The article states the government tries exactly to prevent this from happening since the isolated tribe is about to have contact with a non-isolate tribe:
> Anthropologists now fear that, as well as the prospect of both tribes launching deadly attacks on each other, the potential of contact between the Matis and the other, as yet still isolated Korubo tribe, as well as the desire expressed by the breakaway tribe to reestablish contact with their relatives, could lead to a breakout of disease which could bring the ancient tribe to extinction.
I don't understand why such uncontacted tribes live outside of national and international laws. If you murder someone, whether from another tribe, or a non-native person, you should be arrested and tried for murder.
Why do they get an exception? Serious question -- it seems ethically dubious to me to both refuse to hold them to legal standards, thereby treating them as having the moral awareness of chimpanzees.
Because they can't be under anyone's jurisdiction if they haven't been contacted? It would be like aliens arresting us for breaking galactic laws when we didn't even know there were aliens.
If you're asking why they've never been contacted: we know that doing so would be irreversible, and anything we could learn from observing them would be tainted with our own culture as it inevitably seeps through.
Even if this wasn't the case, morality is not universal and we have no basis on which to judge them.
> People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system.
> There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.
> thereby treating them as having the moral awareness of chimpanzees
Is one of your premises that morality is something that has an objective scale and ours is better developed than theirs?
Non-agrarian societies around the world tend to have cultures/religions more similar to each other than to ours, in part because it's more advantageous to how they live their lives.
As an example: a lot of hunter-gatherer cultures have a way of committing what we'd consider infanticide. Agrarian cultures would tend to frown on that since "all humans have a soul", but the reality of moving around with limited food means that you have to find some way of controlling population.
Another example: the way we treat livestock might be appalling to hunter-gatherers since "animals have souls too". But farmers need to raise and slaughter herd animals to survive.
> uncontacted tribes live outside of national and international laws
Also consider that maybe they have their own laws that you and I are in violation of, who's laws should we follow?
Murder is wrong because murder has a specific definition, and the society that we live in has defined that as wrong. A soldier killing a soldier is allowed during wartime (generally). We have judged that differently. There are a number of reasons why you might kill a person. Some are allowed, and some aren't. It is a fact that your society has a law prohibiting civilians committing murder. Whether the killing of a person is "right" or "wrong" by law is a moral judgement - not a fact - depending on who did it, how they did it, when it was done, and how your culture combines those factors. These tribes likely have similar beliefs, they just might be different to yours. Assuming yours is are the 'correct' ones, is arrogant.
Does this apply to soldiers in wartime? Most societies will not prosecute one of their soldiers who kills another human on the battlefield. Is this murder? Does your state make it illegal for a soldier to kill in wartime?
Many countries have eliminated the death-penalty, but some retain it. Is the executioner a murderer for a state-sponsored execution?
Most states have laws allowing violence if you're in immediate danger. If you kill someone in your state is that murder?
Murdering people by definition is wrong, but it is not murder every time a person is killed by another person.
If someone murders someone in the us, they can get the death penalty. If someone kills someone in self defense, that’s not murder.
These people have government of a kind and a moral and ethical system. If the tribe kills someone within their own cultural traditions, that’s not murder.
Once they’re contacted and brought into a larger society, of course, that changes, but that’s a process that needs to be negotiated.
> Is one of your premises that morality is something that has an objective scale
Uh, yes. I'm not a moral relativist. If you are, I'm sure you're aware of the tricky outcomes of that approach. For example, if you're a moral relativist, then you can't remain consistent with your beliefs and still criticize US executions (I find that most moral relativists reasonably disagree with the US death penalty).
What are the tricky things? On the death penalty in the US: I think it's financially disastrous in the US (executions are more expensive than life imprisonment) and makes it difficult to undo wrongful convictions in line with Blackstone's Ratio. But neither of those are particularly moral.
I'd flip it around and ask how you bootstrap a moral system for all humans (or is it all life?) from scratch. It seems unlikely that I, of all cultures and times, am the pinnacle of morality in the same way that it would be unlikely that I just happened to be born into a family that practices the one correct religion in the world.
Maybe you'd think that I'm inhumane or something, but my beliefs are largely the results of a lot of traveling and meeting the moral absolutists all over the world tell me with the same level of conviction what is right and wrong.
