The point of a girls’ night out is, I guess, to enjoy a social gathering with a certain atmosphere and tone.   At a single sex event, individuals interact in somewhat different ways, different conversations take place. 

A girls’ night out is presumably a reaction to a longstanding (though dying?) tradition of lads’ nights out.

Now, they don’t seem to me to be objectionable – at least so long as they do not entirely crowd out social events in which both sexes are included.

But we wouldn’t approve (would we?) of a social occasion called ‘a whites’ night out’, or ‘a Muslims’ night out’.    Of course, it may well be that a group of friends all have a religion, race or class in common and that they spend time together precisely because of their common interests or background.  Still, if a non-Jew were to find out that some Jewish friends were going to the pub and wanted to join them, he/she would understandably be hurt by a ‘sorry, it’s a Jews’ night out’ rejection.

I distinguish a social gathering from another type of event – say a Bible-reading evening – where, obviously, it would be acceptable to have a ‘Christians-only’ policy.

Now, I’ve asked a couple of people at the Uehiro Centre whether they share this intuition – that a girl’s night out is alright, or at least not as offensive as a Jews’ night out.  They do.  But like me, can’t put their finger on exactly why.  So suggestions welcome…

My own view of gay marriage is that it is completely unobjectionable, so perhaps this goes some way towards explaining why I think the contra arguments are so weak. But I don’t think this is everything. There seems to be a serious mismatch between the strength of feeling obviously held by opponents compared with the reasons they articulate to explain why they hold that view. Many arguments are little more than other ways of expressing opposition. One example is that ‘marriage is only between a man and a woman’ as adopted by Mitt Romney . I recently heard British Conservative MP Peter Bone come up with a interesting variant on this when he said that gay marriage was rather like saying an apple is a pear. Those of a religious persuasion might say gay marriage is sinful, or appeal to a holy book, or the almighty. All these ‘arguments’ shed little light on why opponents think the way they do, and they don’t provide much illumination as to why a proponent ought to think otherwise. I should add that this pattern is not just confined to moral views that I disagree with. For example, finding arguments in favour of human rights seem to me to be particularly tricky.

The problem, I think, is treating conscious reasoning as the whole of moral cognition. There seems to be a lot more cognition taking place when someone adopts a moral position than just the reasons they can consciously articulate. Somebody who has done a lot of empirical work on this is the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In a landmark article, Haidt goes as far as suggesting that conscious reasons are often post hoc justifications of moral intuitions. This gives rise to two illusions: (1) the wag-the-dog illusion is that we believe our moral judgement (the dog) is driven by moral reasoning (the tail); and (2) the wag-the-other-dog’s-tail illusion is that we expect the successful rebuttal of another’s arguments to change that person’s mind.

I think Haidt’s work provides important insights, but goes too far. I think the work of Sperber and his collaborators is more along the right track: they suggest that reasoning is primarily for providing arguments to persuade others and to assess arguments provided by others. I believe that over a purely factual question, one can more reasonably expect consensus between discussants. However, moral arguments are different. Even if two people could perfectly communicate the cognition that caused their moral judgements to each other, there is no reason to expect consensus concerning values: people may want different things more than they want to compromise. Also, moral cognition seems very complicated. It may just be very hard to consciously articulate. So while it might appear that moral reasoning is merely a post hoc justification, it may be instead that it is an imperfect way of seeking to persuade others.

The (even more) difficult question is whether the insights of Haidt, Sperber and others can contribute towards disagreements such as over gay marriage, where lack of arguments seems to make resolving moral disputes very difficult? I think they might. By way of example, proponents of gay marriage sometimes express the concern that opponents of gay marriage are not against gay marriage, but are really homophobic. Opponents often (but not always) deny this. It might be possible to illuminate this question by looking at how opponents actually behave in a wider range of circumstances to infer what leads people to think the way they do, rather than relying merely on what they say (the moral equivalent of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is). The wider circumstances might be moral views concerning marriage and homosexuality generally. This seems to happen anyway – the US this media have been focussing on allegations that a younger Romney bullied another student because he was thought to be gay.

