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timtyler comments on Savulescu: "Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction" - Less Wrong
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"Richard Dawkins - The Shifting Moral Zeitgeist"
Human culture is more end-user-modifiable than the human genome is - since we created it in the first place.
The problem is that culture is embedded in the genetic/evolutionary matrix; there are severe limits on what is possible to change culturally.
Culture is what separates us from cavemen. They often killed their enemies and ate their brains. Clearly culture can be responsible for a great deal of change in the domain of moral behaviour.
If Robin Hanson is right, moral progress is simply a luxury we indulge in in this time of plenty.
Did crime increase significantly during the Great Depression? Wouldn't this potentially be falsifying evidence for Hanson's hypothesis?
Perhaps the Great Depression just wasn't bad enough, but it seems to cast doubt on the hypothesis, at the very least.
Crime is down during the current recession. It's possible that the shock simply hasn't been strong enough, but it may be evidence nonetheless.
I think Hanson's hypothesis was more about true catastrophes, though--if some catastrophe devastated civilization and we were thrown back into widespread starvation, people wouldn't worry about morality.
Probably testable - if we can find some poor civilised folk to study.
Indeed, rarely do we eat brains.
Culture has also produced radical Islam. Just look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuAAK032kCA to get a bit more pessimistic about the natural moral zeitgeist evolution in culture.
What fraction of the population, though? Some people are still cannibals. It doesn't mean there hasn't been moral progress. Update 2011-08-04 - the video link is now busted.
The persistence of the taboo against cannibalism is an example where we haven't made moral progress. There's no good moral reason to treat eating human meat as any different than meat of other animals, once the animals in question are dead, though there may be health reasons. It's just an example of prejudice and unreasonable moral disgust.
Personally, I think the changes are rather directional - and represent moral progress. However, that is a whole different issue.
Think how much the human genome has changed in the last 40-100 years to see how much more rapid cultural evolution can be. Culture is likely to continue to evolve much faster than DNA does - due to ethical concerns, and the whole "unmaintainable spaghetti code" business.
I like today's morals better than those of any other time and I'd prefer if the idea of moral progress was defensible, but I have no good answer to the criticism "well, you would, you are of this time".
I don't think most people living in other times & places privately agreed with their society's public morality, to the same extent that we do today.
For most of history (not prehistory), there was no option for public debate or even for openly stating opinions. Morality was normally handed down from above, from the rulers, as part of a religion. If those people had an opportunity to live in our society and be acclimatized to it, many of them may have preferred our morality. I don't believe the reverse is true, however.
This doesn't prove that our morality is objectively better - it's impossible to prove this, by definition - but it does dismiss the implication of the argument that "you like today's morality because you live today". Only the people who live today are likely to like their time's morality.
Thanks, this is a good point - and of course there's plenty to dislike about lots of morality to be found today, there's reason to hope the people of tomorrow will overall like tomorrow's morality even better. As you say, this doesn't lead to objective morality, but it's a happy thought.
In the middle ages in Europe the middle class lived after much stricter morality than the ruling class when it comes to question such as having sex.
Morality was often the way of the powerless to feel like they are better than the ruling class.
If drift were a good hypothesis, steps "forwards" (from our POV) would be about as common as steps "backwards". Are those "backwards" steps really that common?
If we model morality as a one-dimensional scale and change as a random walk, then what you say is true. However, if we model it as a million-dimensional scale on which each step affects only one dimension, after a thousand steps we would expect to find that nearly every step brought us closer to our current position.
EDIT: simulation seems to indicate I'm wrong about this. Will investigate further. EDIT: it was a bug in the simulation. Numpy code available on request.
I would regard any claim that abolition of hanging, burning witches, caning children in schools, torture, stoning, flogging, keel-hauling and stocks are "morally orthogonal" with considerable suspicion.
There no abolishion of torture anyone in the US. Some clever people ran a campaign in last decade that eroded the consensus that torture is always wrong. At the same time the US hasn't reproduced burning witches.
That's not the case. The United States signed and ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Last year the US blackmailed the UK demanding that the UK either violates the United Nations Convention against torture or that the US will stop giving the UK intelligence about possible terrorist plots that might kill UK citizens. The US under the Obama administration doesn't only violate the document themselves but also it also blackmails other countries to violate it as well.
Right - but it has been banned elsewhere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Article_3_-_torture
I'm happy to see those things abolished too, but since I'm not a moral realist I can't see how to build a useful model of "moral progress".
According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
...this involves attributing truth and falsity to moral statements - whereas it seems more realistic to say that moral truth has a subjective component.
However, the idea of moral progress does not mean there is "one true morality".
It just means that some moralities are better than others. The moral landscape could have many peaks - not just one.
I see no problem with the concept of moral progress. The idea that all moralities are of equal merit seems like totally inexcusable cultural relativism to me. Politically correct, perhaps - but also silly.
Morality is about how best to behave. We have a whole bunch of theory from evolutionary biology that relates to that issue - saying what goals organisms have - which actions are most likely to attain them - how individual goals conflict with goals that are seen acceptable to society - and so on. Some of it will be a reflection of historical accidents - while other parts of it will be shared with most human cultures - and most alien races.
My position on these things is currently very close to that set out in THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD TRUTH ABOUT MORALITY AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.