Comment on Whither Moral Progress?

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:20:41 GMT

...the fact we manage to take more-or-less reasonable decisions using democracy (at least as reasonable at what the kings used to do), that the society doesn't collapse into crime and chaos when we suppress death penalty, serfdom, torture, ...

Recently, it has been quite fashionable on LW to profoundly disagree with all of those points. At the very least, someone's going to say that, when an attempt to suppress slavery was made, the US society did for a while collapse into chaos unheard of before or since.

Speaking quite frankly (and in purple prose), though, there are few other things in the realm of the mind I'd desire right now than to be able to trust securely in all those points, and rest well, knowing that the job of SIAI and partly LW is simply to fight our way upwards before the sky comes crashing down - not also to run as fast as possible from the eldritch monster born of our own shadow!

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