Comments on: The Moral Arc Lecture, Broadcast Live from Caltech https://moralarc.org/the-moral-arc-lecture-broadcast-live-from-caltech/ How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom Wed, 18 Feb 2015 14:10:02 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: T Maz https://moralarc.org/the-moral-arc-lecture-broadcast-live-from-caltech/#comment-29 Wed, 18 Feb 2015 14:10:02 +0000 http://moralarc.org/?p=1276#comment-29 The advert for this book includes the statement:
“If you’d been born a few thousand years ago, before the invention of the state, every decade you’d have stood a 1-in-20 chance of a violent death. ”

While it is true that life is safer today, giving credit to ‘the state’ is completely wrong. Just ask millions of Jews, Soviets, Chinese, Cambodians, murdered by their governments, not to mention all those killed in the wars of the 20th C, including America’s recent wars.

Life is safer not because of states, but because individuals have adopted better attitudes towards each other. Citizen murder rates are down, state murder rates are up.

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