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Yosarian2 comments on Whither Moral Progress? - Less Wrong
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Yes, this is what I was going to say.
As time goes on, we seem to add more and more people and groups of people to the catagory we treat morally. Most major changes in morality over time you could describe this way; the elimination of slavery, women's suffrage, laws of war, better treatment for mental illness, even the idea that it's bad to torture cats for your own amusement could all be called "expanding the group of beings who we feel we have to treat ethically".
Gwern has a rather interesting refutation of this idea.
It's interesting, but its claim may be flawed. The fact is, to the absolute best of our ability to judge, neither gods nor dead people actually exist. So it is not the case that there exist entities that have been pushed out of the circle. On the other hand women and minorities and cats do exist. And they have to various extents been brought into the moral circle. To the extent that the categories of existent entities and morally relevant entities have increased their overlap, that's progress. Or it's at least movement in a consistent direction.