For me, the most outrageous aspect of the bill is that it mandates the imposition of an unwarranted bias against abortion on the woman seeking the abortion, and it does so in a manner which severely undermines her autonomy. It does so by means of two provisions. First, the bill mandates that doctors tell women that abortion causes breast cancer. Now, if abortion did indeed cause breast cancer, then a doctor’s telling their patient this information would not merely be morally permissible, but morally obligatory. However, the purported link between abortion and breast cancer suggested by studies in the 1990s has since been dismissed by a great number of experts in the field, in the light of extensive research (for instance by the National Cancer Institute http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/reproductive-history) which has concluded that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer. Accordingly, the bill does not just recommend that doctors inform patients of the health risks involved in abortion. Rather, the bill enforces doctors to propagate a hypothesis which lacks conclusive scientific evidence as a scientific truth. This is wholly irresponsible, since patients will most likely treat their physician’s opinion regarding health risks as unimpeachable. Moreover, whilst patients may be willing to accept some health risk in order to have an abortion, it seems unlikely that they will have one if they have it on good authority that having an abortion will directly cause them to have breast cancer. In so far as acting on false beliefs can undermine an agent’s autonomy, legally requiring doctors to propogate this apparently false claim threatens the woman’s capacity to autonomously decide whether to have an abortion.

As if this was not destructive enough to the relationship of trust between doctor and patient, another provision in the bill allows doctors to withhold medical information from a patient if it might lead her to have an abortion (which, one might observe, could even include the information that she is pregnant). Again, this is wholly irresponsible; since autonomy seems to require the agent’s having knowledge of relevant information pertaining to their decision, this provision completely robs the patient of her autonomy. Not only that, but it does so in the context of a crucial decision concerning the woman’s health and well-being. Furthermore, the effect of withholding information in this case does not just affect the patient’s autonomy in this local instance. Given the life changing nature of having an unwanted child, it also seems that withholding information which might lead to an abortion will also affect the agent’s global autonomy.

It seems that the only way in which defenders of the bill could defend this second provision is to argue that the ‘therapeutic privilege’ of withholding information from patients is morally justifiable if disclosing information might endanger the patient’s own life or psychological health. In view of this, they might argue that if disclosing certain information might endanger the life of a foetus, it may be morally permissible to withhold the information; the value of the patient’s autonomy, they may argue, should be trumped by the foetus’ right to life.

Needless to say, this argument does not get off the ground unless one assumes that the foetus has a right to life. I do not wish to open up this debate here; however, it is prudent to note one thing. Whatever one’s position may be on the matter, the view that the embryo is a person or has a right to life is far from being an unimpeachable metaphysical or moral truth; there are significant and difficult objections that proponents of these views must face, leaving grounds for uncertainty. However, to return to the Kansas bill, if the justification for withholding information from the patient here is that the information is likely to make the patient want to have an abortion, then in most cases, this seems to presuppose that the woman herself does not hold the view that the embryo has a right to life; if she did, then hardly any information could persuade her to have an abortion. Yet, if this is so, then by claiming that the withholding of information in the context of abortion is morally justifiable, policy makers are tacitly imposing the view that the embryo has a right to life upon those who do not hold this view. Given the grounds for uncertainty on these philosophical questions, this seems reprehensible.

Some conservatives might deem the imposition of this view to be a necessary measure. However, there are reasons why even such conservatives have reason to regard the Kansas bill with disdain. Consider the sort of information that might lead a woman to possibly want an abortion. Such information might include information about potential foetal abnormality, or danger to the mother’s health. Even if this information might lead the woman to want to have an abortion, there are other reasons why knowing this information is critically important. Surely one reason that even conservatives can agree upon is that the woman can only go about planning her life in a manner which will allow the potential child to receive a suitable upbringing, if she is aware of information regarding both her own post-natal health, and the child’s. Again, the withholding of information that the Kansas bill allows threatens the autonomy of pregnant women to plan their lives in the light of their actual circumstances.

The Kansas bill represents a diabolical affront to autonomy. If one believes that the foetus does not have a right to life, then this violation of autonomy is surely indefensible. Yet, even if one believes that the foetus does have a right to life, this does not warrant support of the Kansas bill. Rather, one should support the wholesale prohibition of abortion, and not this back door approach which, although likely to succeed in preventing abortions, will surely have severely damaging consequences for the parent’s autonomy.

