You can only answer the question if you have some sort of answer to the question, "What is moral?" If democracy is moral, then the first democrats got their walking randomly when they accidentally stepped on the "Golden path" of moral progress. Luckily they were able to recognize it as such.

Also, assuming that society would settle on Chimp rights correctly (however correctness is determined) either as human or not, is assuming your conclusion (or building an experiment that might not bear fruit until your unfrozen).

Readers Note:

Since there is a ‘directionality’ to physics (ie. the universe moves from a simpler to a more complex state), and there is also an analogue to a ‘directionality’ in logic/mathematics (ie more complex ideas are built from simpler ideas), isn’t it apriori highly plausible that there’s also an analogue to a ‘directionality’ in the realm of values (ie. moral progress)?

Let me remind all readers that years ago I speculated on multiple transhumanist lists there may be three different ways to define causality. I don’t see a difference between ‘caus... (read more)

" the future will be even less different from the present than the present."

instead of

" the future will be even less different from the present than the present from the past."

?

Why is there a direction to the shifting moral zeitgeist?

E.g. see the work of Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

I'm by no means sure that the idea of moral progress can be salvaged. But it might be interesting to try and make a case that we have fewer circular preferences now than we used to.

If you take the list of things that were moral yesterday and the list that are moral today, and look for pairs between the lists that are kind of the same idea, but just in different quantity (e.g. like and love) then you could step back and see if there is an overall direction.

The key idea is to recognize when two things with different names are really different amounts of some higher more abstract idea.

Eliezer: Wiseman, if everyone were blissed-out by direct stimulation of their pleasure center all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?

Compared to todays state of affairs in the world? Yes, I think that would be enormous moral progress compared to right now (so long as the bliss was not short term and would not burn out eventually and leave everyone dead. So long as the bliss was of an individual's choice. So long as it really was everyone in bliss, and others didn't have to suffer for it. Etc. etc.)

The best discussion of moral progress I've seen yet is in Heinlein's Starship Troopers, where morality progresses by becoming more inclusive. Once, it was family, everyone else was fair game; then, tribe, race, religion, nation, now we recognize (at least officially, there are still many on lower "rungs") the human species as being deserving of our consideration. In Starship Troopers, Heinlein had one of his teachers in "History and Moral Philosophy" say that they were developing morality for dealing with intelligent aliens.

For the co... (read more)

Paul, do you think that your own morality is optimum or can you conceive of someone more moral than yourself - not just a being who better adheres to your current ideals, but a being with better ideals than you?

Yes I can.

If you take the view that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same, then in general it's hard to imagine how any ideals other than your own could be better than your own for the obvious reason that I can only measure them against my own.

What interests me about the rule I propose (circular preferences are bad!) is that it is exclusively a... (read more)

One possibility: we can see a connection between morality and certain empirical facts -- for example, if we believe that more moral societies will be more stable, we might think that we can see moral progress in the form of changes that are brought about by previous morally related instability. That's not very clear -- but a much clearer and more sophisticated variant on that idea can perhaps be seen in an old paper by Joshua Cohen, "The Arc of the Moral Universe" (google scholar will get it, and definitely read it, because a) it's brilliant, an... (read more)

A few processes to explain moral progress (but probably not all of it): a) Acquiring new knowledge (e.g. the knowledge that chimps and humans are, on an evolutionary scale, close relatives), which leads us to throw away moral judgements that make assumptions which are inconsistent with such knowledge. b) Morality is only one of the many ends that we pursue, and as an end it becomes easier to pursue once you are amply fed, watered and clothed. In other words, improvements in material conditions enable improvements in morality. c) Conquest of one culture by ... (read more)

"the knowledge that chimps and humans are, on an evolutionary scale, close relatives"

So what? The differences are so profound that humans should be considered a different class, maybe even a new phylum. The basic one is possession of language and culture. "Animal rights" is a stupid idea. I am against mistreatment of animals, but recognize that it is more an aesthetic than ethical position.

Eliezer:Robin Brandt, is whatever increasing technology does to a society, moral progress by definition, or does increasing technology only tend to cause moral progress?

I see, I answered quite a different question there, I had a funny feeling of that while writing that comment.

Increasing technology tends to cause moral progress yes, by making moral choices economically and experientially(as in our experience of things) more strategic/optimal. It all boils down into satisfying our adapted pattern-recognizers that gives us pleasure or a feeling of righteousn... (read more)

1) Supposing that moral progress is possible, why would I want to make such progress?

2) Psychological experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment suggest to me that people do not act morally when empowered not to do so. So if I were moral I would prefer to remain powerless, but I do not want to be powerless, therefore I perform my moral acts unwillingly.

