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There is a question whether human morality is actually improving over centuries in some meaningful sense, or whether it is just a random walk that feels like improving to us (because we evaluate other people using the metric of "how similar is their morality to ours" which of course gives a 100% score to us and less to anyone else).
I think that an important thing to point out here is that our models of the world improve in general. And although some moral statements are made instinctively, other moral statements are made in form of implications -- "I instinctively feel X. X implies Y. Therefore, Y." -- and those implications can be factually wrong. Importantly, this is not moral realism. (Technically, it is an implied judgment that logically coherent systems of morality are better than logically incoherent ones.)
"The only thing that matters are paperclips" -- I guess we can only agree to disagree.
"2+2=5, therefore the only thing that matters are paperclips" -- nope, you are wrong.
From this perspective, a part of the moral progress can be explained by humans having better models of humans and the world in general. (And when someone says "a difference in values", we should distinguish between "a difference in instincts" and "shitty reasoning".)
Today, the cultures are closer, but the subcultures can be larger. Hundred years ago, there would be no such thing as the rationalist community.
That seems like a stretch, whether you put the stress on the 'community' or the 'rationalist' part. Subcultures can be larger, of course, if only because the global population is like 5x larger, but niche subcultures like 'the rationalist community' could certainly have existed then. Nothing much has changed there.
A hundred years ago was 1925; in 1925 there were countless communes, cults, Chinatowns/ghettos (or ... (read more)