9 votes

North Sentinel Island: Uncontacted tribes’ ‘right to be left alone’ doesn’t gel with broader human rights

2 comments

  1. [2]
    VoidOutput
    Link
    This feels like a very white-man's-burden-y argument. It's not a question of "correcting mistakes of the past". We are learning from the past. Every time we "civilized" people came into contact...

    This feels like a very white-man's-burden-y argument. It's not a question of "correcting mistakes of the past". We are learning from the past. Every time we "civilized" people came into contact with indigenous tribes, we royally fucked it up. Why can't this be the one time where we don't make the same mistake. We don't have a responsability to contact them. If we opened history books more often, we'd feel a strong responsability to instead listen to indigenous people and respect the 2007 UN declaration.

    8 votes
    1. cfabbro
      Link Parent
      I do agree with her that some rights often do come at the expense of others and so ethical judgements on which should take precedence sometimes need to be made, e.g. if the uncontacted tribe's...

      I do agree with her that some rights often do come at the expense of others and so ethical judgements on which should take precedence sometimes need to be made, e.g. if the uncontacted tribe's very survival was imminently under threat then there may be a moral imperative to assist them rather than just stand back and watch them all die. However her justification for why no-contact should potentially be circumvented without any imminent threat to their survival is quite flimsy, IMO:

      Ultimately, we should not presume to know what uncontacted peoples want, purely based on their behaviour towards those who, like Chau, trespass on their territory.

      Really... we shouldn't presume that an uncontacted tribe that has met "most past efforts to contact [them] with hostility" and who killed the last person who landed on their island "shortly after arrival", wants to be left alone? Uh. I think that is a pretty unequivocally clear indication that they would prefer to be left alone.

      10 votes