EA - How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study by rosehadshar

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study, published by rosehadshar on July 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to the following people for helping me with this post: JP Addison, Guive Assadi, Adam Bales, Max Dalton, Ben Garfinkel, Jamie Harris, Lizka Vaintrob. One question I am interested in is how moral progress happens, and particularly how far economic changes have driven moral progress (as opposed to political, cultural or other factors). I think this question has implications for things like: How much to push on value changes versus artificial meat when it comes to ending factory farming How to approach digital sentience Whether it would be an important, good thing to encourage widespread support for something like longtermism, or ‘future generations matter’, or some other set of values How optimistic to be in general about investments in moral circle expansion, value changes, and moral campaigns It’s obviously an extremely complex question, and I don’t think it’s the sort of inquiry where one should expect to find a robust, simple answer, even with a lifetime of work: ‘Moral progress’ is subjective ‘Economic changes as opposed to political or cultural factors’ is very reductive Historical causation is difficult to trace, and evidence is often sparse and messy I still think it’s instructive to think about questions like this though, and to ground that thinking empirically by learning about relevant historical examples. One example that I have spent around a week looking into is the decline of footbinding in China in the twentieth century. In this post, I share my tentative understanding of why footbinding declined. In brief: Some scholars argue that footbinding declined because of the moral campaign that was waged against the practice. Others argue that footbinding declined because foreign textile imports undermined the value of girls’ sedentary handwork, which in turn reduced the economic practicality of footbinding. I currently think that the moral campaign probably expedited the decline of footbinding by years or possibly decades, but that economic changes made it close to inevitable that the practice would decline in the first half of the twentieth century. Even if you don’t buy the handwork argument, the rise of factory work some decades later would likely have killed off the practice. I also think that both the moral campaign and the economic changes were causally dependent on interactions with foreign powers. If China had been entirely isolated from foreign interactions (which it’s worth remembering were often highly exploitative and invasive), I expect footbinding would have continued for decades longer than it did. What happened Footbinding was the practice of tightly binding young girls’ feet so that the bones couldn’t grow. Usually this involved actually breaking bones, and was very painful.[1] Footbinding was practised in China for around a millennium,[2] and was widespread for centuries.[3] In spite of this prevalence, it disappeared as a practice over a space of 50 years, and in many places in more like a generation.[4] In 1900, footbinding was still a majority practice in Han areas, by 1940 at the latest it had become a minority practice, and by 1950 was very unusual. There was a prominent, early moral campaign against footbinding. From the late nineteenth century, foreign missionaries and then Chinese nationalists formed societies, circulated pamphlets, collected pledges from parents not to footbind, and wrote to officials condemning the practice. These efforts preceded an imperial edict against footbinding issued in 1902, and the eventual ban of the practice in 1911.[5] In urban areas, it seems that footbinding as a practice declined in the 1900s and 1910s, so around the time of the ban. In rural areas ...