I don’t know how it will all play out in the end. I hope kindness wins and I agree the effect you discuss is real. But it is not obvious that our empathy increases faster than our capacity to do harm. Right now, for each human there are about seven birds/mammals on farms. This is quite the catastrophe. Perhaps that problem will eventually be solved by lab meat. But right now animal product consumption is still going up worldwide. And many worse things can be created and maybe those will endure.
People can be shockingly cruel to their own family. Scott’s Who by Very Slow Decay is one of the scariest things I ever read. How can people do this to their own parents?
After a while of this, your doctors will call a meeting with your family and very gingerly raise the possibility of going to “comfort care only”, which means they disconnect the machines and stop the treatments and put you on painkillers so that you die peacefully. Your family will start yelling at the doctors, asking how the hell these quacks were ever allowed to practice when for God’s sake they’re trying to kill off Grandma just so they can avoid doing a tiny bit of work. They will demand the doctors find some kind of complicated surgery that will fix all your problems, add on new pills to the thirteen you’re already being force-fed every day, call in the most expensive consultants from Europe, figure out some extraordinary effort that can keep you living another few days.
Robin Hanson sometimes writes about how health care is a form of signaling, trying to spend money to show you care about someone else. I think he’s wrong in the general case – most people pay their own health insurance – but I think he’s spot on in the case of families caring for their elderly relatives. The hospital lawyer mentioned during orientation that it never fails that the family members who live in the area and have spent lots of time with their mother/father/grandparent over the past few years are willing to let them go, but someone from 2000 miles away flies in at the last second and makes ostentatious demands that EVERYTHING POSSIBLE must be done for the patient.
I don’t know how it will all play out in the end. I hope kindness wins and I agree the effect you discuss is real. But it is not obvious that our empathy increases faster than our capacity to do harm. Right now, for each human there are about seven birds/mammals on farms. This is quite the catastrophe. Perhaps that problem will eventually be solved by lab meat. But right now animal product consumption is still going up worldwide. And many worse things can be created and maybe those will endure.
People can be shockingly cruel to their own family. Scott’s Who by Very Slow Decay is one of the scariest things I ever read. How can people do this to their own parents?