Western Civilization considers it a human right to be able kill the most vulnerable humans under the pretext that they aren't ready yet to have human rights.

As njarboe wrote, only recently, and it is by no means restricted to the West (see China or Soviet Russia). The only reason why it is shocking vis-a-vis the West is because it is a radical break with the ethical principles the West has acknowledged (and yes, often practiced poorly) for almost the last two millennia.

The most demented part of it is that as horrific as the practice was historically, as the article here shows, the reasons, as crazy as they were, were at least centered around existential and cosmic concerns. Today, we sacrifice out of inconvenience, or because we "made a mistake", and someone has to pay, but not the guilt party, of course. But because we are still influenced by those "old principles", most of us cannot even consciously face what we are doing. We dehumanize the victims through piss-poor pseudo-intellectual gymnastics so that it all computes in our psychotic calculus of moral purity.

Now compare the possibly hundreds of thousands the Aztecs sacrifices to the 60+ million sacrificed in the US alone since 1973.

So not only do we sacrifice at a far grander scale than ever before, we deny that we do so because we're too cowardly to look the truth in the face. We're not the Aztecs! We have the decency of performing our sacrifices discreetly, out of sight, by other names, and with a _sophisticated_ detachment. We're civilized, damn it!

Though I don't agree, I acknowledge this as likely the best counterargument to my point above.

Only very recently in Western Civilization has this been enshrined in law in most countries and is still a very highly contested issue in many.

> Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.

Good old western civilization, no blood on our hands.

Well, you know, they were either "not human" (or 3/5 in some cases) or "terrorists" or "reds" (those millions in Laos and Cambodia must have fell in that category, one would hope) or something like that. Not sure how they categorized those 200,000 or so peasants in Guatemala, but hey, out of sight, out mind, eh?

In recent US history as well as ancient history, "them" vs "us" has been enough justification to satisfy the public in any time period. It's not that few in the US cared about bombing "commies" in Laos and Cambodia, it's that being "red" made much less difference than being "them". This is tribalism at its finest (or worst, take your pick).

The genocide of native americans, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill starving million in India because he thought them to be less human, the transatlantic slave trade....all just minor blemishes in an otherwise great culture.

Perhaps the whole idea of "culture/ideology" is flawed and progress happens not within a culture but by specifically rejecting cultural and ideological norms.

That itself is a culture/ideology though. That is sort of the culture of the west in fact, to move forward, and whatever isn't helping move forward gets left behind.

for people who are dying of starvation versus people who are being explicitly human-sacrificed, from their perspective do you think it particularly matters if they are dying from the neglect and sheer indifference of others, or from direct intentional malice?

i would argue that for those on the receiving end, the difference matters very little.

Depends. If it's the Aztecs we're talking about, I'm sure they'd prefer to die of starvation in at least some cases - Aztec deities were fairly inventive as far as their sacrifices went, and at least one of them required the victim to be flayed alive, for example.

point taken. if we keep at this long enough we can end up with some utilitarian equations to trade-off the relative costs of different forms of human misery.

Yes, active involvement in situation to make it worse and lack of involvement in situation to make it better are valued in a drastically different ways in most moral systems.

Oddly enough, the people who are actually dying of starvation always seem to be located in Marxist countries rather than the evil capitalist Western countries. Just bad luck, I guess.

It's useful to your argument that you excluded the famines in Ireland and India under the British. Let alone slavery, etc.

Marx was literally a part of western civilisation.

i totally agree that there have been avoidable and horrific famines in marxist countries due to inept attempts at central management of agriculture. these days, there's also a bit of ugly conflict popping up along ethnic lines in some countries where populations are under stress for access to enough farmland for subsistence agriculture vs grazing (environmental pressure will be part of this).

i dont think there's much distinction between marxist countries and capitalist western countries when it comes towards climate change, we all love nice cheap coal and oil now.

What? Care to give examples? And where is a place you would define as Marxist in 2018?

>Care to give examples?

Sure. Soviet Famine of 1921 (5 million). Soviet Famine of 1932-33 (7-10 million minimum, perhaps many more). Soviet Famine of 1947 (1 million or so). Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 (15-43 million). Cambodian Famine of 1974-79 (2 million). Ethiopian Famine of 1984-85 (400,000). North Korean Famine of 1996 (3.5 million).

Number of famines in the capitalist west over the same time period: zero.

Note that I'm not counting food shortages caused by active or recent warfare in either case, thus neither the German "Hunger Winter" of 1946-47 (several hundred thousand) nor the Siege of Leningrad Famine of 1941-44 (about a million) are included.

> And where is a place you would define as Marxist in 2018?

Venezuela will do until something closer comes along. And sure enough, they're on the brink of famine.

You forgot the Great Bengali famine of 1943 (3 million) under British rule in India.

The British had the habit of ducking responsibility for all the famines that killed millions in India under their rule by blaming it on overpopulation. That there were no major famines after Indian independence is conveniently ignored.

> Note that I'm not counting food shortages caused by active or recent warfare in either case,

Surely the Ethiopian famine and the Cambodian famine could be disregarded if you applied this rule consistently.

And the Bengal famine is arguably something caused by a Western democracy that wasn't directly a result of the wartime conditions.

Attributing starvation in Leningrad and Eastern Germany to Marxism is a little odd too.

The op said ‘dying’ and I was referring to the use of the current tense.

> If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.

How about your government? Those hands are a smidge less than clean.

Pollution including that of the sort which causes birth defects among children at a mass scale?

Future societies will look at our treatment of animals the same way.