tmac213 t1_j265p0f wrote
Reply to comment by Wild-Bedroom-57011 in How the concept: Banality of evil developed by Hanna Arendt can be applied to AI Ethics in order to understand the unintentional behaviour of machines that are intelligent but not conscious. by AndreasRaaskov
In the current world I think the answer is clearly yes, although I would amend the word "evil" to something like destructive or harmful, since an economic system doesn't need to contain malicious intent on order to harm people. Feudalism was and is awful, but has largely given way to capitalism in most places in the modern world. As for slavery, capitalism has been the primary consumer of slave labor since the industrial revolution. So yes, capitalism is the worst.
Wild-Bedroom-57011 t1_j28kq4l wrote
But they said "has yet to content with"
Unless you do in fact mean that every single system of governance, including things before slavery that are hard to conceptualize under one framework, extreme state control (whether you believe NK, USSR are actually socialist or not), etc. etc.
I'm not making a pro-capitalist argument, merely the point that
And ignoring the issue of slavery historically-- "has yet to content with"-- does seem a bit of a deliberate sidestep. Of course capitalism will be the primary consumer of slave labour, but slavery, absolute poverty, etc are lower and falling. Further, modern slavery is completely terrible but less severe than chattel slavery, or slavery that came before that.
But again, my argument was never that capitalism is better than anything else, merely that it isn't the most evil thing. Genocide might be. Or something completely different.
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