haven't done much research on either period — but it just seems weird to assume I am.
Aaron, I would suggest that claims of the form "most X tend to commit crime against humanity Y" will be doubted until actively proven, not assumed accurate until disproven. If this seems odd, substitute anyone other than white Americans for X and ask again why people might be unhappy with the unevidenced claim.
Some numbers on slave ownership.
"Second, and of considerable interest to historians, the transcription shows that less than 10 percent of the Georgia white population owned slaves in 1850."
Numbers on people who had killed native americans would be considerably harder to come by, of course. Could you narrow down your time period? I'm pretty certain that by the time you imply (you mention a President, for instance) almost all violent encounters with native americans were occurring in the more sparsely populated border regions.
Heck, I'm searching around for numbers, but I bet that the number of native americans, total, was sufficiently smaller than the number of non-native americans by 1776 that it is not remotely possible for most US citizens to have killed native americans.
Actually, I thought about what I would do if a time machine brought be back to the South in the early eighteenth and nineteenth century, and I was a slave owner, but with the exact same ethical values that I have as a twenty-first century American (opposed to slavery).
It has occurred to me that it would actually be difficult to just free the slaves in this situation. They would have no means of supporting themselves and would have to be given land. Its not that they could just go to the nearest city and look for a job, though maybe some could go North. Selling them would if anything make the ethical problem worse. Plus I would have to worry about how I would support myself, and I imagine many slaveowners had debts. Slaves were freed in the antebellum south, but it was done piecemiel or as part of wills, and I think these sorts of considerations were the reason for that. Also a number of slaveowners became alcoholics or otherwise went crazy, again I think in some ways they were trapped in the system too.
I don't see the connection with vegetarianism at all. And with Native Americans, the idea that everyone went tramping about in the woods looking for Indians to kill is at best a serious oversimplication.
Aaron, there's just no way more than half of all settlers killed at least one Indian. Get real. I doubt more than half of U.S. soldiers on the frontier killed at least one Indian.
Andrew, I agree with what I think is your point, which is that if you are going to make a claim that sounds factual, it should be a fact. It's fine to use hyperbole when it's obviously hyperbole — "the national debt is a zillion dollars and climbing fast" — but to state something as fact that is not a fact is not good. I see this all the time (note the hyperbole!) and it bothers me even when I agree with the point that is being made…as is the case here. I think Aaron is right that most white southerners _supported_ slavery, and maybe even that they would have owned slaves if they could have afforded it. I think he's right that most settlers supported the displacement of Indians (although I'm less sure about near-universal support for simply killing them, an attitude that was widespread but I don't know if it was 20%, 50%, or 80%). So why not say "Imagine you were a white settler…it seems likely that you would have supported the displacement and perhaps killing of native Americans," or "imagine you were a white antebellum southerner, it seems likely that you would have supported slavery, and you probably would have owned slaves if you could afford it."
No, spoiling it with notions of variation and uncertainty that statisticians can't help but do.
On the onther hand – that is mainly how we do help.
Aaron: Y/N has (almost) never been one for a large group of people for anything that changes over time.
K?
@me.aaronsw.com They are your statements of fact, you are responsible for verifying them.
Looking at the population of the United States from 1790 to 1860 (by searching 'population of us by race 1800' on Google) there were four times as white individuals as slaves. Assuming that there can be at most one owner per slave, a maximum of a quarter of the US population owned any slaves. To find the true proportion, one would need to find the average number of slaves owned. I suspect a similar argument could be made for killing native Americans, although the US Census didn't start keeping track of Native Americans until much later.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentatio…
I think this pretty much debunks the 'everyone had slaves' argument.
I'd be even stronger – if your analogy has to be built on top of falsehoods, then it's not a very good analogy. Perhaps we've never before as a country stopped some horrible behavior that "nearly everyone" was doing.
As for who should provide evidence, I think that should rest with whomever made the original claim. It's not unreasonable to ask for evidence for something one doesn't believe.