3) Suppose that agents of type X act more morally than agents of type Y. Also suppose that the moral acts impact on fitness such that type Y agents out-reproduce type X agents. If the product of popu... (read more)

My view is similar to Robin Brandt's, but I would say that technological progress has caused the appearance of moral progress, because we responded to past technological progress by changing our moral perceptions in roughly the same direction. But different kinds of future technological progress may cause further changes in orthogonal or even opposite directions. It's easy to imagine for example that slavery may make a comeback if a perfect mind control technology was invented.

@billswift: I do not want to divert the thread onto the topic of animal rights. It was only an example in any case. See Paul Gowder's comment previous to mine for a more detailed (and different) example of how empirical knowledge can affect our moral judgements.

Marshall, how is your "usefulness" not isomorphic to the word "good"? Useful for what?

I suppose I just want to avoid the preachiness of the word good. It is unfortunately coherent to die for goodness. It is not very useful to die for usefullness.

Useful for what? This doesn't seem like a useful question. Usefulness is obvious and thus no need to ask.

I do not wish to lose my way or be carried away by the bigness of the nominalisation "morality". Occam's Razor should also be applied here - in a pleasant and gentle way.

If one defines morality in a utilitarian way, in which a moral person is one who tries for the greatest possible utility of everyone in the world, that sidesteps McCarthy's complaint. In that case, the apex of moral progress is also, by definition, the world in which people are happiest on average.

It's easy to view moral progress up to this point as progress towards that ideal. Ending slavery increases ex-slaves' utility, hopefully less than it hurts ex-slaveowners. Ending cat-burning increases cats' utility, hopefully less than it hurts that of cat-burnin... (read more)

Re: if we all cooperated with each other all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?

If we all cooperated with each other all the time, that would be moral progress.

Moral progress simply means a systematic improvement of morals over time - so widespread cooperation would indeed represent an improvement over today's fighting and deceit.

It's harder to answer Subhan's challenge - to show directionality, rather than a random walk, on the meta-level.

Gee, this seems awfully similar to Timeless Physics, doesn't it?

Re: direct stimulation of their pleasure center

Morality is normally concerned with conduct, not feelings.

"If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle."

Someone actually gets it right. Greed is moral. Greed is good.

Imagine a country that abolishes capital punishment, then, a few years later, brings it back. Have they made moral progress? Have they regressed? More importantly, who's to say?

Imagine also an alien who arrives on Earth, hears of what we've done with laws and societies and says 'what the hell? They've been morally regressing all this time?!'

Looking forward to the next post. The moral valuation of sentient/conscious matter over 'dumb' matter is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.

Still waiting for someone to take the necessary first step towards a rational understanding of the issue.

Any time now, folks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

Maybe I had better not join the discussion, I just want to say that nearly everyone you will ever meet, they get something and they try to hold onto it for as long as possible, and all their actions are defined by this.

Also everyone will argue what they are hardwired for: sex and eating, till they turn blue.

If we all cooperated with each other all the time, that would be moral progress. -- Tim Tyler

I agree with Tim. Morality is all about cooperation.

If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle. -- John McCarthy, via Eliezer Yudkowsky

This is a reductio ad absurdum argument against the idea that morality is an end. I agree with what it implies: Morality is a means, not an end. Cooperation is a means we each use to achieve our personal goals.

As I said previously, I think "moral progress" is the heroic story we tell of social change, and I find it unlikely that these changes are really caused by moral deliberation. I'm not a cultural relativist but I think we need to be more attuned to the fact that people inside a culture are less harmed by its practices than outsiders feel they would be in that culture. You can't simply imagine how you would feel as, say, a woman in Islam. Baselines change, expectations change, and we need to keep track of these things.

As for democracy, I think ther... (read more)

Yvain: I think you're equivocating between two definitions of utility, "happiness" and "the quantity that's maximized". This dual meaning is really unfortunate.

Sebastian: moral progress might be random except that people (very plausibly) try not to return to a rejected past state. This would be directionless (or move in an arbitrary direction) but produce very few reversals.

poke: pursuing knowledge could be painful and depressing but still intuitively moral.

I see a bit of what looks like terminal/instrumental confusion in this thread. I... (read more)

A particularly interesting question is, what would people of e.g. Roman empire or mediaeval France think about today's society. We can compare the morality of the past with contemporary standards, but we can't see the future. I wonder whether mediaeval people would find our morality less despicable than we find theirs. If such comparison was possible, one could define some sort of objective (or subjectively objective?) criterion - simply put together two societies with different moral codes and watch how many will convert from first to the second and vice ... (read more)

Some changes in morality come about because people notice that their previous ideas contained incorrect probability assessments. These changes can be considered moral progress.

