I agree, and I'd also point to women becoming full members of society, as individuals, citizens, and workers, after thousands of years of human history (though with much work remaining).

But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Generations of African-Americans lived and died under slavery and segregation; that it was stopped eventually did them no good, and more generations continue to face discrimination right now. It's similar to when a person is freed after decades of imprisonment for an unjust conviction: It's better than leaving them in prison, but a great evil was committed.

MLK put it well:[0]

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."

[0] Letter From a Birmingham Jail by MLK, the most valuable words you can read about the subject of oppression and the response to it: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

> But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim.

Tick, tick - 4 people were just born. 250 people will be born in the next minute. 360k people will be born today. And also tomorrow. 2.5M this week. 130M this year. In about 6 years, almost all of them will hit school. School. Schools that are pervasively wretched. Can you make them less wretched? You have six years to change the world. For each 4 years your improvements are delayed, your window misses half a billion people. Good luck. Tick, tock.

One thing I took away from working on One Laptop Per Child, is that few appreciate the breathtakingly high cost of time.

Very well put. And don't forget those kids in school right now. Do we just write off everyone in high school, for example?

> don't forget those kids in school right now

People seem to have difficulty thinking about, and empathizing with, large numbers of people. The "one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic" observation. So it's a challenge to craft descriptions that provide some sense of scale, while retaining an emotional connection. Narrowing scope can help.

You mean, we ended it in the United States. Other countries ended slavery before we did.

> You mean, we ended it in the United States. Other countries ended slavery before we did.

Sort of? The major European powers "ended" it at home by outsourcing it to their colonies. It's not like Britain, France, Belgium, etc. weren't still practicing explicit chattel slavery well into the 20th century.

And others ended it much later. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 (but in practice it still continued after that).

For some context on this as it pertains to the New World check out Bartolomé de las Casas.

And it's still a global problem today, with many still enslaved around the world

Here we're talking about the chattel slavery of Africans as a labor force, not the general concept of slavery.

We didn't end segregation, we ended legally enforced segregation. I went to a segregated school from K-6 (one white kid, whose only living parent was black), and that was in the 80s, when busing was pretty active. I'm sure many of you who live in the US live in segregated neighborhoods, and attended segregated schools.

What's strange is the common insistence that segregation has ended, and what's remaining is somehow by the choice of the participants, even the ones who lose out: the strangeness is that that argument is no different from the arguments made during legal segregation, when the claim was that the law was just a representation and reflection of values held in common.

If today you stood on the corner of the block I grew up on in Chicago for a year, you'd never see a white person.

>what's remaining is somehow by the choice of the participants

It’s a shame that this is a widely accepted explanation for the segregated neighborhoods we live in today. There were proactive policies — some promoted by the federal government — that made it this way.

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/st-louis-conference-cele...

And what's acceptable changes over time. I have no doubt that 100 years from now they'll look back and think many things that we feel are acceptable are immoral and shameful.

Maybe in 100 years we'll be experiencing such extreme hardships that we'll regress our values to more primitive forms.

Such as the treatment of most of the animals we raise for food.

Or, you know, people?

We're raising people for food?!

I’m doubtful. Abolition was the direct result of Christian fundamentalism, perhaps even zealotry. I don’t see the world moving back in that direction.

A few Christians like John Brown were abolitionists. Others, considerably more, were supporters of slavery on the grounds that the Bible seemed to have no problem with it. The whole split between Northern and Southern Baptists was a result.

There were no non-Christian abolitionists. The entire movement in Britain was based on religious grounds. Perhaps fundamentalist is the wrong term. Evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce and the original group of Quakers are whom I am referring.

Weren’t the most outspoken abolitionists Quakers? They’re far from Christian fundamentalists.

How so?