Even in a purely, coldly utilitarian moral system, there are three questions to ask before accepting harmful or destructive Means because they ostensibly lead to a better End:
Do the Means lead to some other negative End, in addition to the intended one? The classical example of the naĂŻve utilitarian doctor who kills a patient in order to harvest their organs and save five patients, in practice, if accepted, leads to general loss of trust in doctors and hospitals and therefore to much greater loss of life; hence, doctors should follow a hard rule of not killing patients to harvest their organs, even if this might save more lives in the shortest term.
Are the Means necessary in order to achieve the End? The negative utility of atrocious Means still ends up in the final account along with the supposed positive utility of the End (and without the penalty for uncertainty that the latter should arguably be given). The Means are as much part of the final state as the End.
Do the Means, in fact, lead to the End? Any consequentialist justification for an atrocity-for-the-greater-good automatically fails if the atrocity does not plausibly bring out the greater good, even before any other consideration is taken. It's all well and good to say that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but (ignoring for the moment that people are arguably owed more consideration than eggs) a large chunk of the 20th century was a sustained and furious festival of egg-crushing and egg-trampling that resulted in precisely zero omelettes.
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After Covid-19, world leaders agreed to work together to strengthen global health systems, but negotiations on a new agreement have stalled
Kat Lay at The Guardian:
Five years ago, the world was hearing the first reports of a mysterious flu-like illness emerging from Wuhan, China, now known as Covid-19.
The pandemic that followed brought more than 14 million deaths, and sent shock waves through the world economy. About 400 million people worldwide have had long Covid. World leaders, recognising that another pandemic was not a question of âifâ but âwhenâ, promised to work together to strengthen global health systems.
But negotiations on a new pandemic agreement stalled in 2024, even as further global public health threats and emergencies were identified. If a new pandemic threat emerges in 2025, experts are yet to be convinced that we will deal with it any better than the last.
What are the threats?
While experts agree that another pandemic is inevitable, exactly what, where and when is impossible to predict.
New health threats emerge frequently. World health leaders declared an outbreak of mpox in Africa an international public health emergency in 2024. As the year ended, teams of specialists were probing a potential outbreak of an unknown illness in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, now thought to be cases of severe malaria and other diseases exacerbated by acute malnutrition.
Maria van Kerkhove, interim director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at the World Health Organization (WHO), is concerned about the bird flu situation â the virus is not spreading human to human but there have been an increasing number of human infections in the past year.
While there is a well-established international monitoring system specifically focused on influenza, surveillance in sectors such as trade and agriculture, where humans and animals mix, is not comprehensive enough, she says. And she stresses that the ability to properly assess the risk âdepends on the detection, the sequencing, the transparency of countries to share those samplesâ.
The Covid-19 pandemic left health systems worldwide âreally shakyâ and has been followed by a long list of other health crises, she says. âSeasonal influenza started circulating, we had an mpox emergency, weâve had Marburg, weâve had cholera, weâve had earthquakes, weâve had floods, measles, diphtheria, dengue, Oropouche. Health systems are really buckling under the weight and our health workforce globally has really taken a beating. Many have left. Many are suffering from PTSD. Many died.â
[...]
Are we doing anything better?
The world has never been in a better position when it comes to the expertise, technology and data systems to rapidly detect a threat, Van Kerkhove says. The expansion of genomic sequencing abilities to most countries worldwide, and better access to medical oxygen and infection prevention and control, remain âreally big gainsâ after the Covid-19 pandemic, she adds.
It means her answer to whether the world is ready for the next pandemic âis both yes and noâ.
âOn the other hand, I think the difficulties and the trauma that weâve all gone through with Covid and with other outbreaks, in the context of war and climate change and economic crises and politics, we are absolutely not ready to handle another pandemic,â she says. âThe world doesnât want to hear me on television saying that the next crisis is upon us.â
The world of public health is âfighting for political attention, for fiscal space, for investmentâ â rather than nations working to stay in âa steady state of readinessâ, she says.
5 years after the COVID pandemic swept the world and impacted all facets of our lives, is the world ready for another pandemic? Not really.
I am watching a video with criticism of geographical determinism in worldbuilding and realized that I don't really remember seeing any fictional stereotypic merchant state that relies on rivers.
Norse and Rus were whom I had in mind, but to my knowledge British and Japanese people also heavily utilized rivers for trade and I would be very surprised if Ancient Chinese people didn't.
I don't know about history of First Nations of North America and did they have trade in our understanding, but I heard that river system of North America is so convenient that the entire 19th century demand for transportation could have been covered by it alone, without trains.
Just some ideas
Freshwater systems are woefully underused in worldbuilding. The other day I was reading about the history of my region and I was amazed at how big and sophisticated native canoes were in the ParanĂĄ, the Paraguay and the Amazonas, and how virtually nobody talks about it. We are talking about ships that could hold about 30 people and some were bigger than Columbus caravels. For centuries into the colonial era, the Spanish and Portuguese hired or pressed into service native navigators for the rivers which were though to navigate as a sea. Still before that, they were the major arteries of commerce and trade through the continent, this is well known. Even Patagonian goods are reported in Corrientes (North of Argentina) which indicates that trade there got very far. As for the Chinese, not only rivers were important to the but also they boasted an amazing canal system but that's about all I know.
One thing I learned recently about rivers and cities is that cities were often founded on the side of rivers, yes, but almost never at their mouth. Look for example at Paris, Rome, London, the Egyptian capitals. They were founded by the river, but the mouth of the river next to the sea is where the delta is, and deltas always change and flood, carrying mud and slit, they aren't good places to build at all. Good river cities are built in the 'deep side' of the river where you can build ports, not in the side where sediment accumulates. Another issue with river cities are marshlands. For example, I remember reading that the marshlands of ancient Rome were drained at great cost. Ancient peoples knew that marshes were 'unsanitary' even if they didn't know why (it's because they host mosquitos and parasites, not because of anything bad wetlands have on itself) and they had to deal with them. There are some exceptions to this, like Venice which was basically built on a marshland (or the Netherlands).
And indeed rivers were (and still are! I see ships going up and down the ParanĂĄ every weekend!) a very efficient way of transportation. There's lots about it written in Europe, but river barges were basically the railroads of their time. Before the advent of railroads, people in Europe (and China) weren't thinking roads, but canals, the French built a lot of canals at great expense which became obsolete later by railroad.
Unfortunately the sources about river canoes and transportation in America (continent) are often tucked away in papers and history books, there really isn't that much accessible literature and illustrations about it. Which is a goddamn shame because learning about native canoes bigger than Spanish caravels (and they were still building them in Paraguay and Argentina during colonial times, according to my sources) blew my mind.
i. War of the Foxes, Richard Siken / ii., v., viii., xi. Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree with You, Hannah Gamble / iii. unknown / iv. Mimmo Paladino / vi. Book 20e, In between here and there, Beata Wehr / vii. unknown / ix. unknown / x. @heartlessqueen
Finally, in a low whisper, he said, 'I think I might be a terrible person.' For a split second I believed him - I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder.
Then âI realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.â
