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fubarobfusco comments on Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post - Less Wrong
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If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were "abused"? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I'd like to know how this could qualify as "abuse" under a reasonable definition. If you have a personal definition of "abuse" under which it does, I would question why something falling under it obviously qualifies as bad.
If you look at history you will also find that the current time period is also the least violent, on a per-capita basis. See Steven Pinker's latest for details. I'm not asserting a correlation; rather, it's the case that all sorts of things that were once considered perfectly normal are now not, and in at least some cases we consider that to be a pretty significant positive change. To say "our ancestors did it, and they turned out okay" seems like a general argument against any sort of moral progress.
I really should get the top level post based on this finished soon.
Yes, but I think these are on different themes.
Yours seems to be more about "Can we tell whether 'moral progress' is a meaningful description of historical social change?"
Mine is more along the lines of "It is proposed that we ought to do thus-and-so. The rebuttal is offered that we can't be obliged to do that since our ancestors didn't, and they got on okay. But this rebuttal is a fully general counterargument against any moral change, including changes that seem obviously correct; indeed, it would have been a counterargument to the abolition of all sorts of things that we today consider atrocities."
Sounds a reasonable, if a bit overly careful, strategy if one is seeking to maximise virtue (in the sense of desirable traits) rather than trying to avoid harm. We currently seem to believe many of the things that are virtuous are brought about by not doing harm or being benevolent to the child, there obviously exist sets of virtues for which this is not true. Also, we may be wrong.
History is not homogeneous when it comes to norms. All sorts of practices where adapted then later abandoned. There are plenty of things people practice that made them turn out great or ok that we or our great-grandparents didn't practice.The argument can thus pretty consistently be used to change the status quo and create something like "moral progress" or rather a process of "moral change". You can't really mine out history, since we may have faulty ideas about what was done and all processes of upbringing will be imperfect. Thus we'll be trying "new stuff" without knowing it, if it becomes known that we did, congratulations we have just expanded the space of possible approaches on which we have empirical results.
I don't think this works as a general counterargument to all moral progress. I think it just maps to a different systematised morality than the one you or I might come up with.
Not really. It merely means that one's prior should be in favor of the way with a long tradition behind them. This is no more paradoxical then the fact that even though all progress depends on mutations, most mutations are bad. In fact this is merely that principal applied to memetic evolution.