Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.
Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?
Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.
Philosophy prof Kwame Anthony Appiah points out the following as potential things we will truly regret allowing as a society:
- The prison system
- Industrial meat production
- The systemic isolation of our nation's elderly
- The environment.
"Regret is insight that comes a day too late." --anon