For many people, be they gerontologists, sociologists, philosophers, or 90 years of age, this must sound like a joke. One is inclined to ask why we should regard it as an achievement rather than a threat to acquire a condition that is constituted by frailty, physical and sometimes mental shortcomings, wrinkles all over one’s body, losing hair and teeth, losing one’s vision, occasionally developing cancer and arteriosclerosis, and finally lying in bed unable to control one’s bladder. We have every reason to conceive of ageing as a threat because it is one of the main causes in a person’s life that leads to a massive decrease of welfare, perhaps only comparable to severe diseases and extreme poverty in its magnitude. Staying active, as the EU claims, might help to alleviate the symptoms of ageing until some point in a person’s life, but it is certainly not “key to tackling the challenge of ageing”. There will come a time where a person will simply be unable to stay active because of the limitations she will experience, and whereas staying active had been sufficient for alleviating the symptoms of ageing before, these symptoms will then be sufficient for confining this person’s activity. The one and only key to tackling the challenge of ageing is solid biomedical science, not idle talk about some presumed advantages of growing old.

The whole European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations is an instance of what I call ‘public consolation’. This phenomenon might not be easy to detect but it certainly exists and bears the following characteristics (not always all of them):

1. There is no singular event – like a natural catastrophe – that triggers the acts of consolation.

2. The acts of consolations are not directed at individuals – like relatives of some deceased person – but at a group of people that is often rather unspecified.

3. Mass media like newspapers, magazines, or the internet cover the acts of consolation and are often instrumentalised by the originators of these acts.

4. The acts of consolation deal with phenomena that common sense disapproves of.

5. The acts of consolation convey the message that common sense is wrong in its disapproval.

Actually, the European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations is an ideal instance of public consolation because it bears all of these characteristics. Ageing is no singular event but a biological process, and the originators of the initiative use the internet for conveying the message that ageing is not as bad as we believe to citizens of Europe.

Public consolation could have its merits that I will not deny. There could be phenomena common sense is unjustified to disapprove of, so that a public consolation campaign could have positive effects if it successfully shows why we should rather cope with these phenomena instead of opposing them. In the face of ageing, however, public consolation is utterly inappropriate because it deludes people and distracts them from the harmful effects of ageing. If the public believes that ageing does not lead to a dramatic decrease in a person’s welfare, that growing old is an achievemen rather than a burden, and that not biomedical science but the hollow attempt to stay active until one is taken away by the Grim Reaper is the best response to ageing – why should politicians feel any pressure to commit themselves to the war on ageing? Why should they feel any pressure to give as much attention to ageing as to cancer, AIDS, or Alzheimer’s disease? And why should anyone of us even care about biomedical strategies to battle ageing if there is nothing wrong with it?

A couple of years or even decades ago, when we had no idea how to combat ageing, this form of public consolation would have been justified. Today, however, since we have evidence that ageing is just another, though particularly nasty and robust, condition that makes our lives go worse but could be mutable through biomedical interventions, we should not support public consolation in the face of ageing anymore but oppose it.

In this post I’ll focus in on normative ethics, practical ethics, and decision theory. Within these areas, I’m going to give a recipe for choosing research topics, if one wants to maximise the practical importance of one’s work as a philosopher. Here it goes:

Begin by asking:

• Which issues might conceivably be the most important moral issue that we currently face?

Then ask:

• What are the crucial normative considerations for determining which of these issues really is the most important?

Then figure out:

• Of these crucial considerations, which is most likely to produce an action-relevant outcome given your marginal research time?

Then:

• Work on that topic!

That was the outline. It’s by no means a perfect methodology, and there are many ways in which it could be expanded upon. It’s main point is to give one the gist, and hopefully to make one wonder about why research topics within ethics aren’t typically chosen in the above way. In the rest of the post I’ll briefly flesh out these different steps.