As a practical matter, they are inaccessible. Nobody lives out there. There is nobody to arrest them. The ones that aren't remotely located are assimilated. In short, to
View this as a 'zoo' or something similar to Star Trek-Ian Prime Directive stuff (where we observe but don't interfere) isn't entirely accurate: these places where they live cannot be reached... the rainforest is HUGE and difficult to traverse.
I say it would be unfair to the tribe members to try them for something that violates our sense of right and wrong. They have never been part of the nation that occupies their territory, did not grow up with its values, never consented to be part of it.
It would be like aliens monitoring Earth and trying inhabitants for violating intergalactic space law while none of the inhabitants are even aware they are part of it.
Imagine you get into a time machine and go back 10000 years. Do you try them in modern court? I wouldn't think so.
I would try thinking of these people as in a time warp. They are uncontacted, after all—they're not murdering Paulistanos, they're murdering others in their time warp.
The stone age natives of North Sentinel Island have no resistance to disease and large numbers of them died the last time they had contact with the outside world. Thus, they have adopted the custom of killing anyone who comes on their little island and the Indian government leaves them alone. The alternative to them killing anyone who comes on their island out of curiosity or whatever would be the genocide of their tribe.
The Brazillian government is probably going to kill a whole bunch of the tribe they are trying to save by making contact with them simply through the diseases they will bring.
I suspect that most of these uncontacted tribes are remnants of ancient Amazonian civilizations who were already wiped out by contact with Europeans, so they probably have more resistance than you would expect.
Do you have any citation for large numbers of North Sentinelese dying from disease due to contact? It's certainly a valid fear, but I'm not sure it has ever occurred. I'm aware that an old couple and four children were kidnapped by the British Navy in the 19th century and the old couple quickly became ill and died. The children were returned to the island.
This citation admits that it's pure conjecture how many North Sentinelese died due to outside diseases. Neighboring tribes on neighboring islands suffered heavy losses, but you specifically claimed that large numbers of natives of North Sentinel Island died.
As far as I can tell, it's highly speculative third-order conjecture that (1) large numbers of them died due to diseases acquired through contact (2) they have a belief that quarantine will protect them (likely despite not having a germ theory of disease) and (3) this is their reasoning for killing outsiders. Medieval Europe was significantly more advanced, and they had all kinds of strange ideas about the cause of diseases and plagues that prevented them from mounting effective quarantines.
We can't expect them to have the same feelings we do about killing outsiders, and I think it's a stretch to project our understanding and values on them and then to back out a reasonable Western-style justification for their actions. I think it's much better to admit that we know very little about their system of moral reasoning and give them the benefit of the doubt that their killing of outsiders under the specific circumstances they found themselves in is moral within their moral framework.
> As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.
Your analogy seems more like an argument against moral relativism that for it. Specifically, if murder is always wrong, then your hypothetical aliens are committing a moral transgression. If moral relativism is all we have, then it should be fine to destroy us and our planet by their own standards.
Moral relativism is simply accepting that there's no value system that is rooted in immutable laws of nature - it's all cultural. It doesn't mean that you can't prefer one value system to the other, and make judgments accordingly.
In some USA states, a punishment for murder is execution. In some other jurisdictions, execution itself is murder.
The question is whose legal standards.
They will have their own law, in their own jurisdiction. Human communities spontaneously develop language, trade and law. You can even verify this in the microcosm of your own communities, with jargon and customs.
And how does their "catastrophic" war compare to the wars of "civilization"?
> And how does their "catastrophic" war compare to the wars of "civilization"?
In terms of deaths per capita, many small hunter-gatherer societies are more violent than our worst wars. It just doesn't look quite so horrifying because the societies themselves are so small, the absolute numbers to us don't even rise to the level of "war". On top of that, the conflict tends to be more of a constant state of affairs that's always in the background, rather than lengthy periods of peace interrupted by an explosion of violence.
The dynamics of this situation are weird. Leave them uncontacted for however long out of principle, monitor them from above, commit to preserving their culture, but then intervene and try to manufacture a truce between tribes (thereby interfering with their culture) because we want to keep them around.
"Hey guys, uh, you know, we were pretty happy to just let you do whatever, but we've been watching you for a while and you've started taking risks. We're not real fond of risks. Would you prefer not taking risks for us please? It would make us feel much better about letting you do whatever you like if you didn't take any risks."
