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Konkvistador comments on More Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
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This is an Irrationality Game comment.
We have not been experiencing moral progress in the past 250 years. Moral change? Sure. I'd also be ok with calling it value drift. 90%
Edit: I talked about this previously in some detail here.
Edit: Apparently the OP was a troll account, retracting all contributions to the thread.
Do you believe that there is no non-arbitrary way to define "moral progress", or you think that "moral progress" is a coherent concept, just we haven't experienced it?
(Retracted for the same reasons as other comments in this thread.)
I think moral progress is a coherent concept, I'm inclined to argue no human society so far has experience it, though obviously I can't rule out some outliers that did do so in certain time periods since this is such a huge set. we have so little data and there seems to be great variance in the kinds of values we seen in them.
This is an Irrationality Game comment. (Though I'm actually not sure how it will score).
"Moral progress" simply describes moral change or value drift in the speaker's preferred direction. Very confident (~95%).
I don't use it that way. I like lots of moral changes in the past 250 years but feel the process behind it isn't something I want to outsource morality to. Just like I like having opposable thumbs but feel uncomfortable letting evolution shape humans any further. We should do that ourselves so it doesn't grind down our complex values.
There are lots of people running around who think society in 1990 is somehow morally superior to society in 1890 on some metric of rightness beyond the similarity of their values to our own. This is the difference between someone being on the "wrong side of history" being merely a mistake in reasoning they should get over as soon as possible and it being a tragedy for them. A tragedy that perhaps kept repeating for every human society and individual in existence for nearly all of history.
This also suggests different strategies are appropriate for dealing with future moral change. I think we should be very cautious since I'm sure we don't understand the process. Modern Western civilization doesn't have narrative of "over time values became more and more like our own", but "over time morality got better and better and this gives our society meaning!". Its the difference between seeing "God guiding evolution" and confronting the full horror of Azathoth.
If you can't produce evidence that moral progress ever happened and believe that it definitely hasn't happened in the recent past, why do you think that moral progress is a coherent concept?
I didn't say I had great confidence in moral progress being a coherent concept. But it seems plausible to me that acquiring more true beliefs and thinking about them clearly might lead to discovering some values are incoherent or unreachable and thus stop pursuing them.
Do you think any human society ever experienced moral progress?
Hard to say, history is blurry, we do know the past 300 years well enough that I'm ok with this level certainty.
I'm far from comfortable saying that there was no moral progress in say some Medieval European societies. Not perhaps from our perspective, but from a sort of CEV-of-700 AD values looking at 1100 AD one, who knows? I don't know enough to have a reasonable estimate.
There was also useful progress in philosophy made before the "Enlightenment" that sometimes captured previous values and preferences and fixed them up. But again nearly any society for which that is true there was also lots of harmful philosophy that mutated values in responses to various pressures.