1. What’s the list of the conceivably most important current moral issues?

There are many problems in the world, and there are many ways of carving up the space of ‘problems’. I’ll talk about these issues in a later post. But, in the mean time, here are a few contenders.

i. Global poverty

Why? Currently 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, purchasing power parity adjusted (that is: they consume the goods equivalent of what $1.25 could buy in the US in 2005). 18 million people die per year of poverty-related causes – that’s about one third of all human deaths.

ii. Abortion

Why? Around 42 million abortions are performed per year. Many people think that a fetus has similar rights to an adult person, and so performing an abortion is roughly on a par, morally, with murder. To get a sense of scale on this issue, consider that if this were true then the murder toll from the government sanction of abortions would outstrip all previous genocides combined.

iii. Animal suffering and slaughter

Why? A staggering 50 billion non-human land animals are killed every year for food. A large proportion of those animals are factory farmed, living in extreme suffering. There are compelling arguments to the conclusion that we should treat non-human animal suffering as being on a par, morally, as human animal suffering. If this were true, then the annual animal suffering caused by humans could easily outweigh all human suffering.

iv. The risk of human extinction

Why? The number of people who might live in the future, if we survive the next few centuries, numbers in the trillions (consider that, if humans live at current population levels for the average lifespan of a mammalian species, then there are over 10^13 (or ten trillion) humans in the future). If we ought, morally, to value potential future people in the same way that we value present people, then the loss from the human race going extinct in the near future might number in the trillions of lives.

2. What are the crucial normative considerations?

It would be controversial to claim, of any of the above issues, that it is the most important moral issue that we face. Even if we knew all the empirical facts, there would still remain tricky moral issues – moral considerations that are crucial insofar as, if we knew the right opinion on the matter, we could write off certain of the above issues as not of the greatest importance.

There are many we could put on the list. But the list would certainly include:
- How should we value future people, and merely possible people, compared with present people? (Relevant to: abortion, animal suffering, extinction risk)
- What moral status do non-human animals have, and how should we make inter-species comparisons of wellbeing? (Relevant to: animal suffering)
- At what stage does a human fetus become a person, with rights to life similar to that of an adult? (Relevant to: abortion)
- How should we act under empirical uncertainty – in particular should we follow expected utility even when it comes to tiny probabilities of huge amounts of value? (Relevant to: extinction risk)
- All other things being equal, should we prioritise the prevention of wrongs over the alleviation of naturally caused suffering? (Relevant to: abortion, animal suffering)
- Given that we aren’t ever going to be certain in answers to the above questions, how should we take into account uncertainty about these moral issues in our decision-making? (Relevant to: global poverty, abortion, animal suffering, extinction risk)

3. Which topic would be advanced the most from one’s marginal research time?

This one is more dependent on one’s own abilities and interests. But, in general, we could suppose that research time on a particular topic has diminishing marginal value. So, for example, working on the question of when a fetus becomes a person probably isn’t the area when one will have greatest marginal research impact: the subject has been extensively studied by hundreds of good thinkers. In contrast, the topics of how to handle moral uncertainty, or how to make inter-species wellbeing comparisons, or whether to prioritise averting wrongs over preventing naturally caused suffering, have been comparatively little studied.

Stratospheric sulfate seems to be one of the most promising geoengineering methods to combat climate change. It involves the injection of  hydrogen sulfide (H2S), sulfur dioxide (SO2) or other sulfates, into the stratosphere. Similar to what happens after major volcanic eruptions, this would reflect off part of the sun’s energy and cool the Earth, counterbalancing the effect of greenhouse gases (see for instance the “Year without a Summer” that followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora).

It is probably the best geoengineering solution to climate change, in that it’s likely to work, should be technically feasible, can be done by a single nation if need be (no need for global consensus), and is likely to be very cheap – especially in comparison with cutting emissions. But it has a few drawbacks:

1. It will have unpredictable effects on the weather across the globe.
2. We can’t really test it – the test would be doing it, on a global scale.
3. We wouldn’t know if it worked until we’d had about a decade of temperature measurements.
4. Once started, it’s extremely dangerous to stop it – especially if carbon emissions keep rising.

So, should we do it? Narrow cost-benefit analysis suggests yes, but that doesn’t take into account the uncertainty, the unknown unknowns – the very likely probability that things will not go as expected, and that we’ll have difficulty dealing with the side effects. This includes the political side effects when some areas of the globe suffer more than others from this process.

How bad does global warming have to get before we consider this type of nearly irreversible geoengineering? If we had to choose between this and cutting emissions, how high would the cost of cutting have to go before we sprang for this instead? In short, what price do we put on avoiding uncertainty on the global scale? Can we estimate a dollar amount, or some alternative measure of the cost – quality-adjusted life years, or some other human-scale estimate? Or is this an illusionary precision, and do our intuitions and qualitative arguments (precautionary principle?) give us a better estimate of whether we should go ahead with this?

