ho hum

[lauralh]

"For example, in Honduras, the site of the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country's population lives on less than $2 per day."

Comments

[chris.livejournal.com]

thats kind of a fatalistic argument. human nature does change over time. consider just the value of life. in the civil war we lost like x000,000 soldiers, now its upsetting when we've lost around 2000. in past cultures if a slave or serf or some other lower class fell ill or was injured, they'd just let them die. now even the poorest person is entitled to emergency medical care. consider how just a couple generations ago it was pretty acceptable for people to beat their wives and/or children like they were property. (if not accepted, it was certainly overlooked, and you sure didn't get involved in their business about it).

there's no reason to expect that people (as a society) can't or won't improve over time, unless of course, nobody tries to.

[tyrven.livejournal.com]

This isn't meant to be fatalistic nor is it to deny the purpose or benefit of "improvement" (by whatever yardstick a culture determines). The point is to challenge the role of intention or innate morality in that process. For instance, governments are not necessarily any more "moral" than they were two hundred years ago, but there are public relations issues due to how much we've brought the war to the living rooms of Americans; this accountability creates a consequence which yields a change in behavior. I don't think this invalidates the benefit of this change at all, but I think it's naive to mistake it with morality.

[chris.livejournal.com]

I'm sure if they could start up a draft, pay soldiers 1/4 of what they make now, and increase casualties about 500% they would (lives are cheap, bombs and missles are not). but as you say the circumstances of accountability are much higher now. its obviously not the government's morality that is changing the situation, but what the people will find acceptable.