People, by default, do not care very much about the suffering of the powerless. This is a very general pattern: De facto torture of the old and dying (Who by Very Slow Decay), Animal in factory farms, prisoners in solitary, Scott’s rant about school being child prison, etc.
There is no real need to explain a specific example of a very general trend. In fact it is the opposite that needs explanation. We actually have made progress in various ways (for example slavery is greatly reduced, though the USA still has prisoner slaves). But compassion toward the powerless is a deviation from the default. We need to fight for it. The fight has not been won in the USA.
There are a lot of people who care about animals in factory farms, a lot of grant money and many organizations. Prison reform is similar. Both causes are clearly part of the modern left coalition.
There aren’t similarly powerful organizations that care about the rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals.
In the particular case of factory farming, there’s a costly-but-simple solution: stop doing it. The animals’ lives are not worth having, so we stop creating them. For some subset of patients in mental hospitals, who can’t create good lives for themselves on their own and a further subset of whom are dangerous to others, it’s really not clear what we should be doing. Just letting people go created a bunch of negative externalities and it’s questionable whether the patients themselves were better off. Really amazingly good care, when we know how to do it, which is not always, is excruciatingly expensive. So even if someone cares about this issue a lot, it’s really not obvious what they should do or ask for.
EDIT: I finished rereading the SSC post I linked to and apparently there just is a better thing, outpatient commitment, and we should get right on that.
People, by default, do not care very much about the suffering of the powerless. This is a very general pattern: De facto torture of the old and dying (Who by Very Slow Decay), Animal in factory farms, prisoners in solitary, Scott’s rant about school being child prison, etc.
There is no real need to explain a specific example of a very general trend. In fact it is the opposite that needs explanation. We actually have made progress in various ways (for example slavery is greatly reduced, though the USA still has prisoner slaves). But compassion toward the powerless is a deviation from the default. We need to fight for it. The fight has not been won in the USA.
There are a lot of people who care about animals in factory farms, a lot of grant money and many organizations. Prison reform is similar. Both causes are clearly part of the modern left coalition.
There aren’t similarly powerful organizations that care about the rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals.
In the particular case of factory farming, there’s a costly-but-simple solution: stop doing it. The animals’ lives are not worth having, so we stop creating them. For some subset of patients in mental hospitals, who can’t create good lives for themselves on their own and a further subset of whom are dangerous to others, it’s really not clear what we should be doing. Just letting people go created a bunch of negative externalities and it’s questionable whether the patients themselves were better off. Really amazingly good care, when we know how to do it, which is not always, is excruciatingly expensive. So even if someone cares about this issue a lot, it’s really not obvious what they should do or ask for.
EDIT: I finished rereading the SSC post I linked to and apparently there just is a better thing, outpatient commitment, and we should get right on that.
From my Nordic perspective being ok to standby when other groups fail to powergrab decent conditions seems like an outlier.