The prime directive lover in me tends to agree with such logic (I am also a brazilian born/raised in the Amazon) but try to extrapolate that scenario to some extraterrestrial "overlords" telling us the same thing in a pre-nuclear winter situation. I would rather stick to their plan than risk my own ass. Of course, I know, that's a reductio ad absurdum type of argument but still...
I'm upset by the whole thing for the reason of how some people think isolation is appropriate in allowing this situation to even occur. It's maddening to think a more advanced civilization in space could be observing us in similar fashion as these people with their kids and who have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world. Ugh.. seems so cruel.
And groups like the Amish show that it's possible to uphold traditional ways of life even when exposed to modernity. The Amish let their teenagers live in the outside world for a few years and decide for themselves whether they want to return to the community or become generic Americans. The strategy seems to work: the Amish are growing tremendously.
But the reason for intervention isn't just "risks" but the decimation of an uncontested population due to disease caused by a previous intervention. In other words, it seems as though the "prime directive" has already been violated and this is damage control.
I understand that we might now feel obliged to intervene. I think the weirdness for me comes from the fact that we are watching them, and the paradoxes it introduces.
If we weren't watching them, they would potentially go to war, some of them would likely die, and there is a chance that more would die of disease. But we would be none the wiser.
But since we are watching, we perceive a risk that they don't, and we now feel an obligation to mitigate that risk through intervention. We want them to be independent but they are our dependents. We want them to be free but we must restrict their movements. We want them to be untouched by disease but must expose them to it in order to minimise exposure. We take pride in the fact they are untouched yet we must touch them in order to maximise their untouchedness. It is weird.
They haven’t been left uncontacted for some prime directive like reasoning. It is because the every time it has happened before the primitive tribesmen die from exposure to our germs which thy have no antibodies for.
Which nation should they belong to? They likely consider themselves to be their own 'nation', and have for a long time. Simply because Brazil is now a thing, does not necessarily mean that Brazil should own these people and that these people should consider themselves to be a part of Brazil and be subject to its laws. There are arguments either way.
You assume that these people have no 'law' of their own. Though I cannot say either, it is entirely possible that distinguish between the ways a person is killed and they are punished accordingly. Simply because it is not your law doesn't mean they don't have their own.
The article states these tribes are rivals. They may consider themselves at war. Soldiers are not tried for killing other soldiers (within reason) in wartime, so why should rival tribesmen be tried for killing other tribesmen when they are at war?
I can draw a map and say this is my country. But, if I don’t ever mention it to the people living there then de facto that land is not part of my country.
Why should we do something about possible violence that could kill people?
Because we can. We've got the tools and people to prevent this stuff, and they can't really do anything about it. So we should, if it saves lives.
Hypotheticals about "countries" and "laws" are pretty irrelevant. Laws are enforced by people with the ability to enforce them. And right now, that's us. So let's use that power to save lives.
> Nation: A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory. [1]
They are their own nation(s). The question is if they have (or should have) a monopoly on violence [2] in their own territory and/or are self-governing in other aspects of life.
Whoops. I think this was supposed to be a reply to jnbiche [1], though I can't confirm if the reply makes sense anymore. Not sure how that happened. Sorry for the confusion.
A moderator raised it to be a top-level comment because its original parent was flagkilled, and yours was a fine comment which seemed to stand on its own. Sorry for the confusion.
(It's on my list to write code to supply a link to the original parent when we do that.)
If you find this story intriguing, the book "Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman's Story" is an amazing journey into a similar culture of cyclical violence between neighboring tribes.
This is a horribly cynical interpretation but the new Brazilian President has said he wants to open the Amazon to logging and he doesn't care much about the indigenous people[0]
Of course if he tries anything the international community etc will protest, but if this 'rescue mission' (read: death squad with plausible deniability) can't stop the 'catastrophic jungle war' in time then the tribes kill each other off, there's no outcry and the logging begins.
These tribes of dozens of individuals are not what prevents logging for happening. The mission will use boats and an helicopter on a long trip just to reach the place. What would be the economic viability to estabilish a commercial operation there?