Ghent University also organises an information evening about sustainable fish, open to the wide public. Experts will talk about the consequences of overfishing and about how we can make ‘sustainable fish decisions’.

The Sustainable Fish Week is not a one-off event. It is meant as an ‘appetizer’ for the university’s future fish policy. In November 2011, the university’s Marine Biology Research Group launched the Sustainable FISH @ UGent project. The aim is to assess the university’s fish and seafood purchases and to remove those that score poorly on sustainability from the menus and replace them with sustainable alternatives.

On its website, Ghent University proudly writes that it accepts its responsibility and has opted for sustainable fish. It would be great if other universities adopted this initiative (and similar initiatives such as ‘Donderdag Veggiedag’/‘Thursday Veggie-day’, a campaign to encourage people to eat vegetarian at least one day a week; those who, on Thursday, choose the vegetarian option at restaurants who participate in the initiative (such as the university restaurants) receive a free drink or desert).

Why would other universities not copy such initiatives?

Some might argue that universities should remain neutral about ethical matters, but this seems a very weak argument. First, it is not clear why selling both sustainable and unsustainable fish is more ethically neutral than selling only sustainable fish. The two different policies reflect two different substantive ethical positions: that eating unsustainable fish is ethically acceptable, and that it isn’t. Second, it could be argued that, as educational institutions, universities should set an example for ethical behaviour. There is sufficient scientific evidence now to show that if we maintain current fishing practices many fish species will go extinct., resulting in an unstable ecosystem with potentially disastrous consequences for the environment. True, major fishing companies may be harmed by campaigns like the Sustainable Fish Week. But surely that is not a reason not to replace unsustainable fish with sustainable fish. We should instead put pressure on these companies to change their practices, and we should support those fisheries and farms that have sustainable fishing policies. Another reason why universities should copy this initiative is that, as educational institutions, their impact may be much higher than the impact of individuals trying to convey the message that we should opt for sustainable fish instead of unsustainable fish.

I hope that, by making this initiative more widely known through this blogpost, other universities, schools or colleges will feel inspired to undertake similar initiatives. It is a simple initiative, but with potentially a significant impact.

I wrote recently on the moral obligation that vegetarians have to support the development and consume frankenmeat, derived from stem cell technology.

The occurrence of the headless lamb raises another intriguing option for those who oppose the rearing of animals in the food industry on grounds of suffering caused by farming practices. Headless animals, including lambs, do not suffer.

Such aberrations occur because of genetic mutations or other abnormalities in normal development. However, knowledge of the cause of such conditions could be used to intentionally create headless lambs, or other other animals as a source of meat which does not involve suffering.

The deliberate creation of headless lambs is high on the Yuk Factor. But it has one strong ethical argument in its favour – it provides meat with out suffering to the animal reared and killed.

Such animals could be kept alive long enough on artificial diets or nutrition until the size and quality of meat is sufficient. Strict regulation of the nutrients might even enhance the quality of the meat.

For those committed to reducing animal suffering, the intentional creation of headless or preferably anencephalic animals for food is preferable to the status quo.

Those who find creating such animals objectionable but who support factory farming should ask why their own sense of unease or disgust outweighs the suffering inflicted on animals to satisfy their carnivorous palates?

Several features of this case show what advances are possible. First of all, they kept on trying him till they got the right result! He was acquitted in January 2011 but we don’t want to let these people get away with this kind of stuff, so he was tried again three months later and convicted. Now that is the kind of justice we need here. Regrettably the Danes have now backslid, since for some purely technical piece of legalistic nonsense the Danish Supreme Court let him off again. Still, progress takes time and eventually the judges will fall into line. They did at least emphasise that criticising Islam is a crime irrespective of whether the claims are true or false.

Indeed, just look at what a great clause they’ve got in their law: Article 266b: “Whoever publicly or with the intent of public dissemination issues a pronouncement or other communication by which a group of persons are threatened, insulted or denigrated due to their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation is liable to a fine or incarceration for up to two years.” We can get pretty much everyone on something in there. We can certainly get absolutely anyone who has any religious belief whatsoever, because so far as I can remember a defining characteristic of most religious belief is the denigration of all the other religions. Other religions are heresy and their believers are therefore heretics (so are thereby denigrated) who are destined for hell if they don’t fall into line: now if that is not a threat I don’t know what is!

