Human nature is violent enough that such isolated cases will probably pop up forever, unless some miraclous change suddenly happens. The 20th century was the bloodiest, because advanced lethal technology allowed it, not because human nature suddenly changed in a bloodier direction.
The fact remains that overall humans today have more empathic values than before, otherwise we would automatically fall back to basic primal responses to different skin colors, religion or what have you. Some people still do, of course, but at least now these are things that are on a societal level forbidden, at least in the western world, and that's a definite change.
If we look at history, we can clearly observe a pattern of increasing empathy in human behavior. Granted the biggest changes have probably only happened in a few recent centuries, but they have regardless.
My point being, of course, things like slavery and other sort of inequality between people. These are things that were considered perfectly normal -- surely a slave owner in their time would've answered almost exactly like you did now to a question about what the slaves would be like in millions of year, substituting eating with working, of course.
These were values of the time only perhaps questioned by a niche group at the time which the majority only ignored or laughed at. Slowly, however, the niche gained momentum, and suddenly you have a vastly different worldview like what we have today, where slavery is a purely negative thing. The Romans used to say that you can't have freedom without slavery; a vastly different interpretation to today's, don't you think?
My hypothesis would thus be that the niche of animal rights activism today will grow to be a phenomenon supported by the majority. You can already clearly see the change by looking at statistics that show younger generations are adopting vegetarianism, veganism, or any of the many forms of conscious choice to abstain from supporting killing of animals. There's of course no guarantee the change will continue in that direction, but history, I think, shows it will.
One thing also speaking in favor of this is the fact that just like for inequality of people, there is really no factual explanation for why a human life would be so much more important than the life of an individual of another species, and these tend to lose importance over time, when we move onto a (hopefully) more and more logical and scientific society. The value of human life consideration doesn't follow any logical pattern, i.e. a baby for all practices and purposes is perhaps even less sophisticated than many animals, but it's the potential people see in them that makes them important. On the other hand, a person with serious brain damage can also be on a much lower level than many animals, yet it is only the stamp of "being human" that is enough.
This logical inconsistency is based on mostly on emotions and beliefs, partly on Biblical tradition, which is not nearly as important in defining society's values anymore as it was before, but also partly just for evolutionary instict to preserve one's own species, and since today the human race is hardly anymore in the danger of extinction, it has begun to fade in importance.
I'm certainly unable to point a clear timeframe in which a change in these values will occur on a large scale, but the thing I think can be almost said for certain is that it will.
Probably a good time to remind all the people forced to use Windows here of this little brilliant utility, which functions as a local proxy server and thus works with any browser, and can filter popups, the kind of mouseover events mentioned in this article, sounds, ads, everything. A must-have for Win32 people, in my opinion.
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Human nature is violent enough that such isolated cases will probably pop up forever, unless some miraclous change suddenly happens. The 20th century was the bloodiest, because advanced lethal technology allowed it, not because human nature suddenly changed in a bloodier direction.
The fact remains that overall humans today have more empathic values than before, otherwise we would automatically fall back to basic primal responses to different skin colors, religion or what have you. Some people still do, of course, but at least now these are things that are on a societal level forbidden, at least in the western world, and that's a definite change.
If we look at history, we can clearly observe a pattern of increasing empathy in human behavior. Granted the biggest changes have probably only happened in a few recent centuries, but they have regardless.
My point being, of course, things like slavery and other sort of inequality between people. These are things that were considered perfectly normal -- surely a slave owner in their time would've answered almost exactly like you did now to a question about what the slaves would be like in millions of year, substituting eating with working, of course.
These were values of the time only perhaps questioned by a niche group at the time which the majority only ignored or laughed at. Slowly, however, the niche gained momentum, and suddenly you have a vastly different worldview like what we have today, where slavery is a purely negative thing. The Romans used to say that you can't have freedom without slavery; a vastly different interpretation to today's, don't you think?
My hypothesis would thus be that the niche of animal rights activism today will grow to be a phenomenon supported by the majority. You can already clearly see the change by looking at statistics that show younger generations are adopting vegetarianism, veganism, or any of the many forms of conscious choice to abstain from supporting killing of animals. There's of course no guarantee the change will continue in that direction, but history, I think, shows it will.
One thing also speaking in favor of this is the fact that just like for inequality of people, there is really no factual explanation for why a human life would be so much more important than the life of an individual of another species, and these tend to lose importance over time, when we move onto a (hopefully) more and more logical and scientific society. The value of human life consideration doesn't follow any logical pattern, i.e. a baby for all practices and purposes is perhaps even less sophisticated than many animals, but it's the potential people see in them that makes them important. On the other hand, a person with serious brain damage can also be on a much lower level than many animals, yet it is only the stamp of "being human" that is enough.
This logical inconsistency is based on mostly on emotions and beliefs, partly on Biblical tradition, which is not nearly as important in defining society's values anymore as it was before, but also partly just for evolutionary instict to preserve one's own species, and since today the human race is hardly anymore in the danger of extinction, it has begun to fade in importance.
I'm certainly unable to point a clear timeframe in which a change in these values will occur on a large scale, but the thing I think can be almost said for certain is that it will.
Probably a good time to remind all the people forced to use Windows here of this little brilliant utility, which functions as a local proxy server and thus works with any browser, and can filter popups, the kind of mouseover events mentioned in this article, sounds, ads, everything. A must-have for Win32 people, in my opinion.