Wait a minute. This entire conversation begins with you conflating moral progress and directional evolution.
However, we don't see very much devolution happening on this planet - which explains why I think moral progress is happening.
Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?
Then I say: what you call good biological changes other organisms would experience as negative changes and vice versa.
You throw out the thesis about evolution having a direction because life fills more and more niches and is more and more complex. If those are things that are important to you, great. But that doesn't mean any particular organism should be excited about evolution or that there is a fact of the matter about things getting better. If you have the adaptations to survive in a complex, niche-saturated environment good for your DNA! If you don't, you're dead. If you like complexity things are getting better. If you don't things are getting worse. But the 'getting better' or 'getting worse' is in your head. All that is really happening is that things are getting more complex.
And this is the point about the 'shifting moral Zeitgeist' (which is a perfectly fine turn of phrase btw, because it doesn't imply the current moral Zeitgeist is any truer than the last one). Maybe you can identify trends in how values change but that doesn't make the new values better. But since the moral Zeitgeist is defined by the moral beliefs most people hold, most people will always see moral history up to that point in time as progressive. Similarly, most young people will experience moral progress the rest of their lives as the old die out.
I think there is some kind of muddle occurring here.
I cited the material about directional evolution in response to the claim that: "Evolution does not have a direction."
It was not to do with morality, it was to do with whether evolution is directional. I thought I made that pretty clear by quoting the specific point I was responding to.
Evolution is a gigantic optimization mechanism, a fitness maximizer. It operates in a relatively benign environment that permits cumulative evolution - thus the rather obvious evolutionary arrow.
In this video, Julian Savulescu from the Uehiro centre for Practical Ethics argues that human beings are "Unfit for the future" - that radical technological advance, liberal democracy and human nature will combine to make the 21st century the century of global catastropes, perpetrated by terrorists and psychopaths, with tools such as engineered viruses. He goes on to argue that enhanced intelligence and a reduced urge to violence and defection in large commons problems could be achieved using science, and may be a way out for humanity.
Skip to 1:30 to avoid the tedious introduction
Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - PART 1 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.
Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - PART 2 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.
Well, I have already said something rather like this. Perhaps this really is a good idea, more important, even, than coding a friendly AI? AI timelines where super-smart AI doesn't get invented until 2060+ would leave enough room for human intelligence enhancement to happen and have an effect. When I collected some SIAI volunteers' opinions on this, most thought that there was a very significant chance that super-smart AI will arrive sooner than that, though.
A large portion of the video consists of pointing out the very strong scientific case that our behavior is a result of the way our brains are structured, and that this means that changes in our behavior are the result of changes in the way our brains are wired.