Astral Codex Ten

Confederacy

3 min read

Confederacy

Article

Confederacy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 30, 2022 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Somebody’s going to ask “but what about the Confederacy?””; “original Confederacy problem”; “the difference between Ukraine and the confederacy”. It most often appears alongside China, Crimea, Russia.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 30, 2022
  • Last seen: April 06, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Who Gets Self-Determination?
March 30, 2022 · Original source
Somebody’s going to ask “but what about the Confederacy?” The position that most tempts me is “The Confederacy had every right to secede, because every region that wants to secede has that right - but immediately upon granting them independence, the Union should have invaded in order to stop the atrocity of slavery”. I say it tempts rather convinces because it suggests a moral duty to conquer any country doing sufficiently bad things (should the Union have invaded Brazil too, for the same reason?) I’m still not sure how I feel about this. Assuming we’re against invading foreign countries on principle, a utilitarian might refuse to let the Confederacy leave in the hope of preventing the establishment of a permanent slave power. But I would still think of that as one of those rights violation which utilitarians occasionally allow for the greater good.
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
April 06, 2022 · Original source
This seems a lot like the original Confederacy problem, in that it takes the usual world-policeman moral dilemma of “should good countries conquer bad countries to prevent them from being bad?” and twists it into the “should good countries prevent bad countries from gaining independence, to prevent them from being bad?” I’m not sure how to think about these questions.
My immediate response to "what about the Confederacy?" is to say that yes, the people of the South had the right to secede in 1861 if they wanted to - but they didn't.
A lot of people had this objection, which I don’t find very interesting. I don’t know what the real-world numbers for the Confederacy looked like, but it seems possible in principle that, say, all white citizens supported, all black citizens opposed, and blacks were a minority so it passed. I don't think that scenario would be very different, ethically, from what really happened, so I don't want to hang my opposition to what really happened on its differences from that scenario.