Now I’m not saying that IS the case, only that the categorical “Well obviously our society is a single society so that clearly didn’t happen” implication is stupid.

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That’s irrelevant because morality has no interest in reducing harm. What it has an interest in reducing is uncompensated harm. It’s totally okay to harm someone if harming them will result in good things happening to them that compensate for that harm (of course, the good things have to be good by their standards not yours).

If compound interest causes you harm, but it also causes a large amount of good things to happen to you that outweigh that harm, then its effect on you was good overall. That means that the only African-Americans alive today that slavery harmed are the ones whose lives are so terrible that they spend the majority of them wishing they were dead.

>“Your veil of ignorance is slipping.”

This discussing is not about any sort of pure utilitarianism that uses the Veil of Ignorance. This is a discussion related to nonutilitarian concepts like Just Desserts and Retribution. In these case the identity of the people we are debating is highly important and using a veil of ignorance is not appropriate.

>Besides, I never really bought the related sorts of arguments:
“I cannot be in favor of abortion, because if my mother had aborted me I wouldn’t even be here.”

I don’t buy that argument either, especially since it also makes you against every other form of birth control, including abstinence. When we’re considering moral questions that will affect the personal identity of future generations I think we should just pick whatever population is morally best and not consider the fact that it will result in another population not existing to be a problem.

Of course, there is serious argument over what makes a population morally best. Is it better to have a small population with high utility or a large one with low utility? Should we try to create a diverse population? Should we make people have human-like values or something else? But that’s another discussion entirely.

But again, we’re not discussing how to choose a future population through a veil of ignorance. We are discussing questions of justice, reparations, and whether or not any specific person was wronged. And while it is true that our current population is not as “morally good” as a population in a world where slavery had never happened would be, that does not mean any specific person was harmed and deserves reparations for the harm they suffered.

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But since the human population tends to grow in most cases time travel will kill more than it saves.

No, because time travel also saves / “creates” (same thing, really) all the people that are born instead – which your logic seems to be neglecting.

If you save 6 million Jews+others but condemn 6 billion post-WW2 lives to non-existence, that’s only a 1000:1 cost if you also prevent anyone else from being born. But if in both timelines there are 7 billion people in 2014, then from 2014-perspective you’ve killed 7 billion people and saved/replaced them with 7 billion OTHER people. Which … I guess is a net wash? Time travel morality is weird.

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Do reactionaries say that “Reactionary states” (meaning, what exactly?) won’t go to war, or that they won’t go on grand crusades to spread ideology x?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/22/apart-from-better-sanitation-and-medicine-and-education-and-irrigation-and-public-health-and-roads-and-public-order-what-has-modernity-done-for-us/

This claim I received mostly from blog posts I can’t find right now and from discussions with Michael Anissimov. It goes that when states are fully sovereign, self-interested, and run by noble classes – as they were long ago – their wars are rare, as short as possible, and mostly fought in a civilized way.

I suspect the parable of Fnargl (where an omnipotent, gold-maximizing alien brings about world peace and prosperity) also gets mixed in here somewhere.
I define “Reactionary state” as a state where the governing structure, whether corporate or monarchic in nature, feels secure and works for its own interests, not for the good of the people underneath.
But there’s all kinds of reasons to go to war based off pride, or history, or kings can be completely nuts, all of which were in play in South Carolina.
EDIT:Most telling was the complete and utter lack of respect many Southern intelligentsia, especially the South Carolina “fire-breathers,” had for any Northern opinion and sensibilities. The Reactionary position relies on monarchs negotiating with each other rather than going to war, and the South Carolinans had absolutely no respect for the North. My favorites were the theory that Northerners, being descended from Anglo-Saxon peasants, were naturally inclined to be submissive to Southerners descended from Normans, and the politician who offered to drink all the blood spilled as a result of secession, though he never went through with it.

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