I really enjoyed this, though I'm not sure I agree with your opening premise. It seems like an individual can subjectively improve their ethics over time, and through empiricism, so can a society.
That said, I suspect an unspoken aspect to your argument is that we have already randomly walked around, if not precisely on, the optimal human ethic. In this way, there can be no ethical progress. It's just a matter of getting a critical mass of humanity to zero in on that location.
I replaced everything except the ceiling lights with no-blue lights and use F.lux on my devices. Now I get sleepy when I'm supposed to and never stay up late.
As anyone who spans two cultures know, it's often frustrating to see how wrong the media can get news in one or the other of their domains.
When faced with the elevated stakes of COVID-19 and the consequences of mismanagement imposed upon her family in China, my good friend and colleague took on the challenge of addressing the knowledge gap, setting up covid19readings.com.
The site, and its team of volunteer translators, is dedicated to surfacing quality journalism and first-person accounts of the virus, both to correct skewed perceptions in the English-speaking world and to help humanity at large weather the storm.
I hope it can be of value, at the very least, to the discussion here.
I guess I misinterpreted your argument on that point. I'm somewhat inclined to the belief I attributed to you, so I'll try to defend it...
We've been circling the same set of ethical ideas for quite a while now, if not for the whole of our species history. So either we're stuck in a local maxima of ethical reasoning, or there's a disconnect between our capacity to reason about ethics (which we've found possibly the absolute maximum of) and our capacity to implement it (having reached varying local maxima across the globe). I'm inclined to believe the latter, because the problem of ethics is ever-pressing, and yet we've seen no new formulations since