One of the socially acceptable things that will be unfathomable for them is the unspeakable cruelty to animals that we commit.
Especially that we have developed such a profound system of human rights and their protection.
I wholeheartedly agree. Jeremy Bentham brilliantly enunciated this in 1789 when he wrote:
"Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things. ... The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated ... upon the same footing as ... animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?... The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes... "
Yet even today we continue to live as hypocrites and leave our own rights violable by not affording them to all sentient beings that qualify for the same protection. I am certain that one day future societies will look back on our treatment of animals (with particular regard to blood sports and the entertainment industry) with the same revulsion as we we do when reading about human sacrifice, the slave trade, and ancient forms of capital punishment. It probably won't be for a very long time, though. Steven Pinker wrote an excellent book on the gradual decline of violence throughout history, which I would highly recommend. It's called
The Better Angels of Our Nature and it looks at various international relations theories, philosophical arguments, and scientific data to suggest that we might actually have good reason to be optimistic about the trajectory of civilisation.