The indigenous people that prevents some of the logging in some places are much larger ones with total contact with the rest of society for centuries that live in much more accessible areas
It's not without historical precedent. Look at the Congo under King Leopold for one example. Everyone is in the accessible areas, not as many in the harder to reach places that makes it extremely economically viable for them to set up shop there.
Like I said it's a cynical interpretation and I hope I'm wrong, but this is literally history repeating itself.
"The Matis, known as the ‘cat people’ because of the ‘whiskers’ they attach to their faces, are notoriously violent but instead of clubs use bows and arrows or long blowguns with poisoned-tipped darts to kill their enemies."
"The Korubo are also known as the ‘clubber Indians’ because of the shoulder-height wooden clubs they use for killing their enemies by breaking open their skulls."
These are horrific human beings on par with ISIS, but we find them quaint as our little pets in a zoo to be watched and studied.
Hunter Gatherers are humanity at its absolute worse, they deserve the chance to move on with civilization. These zoos are what future people will judge us for.
59 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] thread> Anthropologists now fear that, as well as the prospect of both tribes launching deadly attacks on each other, the potential of contact between the Matis and the other, as yet still isolated Korubo tribe, as well as the desire expressed by the breakaway tribe to reestablish contact with their relatives, could lead to a breakout of disease which could bring the ancient tribe to extinction.
Why do they get an exception? Serious question -- it seems ethically dubious to me to both refuse to hold them to legal standards, thereby treating them as having the moral awareness of chimpanzees.
If you're asking why they've never been contacted: we know that doing so would be irreversible, and anything we could learn from observing them would be tainted with our own culture as it inevitably seeps through.
Even if this wasn't the case, morality is not universal and we have no basis on which to judge them.
> There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.
Is one of your premises that morality is something that has an objective scale and ours is better developed than theirs?
Non-agrarian societies around the world tend to have cultures/religions more similar to each other than to ours, in part because it's more advantageous to how they live their lives.
As an example: a lot of hunter-gatherer cultures have a way of committing what we'd consider infanticide. Agrarian cultures would tend to frown on that since "all humans have a soul", but the reality of moving around with limited food means that you have to find some way of controlling population.
Another example: the way we treat livestock might be appalling to hunter-gatherers since "animals have souls too". But farmers need to raise and slaughter herd animals to survive.
> uncontacted tribes live outside of national and international laws
Also consider that maybe they have their own laws that you and I are in violation of, who's laws should we follow?
Many countries have eliminated the death-penalty, but some retain it. Is the executioner a murderer for a state-sponsored execution?
Most states have laws allowing violence if you're in immediate danger. If you kill someone in your state is that murder?
If someone murders someone in the us, they can get the death penalty. If someone kills someone in self defense, that’s not murder.
These people have government of a kind and a moral and ethical system. If the tribe kills someone within their own cultural traditions, that’s not murder.
Once they’re contacted and brought into a larger society, of course, that changes, but that’s a process that needs to be negotiated.
Uh, yes. I'm not a moral relativist. If you are, I'm sure you're aware of the tricky outcomes of that approach. For example, if you're a moral relativist, then you can't remain consistent with your beliefs and still criticize US executions (I find that most moral relativists reasonably disagree with the US death penalty).
I'd flip it around and ask how you bootstrap a moral system for all humans (or is it all life?) from scratch. It seems unlikely that I, of all cultures and times, am the pinnacle of morality in the same way that it would be unlikely that I just happened to be born into a family that practices the one correct religion in the world.
Maybe you'd think that I'm inhumane or something, but my beliefs are largely the results of a lot of traveling and meeting the moral absolutists all over the world tell me with the same level of conviction what is right and wrong.
It would be like aliens monitoring Earth and trying inhabitants for violating intergalactic space law while none of the inhabitants are even aware they are part of it.
Imagine you get into a time machine and go back 10000 years. Do you try them in modern court? I wouldn't think so.
I would try thinking of these people as in a time warp. They are uncontacted, after all—they're not murdering Paulistanos, they're murdering others in their time warp.
The Brazillian government is probably going to kill a whole bunch of the tribe they are trying to save by making contact with them simply through the diseases they will bring.
