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TimS comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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Isn't the way to properly judge a civilization exactly what is under dispute in this discussion?
Measured by time, the Roman Republic lasted longer than the modern version of the United States government - dating from ~1865 or ~1936 depending on how one wants to count.
Measured by per-capita wealth, modern day Sweden might do better than the US in the 1950s.
I'm not opposed to measuring according to moral correctness, but first we need to agree on what actually is morally correct.
The US government (and many others) have lasted as long as they're had a chance to last, so it seems unfair to judge by duration.
I didn't mean how long the societies lasted, that raises issues about what constitutes the "same" society. I meant what happened to societies X years after they adopted various moral positions. Also, I agree that we can learn a lot from the Roman Republic.
Do you have a specific example in mind? For X<20, no obvious examples leap to my mind.
And in the modern era, X>5 means that any consequences could be so overdetermined that pointing to particular moral changes is hindsight basis at best - particularly because moral changes tend to be gradual rather than sudden. For example, Brown v. Bd. of Edu didn't come out of nowhere, legally speaking.
I had in mind X on the order of 100.
Also, I don't just mean the modern era.
I'm a big believer in the power of examining history to understand current society. For example, Gordon Craig makes an interesting case that the particular results of the Revolution of 1848 in Prussia were a substantial cause of the rise of the Nazis.
But it is important to recognize the limits of historical analysis across long periods of time. First, multiple causes blend together, making it very difficult to disentangle causation. More importantly for this conversation, moral changes are not discrete events.
Thus, trying to figure out the moral changes from the 1670s and 1680s that causes the French Revolution to have a Reign of Terror while the America Revolution did not seems to be asking too much of historical analysis. Looking before 1650 seems even worse.