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Saranga Sudarshan's avatar

I don’t know what growth is possible for young children that are killed by natural disasters or congenital diseases.

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ken taylor's avatar

Two things come to mind. One is a comment by Jeremy Bentham on his own theories of utility. Bentham said no system can address all problems but we can design society to address some and that is better than addressing none of society's issues.

The second that always comes to mind is a little book by H.G. Wells entitled The Modern Utopia. It is actually an essay rather than a version of a perfect world, and as such before anyone begins to espouse on any utopian vision the book needs to be perused.

Ultimately Wells ends up illustrating two fallacies of any utopian vision. The first is that in order to assume any ideal one has to first assume that the ideal itself could somehow eliminate change. Inmmortality, as such, if a being is still alive does not end the body's changing, in fact it would require a much slower cellular replacement but not end it because that would not be immortality but death.

The second problem is utopians must assume all people have all the same desires and all the same personalities. If this were true then of course we would all already live in a utopia, but as we complete for resources our interests are different. This being true, then utopias must require an extreme method to enforce conformity. But methods that attempt to enforce conformity are exactly the issue utopian visionaries wish to escape so we are right back to the first problem of such visions.

And while I would totally agree with Mr. Philosophy Bear on many of his goals, I am still left wondering that they are everyone's goals since we don't already have such a society. Thus any policies to implement such goals end up using the same methodologies of enforcement And this is the history of revolutionary results that's aims were to better society.

So to actually better society, I fear we are forced to abandon utopian ideologies altogether and constantly revise aspirations as injustices of either environment or human leadership occur. It is like the pre-computerized automobile engine. The problem may not have always been the obvious problem and if the initial "fix" was unsatisfactory then another fix was attempted until the issue causing the problem was resolved.

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