As far as I can tell, it's highly speculative third-order conjecture that (1) large numbers of them died due to diseases acquired through contact (2) they have a belief that quarantine will protect them (likely despite not having a germ theory of disease) and (3) this is their reasoning for killing outsiders. Medieval Europe was significantly more advanced, and they had all kinds of strange ideas about the cause of diseases and plagues that prevented them from mounting effective quarantines.
We can't expect them to have the same feelings we do about killing outsiders, and I think it's a stretch to project our understanding and values on them and then to back out a reasonable Western-style justification for their actions. I think it's much better to admit that we know very little about their system of moral reasoning and give them the benefit of the doubt that their killing of outsiders under the specific circumstances they found themselves in is moral within their moral framework.
Do they not get to have their own territory, or do they have less right to sovereignty than the US or Argentina?
The question is whose legal standards.
They will have their own law, in their own jurisdiction. Human communities spontaneously develop language, trade and law. You can even verify this in the microcosm of your own communities, with jargon and customs.
And how does their "catastrophic" war compare to the wars of "civilization"?
In terms of deaths per capita, many small hunter-gatherer societies are more violent than our worst wars. It just doesn't look quite so horrifying because the societies themselves are so small, the absolute numbers to us don't even rise to the level of "war". On top of that, the conflict tends to be more of a constant state of affairs that's always in the background, rather than lengthy periods of peace interrupted by an explosion of violence.
"Hey guys, uh, you know, we were pretty happy to just let you do whatever, but we've been watching you for a while and you've started taking risks. We're not real fond of risks. Would you prefer not taking risks for us please? It would make us feel much better about letting you do whatever you like if you didn't take any risks."
We would still have to listen, however.
If we're foolish enough to get to the point of self-destruction in the first place...
I'm upset by the whole thing for the reason of how some people think isolation is appropriate in allowing this situation to even occur. It's maddening to think a more advanced civilization in space could be observing us in similar fashion as these people with their kids and who have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world. Ugh.. seems so cruel.
If we weren't watching them, they would potentially go to war, some of them would likely die, and there is a chance that more would die of disease. But we would be none the wiser.
But since we are watching, we perceive a risk that they don't, and we now feel an obligation to mitigate that risk through intervention. We want them to be independent but they are our dependents. We want them to be free but we must restrict their movements. We want them to be untouched by disease but must expose them to it in order to minimise exposure. We take pride in the fact they are untouched yet we must touch them in order to maximise their untouchedness. It is weird.
You assume that these people have no 'law' of their own. Though I cannot say either, it is entirely possible that distinguish between the ways a person is killed and they are punished accordingly. Simply because it is not your law doesn't mean they don't have their own.
The article states these tribes are rivals. They may consider themselves at war. Soldiers are not tried for killing other soldiers (within reason) in wartime, so why should rival tribesmen be tried for killing other tribesmen when they are at war?
Because we can. We've got the tools and people to prevent this stuff, and they can't really do anything about it. So we should, if it saves lives.
Hypotheticals about "countries" and "laws" are pretty irrelevant. Laws are enforced by people with the ability to enforce them. And right now, that's us. So let's use that power to save lives.
They are their own nation(s). The question is if they have (or should have) a monopoly on violence [2] in their own territory and/or are self-governing in other aspects of life.
[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
That's what I said.
The question is if they have (or should have) a monopoly on violence [2] in their own territory and/or are self-governing in other aspects of life.
That's up to their nation to decide.
No, it's up to the entity with the greater ability to enforce their will to decide, which in this case would be the Brazilian government.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539155
(It's on my list to write code to supply a link to the original parent when we do that.)
Of course if he tries anything the international community etc will protest, but if this 'rescue mission' (read: death squad with plausible deniability) can't stop the 'catastrophic jungle war' in time then the tribes kill each other off, there's no outcry and the logging begins.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/tribes...
The indigenous people that prevents some of the logging in some places are much larger ones with total contact with the rest of society for centuries that live in much more accessible areas
Like I said it's a cynical interpretation and I hope I'm wrong, but this is literally history repeating itself.
"The Korubo are also known as the ‘clubber Indians’ because of the shoulder-height wooden clubs they use for killing their enemies by breaking open their skulls."
These are horrific human beings on par with ISIS, but we find them quaint as our little pets in a zoo to be watched and studied.
Hunter Gatherers are humanity at its absolute worse, they deserve the chance to move on with civilization. These zoos are what future people will judge us for.