Secondly, he was being tried for remarks he had made in private in his own home! No more of this entirely spurious distinction between what is said in private and what is said in public. Why should that matter?

The real advance here, of course, would be if we could get at what people think instead of having to wait for them to say it out loud. Yes, we can make inferences to what they think from the metaphors and code words they use, and of course, if they are foolish enough to make any jokes we can always make that look bad in court (just look at the success we’ve had over the mildest flirtations). So we have a range of valuable tools to use when we just need to get someone banged up for something or other irrespective of whether they’ve said anything literally disagreeable to me.

It does look as if neuroscience holds out some hope here. In some ways it doesn’t matter too much how well it works as long as juries buy it when we need to shut someone up. After all, the lie detector is nonsense (don’t tell too many people) but the US still manages to use it to good effect. Nevertheless, there is a greater good here as well. Reliably being able to get at those who think the wrong things even though they don’t say them would be very valuable. So in addition to its purely prejudicial value in court the neuroscience might help us in this way too. Whether Britain will start catching up with the modern world or stay mired in its sentimental attachment to outdated liberties is, of course, another question.

Communist: one of the easiest ones to conceive of. Here it turns out that as barriers to trade are removed and transaction costs go to zero, the natural state of the economy is one of perpetual crashes. Celebrity and fame feed upon themselves: everyone demands the best, and the definition of the best is shared widely: niche markets don’t exist. Incomes follow such a sharp power law that only a few percent of the population have any wealth at all. Automation means that most people can’t earn enough to sustain themselves: their income drops below the costs of keeping them alive. Hence a large, bloated, over-regulating government becomes a matter of survival.

Ultra-capitalist: as barriers to trade are removed and transaction costs go to zero, the whole market segments into small niches. Everyone can find some buyer for their work, as new demands and new suppliers spring up immediately, connected by new technologies. Technology solves known externalities (like global warming), so there is little need for a centralised controlling authority. Change happens so rapidly that any governmental intervention is counterproductive: by the time the change is implemented, the benefits and costs the government was trying to influence are things of the past. The efficient market, the only thing fast enough to keep up with itself, flows like a river around any blundering governmental efforts, rendering them moot.

Void of free speech: Spam and advertising become ubiquitous, leaving no escape to anyone. Marketing stops being an airy art and becomes an engineering science: companies (and political parties) really can force people to buy or vote just through the force of their targeted advertising. The human mind is hackable: the experiences of every moment of every day are akin to hypnosis and brainwashing. Any society that doesn’t protect itself with draconian regulations is unlivable. But the profits to circumventing the regulations are so huge that organisations are willing to pay a fortune to have individuals carry their message: there ceases to be any moral difference between private and corporate speech. At the same time, technology makes the assembly of devastating weapons extremely easy: the only protection is suppressing the information. Extreme censorship becomes essential to sanity and survival.

Bereft of science: another easy one to conceive of. The technological tools derived from science become so dangerous – the weapons too powerful, the never-anticipated side-effects too devastating – that the only way to continue is to ban them entirely. Some experience with dangerous tools developed by social science convince everyone that there is no safe area of scientific inquiry. Some discoveries may be harmless, but we can never know which ones in advance. The human race agrees that it isn’t worth the risk: science comes to a halt. There are things man was not meant to know.

BNP-ish:  Highly infectious new diseases cleave humanity into small enclaves whose mutual suspicions are fully justified. Or maybe artificial evolution and enhancements divide humans into sub-species so distinct they no long have any shared values allowing them to relate. Distrusting the outsider is rational, mixing with them is dangerous.

The point is not that any one of these scenarios is very likely. The point is that it’s not unreasonable to suppose that they are possible – and nothing we know now can rule them out. They depend on deep trends in technology and society that we have little understanding of and little control over (or, more frighteningly, it may just be luck where we end up). All we know about “how the world really works” are firmly rooted in the past, and it may not take much technological change to obsolete it completely. Take the arguments presented by your least favourite political movements, and imagine what changes to technology and society would make these arguments reasonable. Are you sure those changes could never happen?

So keep a firm hand on your values, always ready to jump ship on your politics.