What's being suggested is at least that there was no serious opposition to slavery and the treatment of natives at the time at which the atrocities of the 16th-19th century were occuring. Maybe not everyone owned slaves, but no one opposed it. This is plainly false. Read any history of the period. William Penn, Bartolome de las Casas were good examples of people who objected to the treatment of natives. The Spanish crown had serious problems with the way the conquistadores behaved toward the natives of their territories. Isabella, I believe, was especially concerned. I've heard that Cervantes said that people leave their conscience in Spain when they travel to the New World. And we all know about the abolitionist movement. This is partly in response to the first comment.
From Wikipedia:
"The United States Census of 1860 was the eighth Census conducted in the United States. It determined the population of the United States to be 31,443,321 — an increase of 35.4 percent over the 23,191,875 persons enumerated during the 1850 Census. The total population included 3,953,761 slaves."
Given that many of these slaves were on large plantations, I think it's safe to call this point inaccurate, even in the South.
The proportion of slave owners is probably much less than the 25% upper bound – slave ownership implied some wealth, and I believe wealth was fairly concentrated at the top at that time.
"Maybe not everyone owned slaves, but no one opposed it. This is plainly false."
Yes. I think there was a really large segment of the public that was opposed to it. ….they were called "slaves".
Yes Y/N was probably always closer to 0 than 1. But the important thing for the philosophical argument proposed, is surely that Y/N is a hell of a lot closer to 0 today (one would hope!). Sometimes the raw numbers just aren't what really matters. Maybe ask a slave?
Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian. I broadly agree with the arguments of the original poster.
Will – you did not really mean it?
"Sometimes the raw numbers just aren't what really matters"
This is a statistics blog and if there is anywhere that raw numbers (even if always percieved via fallible models) really do matter – it _must_ be here!
K?
p.s. purposely did not use "should" intead of "must" here
Folk did bad things.
Folk eat meat.
Ergo, eating meat is a bad thing.
How does this qualify as an argument?
If you are going to argue by analogy to "facts", then they should be actual "facts". Otherwise, you might as well use an old Star Trek episode as the basis for the analogy.
I don't think Aaron's analogy was that bad, though maybe poorly executed. The raw numbers are in fact of no or little importance in this instance since the argument and the analogy does not rely on numbers at all. The author however, seems to spend too much time in his article to win over the numbers on his side, when he could have just as well done without. Or even better, chose another, more descriptive analogy. The point was never exactly how many native Americans were killed, but just that morality in that era was different which made such events possible and then society changed. Probably due to people that DIDN'T think that it was acceptable to kill native Americans. And they must have been a quite a few because here we are today, not killing native Americans.
Ethical vegetarians just wants to put meat-eating into (historical) perspective. The morality of today's society accepts eating meat but maybe that also will change and we will look back on it 200-300 years from now and find it immoral and unthinkable. This isn't about numbers so it probably shouldn't be under statistical scrutiny.
David, I think the argument is more similar to:
Throughout history, humans have decided that certain acts of past humans were morally wrong and have thus discontinued the use of such practices. These acts, now considered to be unquestionably wrong, were considered "normal" at that time by at least a large enough segment of the population to remain a public activity (wheras murderers today may feel they are acting morally but must do so in private because most people would disagree and stand against the murderer)
Washington openly stated his actions against the Native Americans as Aaron posts in his original message. We now consider those actions morally wrong.
Many people publicly owned slaves in the past. We now consider that morally wrong.
Many people openly eat meat. Segments of the population(perhaps a growing portion?) oppose this activity today, including Aaron. Aaron used to be a meat eater and likely thought the same way about eating meat as did slave owners about owning slaves: that they were doing nothing morally wrong. As a vegetarian today, Aaron now believes eating meat is morally wrong. Likely, if past slave owners were alive today, they would feel that owning slaves is morally wrong and realize their past mistakes. Perhaps in several decades we will look back at meat eaters the same way we do about Native American killers and slave owners. Regardless, your simplification of his arguments did not accurately represent his post.
Shorter Ryan:
Folk thought bad things were OK.
Folk eat meat.
Dude thinks eating meat is a bad thing.
Ryan's Law: Dude is right!
Ryan's Wish: Folk will "perhaps" come around.
Again, where's the argument?