Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013

passive_fist

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Moral Progress hasn't happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.

Do you think the decline of lynching is mere change rather than progress?

I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I'm happy at the reduction of lynching, but I'm unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.

As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I'm als... (read more)

13[anonymous]13y

The claim that the morality of a society doesn't steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you'd still expect some of those walks to go up. To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.

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