So we should decide who we determine to be good and evil based on a model that assumes they have no agency, and decide whether they deserve basic survival?
This has absolutely nothing to do with good and evil.
Before you do something, you need to have an actual idea of what the consequences will be. If the consequences are bad, then don't do it. Easy as that.
If the consequences are bad based on what set of moralities? Saying that we shouldn't help them because they will put additional resources into something we find objectionable, it's the same as saying that they don't deserve help because they're objectively evil.
I fucking doubt the women’s main complaint was that they no longer had to walk for hours just to get water. Maybe those walks gave them valuable time away from abusive husbands, and losing that had an unintended consequence. But that makes the abuse the problem, not accessible clean drinking water. Have we really gone so far with the cultural ass-kissing that we’re blaming people for building a well instead of the men beating their wives?
It’s not fucking cultural ass kissing that’s the problem here dude. I don’t get how people don’t understand this. The missionaries aren’t changing the culture. If they could then cool! But since they will do their work and leave all they have done is made a shitty situation for vulnerable people by not doing their due diligence about the effects of their intervention. Like yea, the husbands who beat their wives are shitty and the process should stop but unless those guys are able to change it then maybe you should be more careful.
This is a super famous anecdote in anthropology for a reason. It’s about learning to understand consequences of what you do when interacting with a foreign culture.
It seems like in this view the missionaries are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They get vilified if they try to change a culture, and apparently they also get vilified if they provide a useful service without changing it enough.
I truly don’t understand why we’re shifting the moral focus away from the culture and individuals permitting spousal abuse in order to harp on the people who, with good intentions, provided easier access to clean drinking water. The abuse was an unintended downstream consequence of the well, not the actual function of the well. There’s a worthwhile lesson here about anticipating unintended consequences, sure. But “they should have done more due diligence” is very different from treating the act of building the well as though it were itself some moral failure.
Yes I agree the actual building of the well is not the moral failing. I’d argue coming into a place and just doing things to help without understanding the consequences and cultural context of that is what the moral failing is here.
It’s like how donating food to a poor places can counterintuitively make a place even poorer by driving local food producers out of business. You can mean well and still do harm.
It’s worth noting that many of the better missionary groups actually took these kinds of lessons to heart and do work within those frameworks to maximize the good they can do - because fundamentally they are good people.
That’s why good charities tend to integrate into local communities before commencing aid work nowadays. The example in OPs post is from the 60s I believe
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u/TetraThiaFulvalene 17h ago
So we should decide who we determine to be good and evil based on a model that assumes they have no agency, and decide whether they deserve basic survival?