Costly moral actions

Two and a half years later, and I finally have a thought that is blog-worthy.

Working on my dissertation, I happen upon an article about the Atlantic slave-trade. Kaufmann and Pape (1999) Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade. IO 53 (4) 631--668

The British lost 5k lives and 2% of their national income for 60 years in an effort to squash slavery.


Their claims for the abolitionist movement working:
-Corrupt British society. Getting rid of slave trade was more or less a way to fix the country. Basically, some religious leaders (non Anglican Protestants) thought that God would punish Britain if they didn't end slavery, and that slavery was a manifestation of all the bad moral problems in the country. It really had nothing to do with the morality of slavery, but with a desire to save themselves.
-They did it completely on their own.
-Domestically grown idea.
-Moral obligation to 'fix the problem'

Here's their conclusion (page 664):
"Since our theory is developed from a single case, evidence from the same case cannot
be used to estimate its generalizability to other past cases or future opportunities.
The next step is to identify any comparable or nearly comparable costly moral actions.
Although all but the first of the following were almost certainly less costly than
Britain’s anti-slavery effort, reasonable candidates include American and French decisions
to end slavery, British and Dutch efforts to end suttee, certain instances of
decolonization, and the development aid policies of the world’s most generous donor,
Norway. We should also study cases where costly moral action was considered
but not pursued, such as the Allies’ failure to bomb Auschwitz.

If our theory stands up, it implies that some future costly moral actions may be
pursued unilaterally by a single powerful state, rather than by multilateral agreement,
and may be driven primarily internally rather than reflecting the spread of an international
moral consensus. They may also be more likely to emerge from a state that is
undergoing domestic upheaval of which the international moral project is partly a
side effect. These possibilities should caution us that some future international moral
actions may not be ones that cosmopolitan sensibilities or Western societies will
welcome."

Read the last paragraph again. It's ok, I'll wait...

Which countries are still all messed up? Not really the Western ones. The scary part = what ideas are they going to spread? No one's really going to argue that slavery is moral. But, say you have some small (and the abolitionists were a minority group) group of people that think, I don't know, women being allowed to work outside the home is immoral... If they have enough time and money, they might be able to spread it. Or Hitler. Small group of people, domestically grown "moral" issue, lots of time and money...we like to think otherwise, but that could have worked. Morality is culturally manufactured.

thoughts?