I think you’re misunderstanding Viliam’s point. Your examples, other than Marxism, aren’t proposing empirically testable theories: they’re moral revolutions, or social ones that demand valuing some people differently from before. Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Well three of those four things are essentially government/societal policies, and one can argue about what the consequnces of adopting or not adopting those policies are.
It’s possible to make predictions and arguments about how letting women vote would affect society, or men in particular. But the people who fought for women’s suffrage did so on moral grounds of equal rights; even if they had believed suffrage would in fact harm society in some way they wouldn’t have changed their minds. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Christianity is even more clearly about moral precepts and not about “worldly” benefit. Anti-slavery is too, although the US civil war mixed that up with a lot of other causes. About Prohibition I don’t know enough to say.
I think you’re misunderstanding Viliam’s point. Your examples, other than Marxism, aren’t proposing empirically testable theories: they’re moral revolutions, or social ones that demand valuing some people differently from before. Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Well three of those four things are essentially government/societal policies, and one can argue about what the consequnces of adopting or not adopting those policies are.
It’s possible to make predictions and arguments about how letting women vote would affect society, or men in particular. But the people who fought for women’s suffrage did so on moral grounds of equal rights; even if they had believed suffrage would in fact harm society in some way they wouldn’t have changed their minds. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Christianity is even more clearly about moral precepts and not about “worldly” benefit. Anti-slavery is too, although the US civil war mixed that up with a lot of other causes. About Prohibition I don’t know enough to say.