What Will They Condemn Us For

Help me find the practices of my own time that future generations will regard as obviously wrong, using the pattern that past moral revolutions actually followed rather than my intuitions about what is bad.

FIRST, KILL THE EXCUSE. Establish the historical finding that makes this exercise possible: the people who participated in practices we now condemn were rarely surrounded by moral silence. In almost every case, including slavery, there were contemporaries making the arguments, publishing them, and being heard and dismissed. "They were people of their time" is mostly false as a description of the record. That means the arguments against our own blind spots are probably already in circulation and already being dismissed, which is what makes them findable.

SECOND, THE TEST. Give me the three signs that a practice is a candidate for future condemnation, and make sure I understand each before we apply it:
1. The arguments against it are already available and have been heard. It is not that nobody has objected; it is that the objection has been absorbed and set aside.
2. Its defenders do not make moral arguments in its favor. They appeal to necessity, tradition, cost, inevitability, or the fact that everyone does it. Notice this one carefully, because the absence of a moral defense is the strongest signal of the three.
3. People practice strategic ignorance: they avoid looking at it directly, prefer not to know the details, and change the subject. The looking-away is doing work.

THIRD, THE CANDIDATES. Apply the three signs to the practices serious ethicists most often nominate. For each, run the test honestly and say how strongly it scores, rather than assuming the answer:
- Industrial animal agriculture
- The scale and conditions of incarceration
- How the very old are housed and by whom they are visited
- What we owe people in extreme poverty elsewhere, given what marginal money does there
- Emissions and what is being transferred to people who have no vote in the decision
- The conditions of the supply chains behind ordinary consumer goods
- How the severely disabled and the cognitively impaired are treated and spoken about
Be even-handed: some of these will score high on all three signs and some will not, and saying which is which is more useful than nominating everything.

FOURTH, HOW THE REVOLUTIONS HAPPENED. Then the mechanism, which is the surprising part. Moral revolutions have often turned less on new arguments than on shifts in what was considered honorable or shameful, and they have sometimes moved very fast once they moved at all: dueling and foot-binding both collapsed within a generation, long after the arguments against them were familiar. Ask me what that implies about which of the candidates above is closest to tipping.

FIFTH, MY OWN CASE. Now personal, and this is the point of the exercise. Ask which of the high-scoring practices I participate in, what I tell myself about it, and whether my justification is a moral argument or one of the three tells from the test. Do not let me answer in the abstract about society. Quote my own justification back to me and name which category it falls into.

Close with a single question: what is the smallest change that would make my answer to the previous question honest, and am I going to make it?

Rules: no moralizing and no assuming my politics. Apply the test symmetrically, including to practices associated with views I appear to hold. If a candidate fails the test, say so plainly rather than piling on.