Example: people find a logical inconsistency in their moral thinking, and correct for it.

Example: people notice that they have been assuming it necessary to be Homo sapiens or to be of a specific gender or color in order to have conscious experience, and that they don't actually have any basis for such an assumption.

As long as our knowledge about the universe (including our own thoug... (read more)

Nick:

I don't think discovering better instrumental values toward the same terminal values you always had counts as moral progress, at least if those terminal values are consciously, explicitly held.

Why on earth not? Aristotle thought some people were naturally suited for slavery. We now know that's not true. Why isn't that moral progress?

(Similarly, general improvements in reasoning, to the extent they allow us to reject bad moral arguments as well as more testable kinds of bad arguments, could count as moral progress.)

A moral state X represents progress from moral state Y if people in both moral state X and moral state Y agree that X is better after being presented with the arguments. That is, X represents progress from Y if all it takes is the right way of thinking about it to convince someone from Y to move to X.

Paul, I think values and beliefs have both changed in that case - we (I hope I'm right to generalize!) don't judge that any facts about a person could make it right to enslave them. Most of us have scrapped the whole teleological framework Aristotle used to say that.

I probably should have said "...counts as the sort of moral progress Eliezer is talking about", the reason being that updating beliefs/instrumental values isn't a matter of metaethics, and is unproblematically directional.

Nominull, in your first sentence, does "people" mean ... (read more)

Nick,

Fair enough, but consider the counterfactual case: suppose we believed that there were some fact about a person that would permit enslaving that person, but learned that the set of people to whom those facts applied was the null set. It seems like that would still represent moral progress in some sense.

Perhaps not the sort that Eliezer is talking about, though. But I'm not sure that the two can be cleanly separated. Consider slavery again, or the equality of humanity in general. Much of the moral movement there can be seen as changing interpretati... (read more)

"[W]e (I hope I'm right to generalize!) don't judge that any facts about a person could make it right to enslave them."

I'm not so sure, Nick. Taboo person, and consider our treatment of certain nonhuman animals.

People will always consider their own beliefs moral and those of their predecessors who disagreed to be less so. People who believe in "moral progress" are adherents of a religion, whether they recognize it or not.

"Lowly Undergrad, early societies didn't have this idea of reducing violent death to zero - through what mechanism did they acquire this belief, given that they didn't start out with the idea that it was "moral progress"?"

While it is certainly difficult to imagine the mindset of people who existed ten of thousands of years before us, I think since they were still human beings, we can assume they were somewhat similar to you and I. From this basic assumption think we can look toward Peter Singer's philosophy of the moral circle. The s... (read more)

There is a tendency for older generation to feel nostalgic for the time of their youth and for the younger generation to strive for changing the status quo. So I wonder whether the modern perception of moral progress (as opposed to perennial complaints of moral degradation popular among our ancestors) comes from the youth being more economically and politically empowered than ever before, which allows it to dominate public discourse.

i also consider morality to be about cooperation... in this sense moral progress predates humanity specifically i consider the evolution of multicellular life to be an example of moral progress

Not everyone has the same intuition about the wrongness of slavery, though, and "they're not us and they're more use to us this way" is justification enough for some. People have divergent intuitions about empirical and logical propositions, too, but in those cases there's an obvious (if not always practical) way to settle things: go and look, or find a (dis)proof. You can trivially demonstrate that 1+1≠3, but it's hard to see how you could reject with nearly as much rigor even something as ridiculous as "it's good to enslave people born o... (read more)

Paul,

Thanks for the clarification.

I submit that's enough to constitute all the knowledge we need to say that kind of behavior is immoral.

So we're saying what we think is moral based on our knowledge. I'd say that's pretty watertight. We know what we feel is right, but the more we can tie it to objective facts about the world, the stronger our position. However, I'd still argue that we can never move beyond merely believing in our morals, by definition. (Yes, I said it!) The moment we state that we know that our morals are true for all time and space, we're setting ourselves up for a fall that we can't recover from.

Sorry for repost, but note also that my earlier comment made no reference to slavery, and I of course agree that slavery isn't right. My beef was with the assertion of a true moral.

Whether you agree with it or not, Obama's "moral progress" means a change in US law to comport more closely to (his present view of) morality, not a change in the moral views of Americans. It is quite possible to view oneself as the apex of possible morality and still believe in the possibility of moral progress on other people's part.

I disagree with Obama because I disagree with some of the goals of his morality, but I don't see that as any reason to attack his semantics.

I see moral progress as 1) increased empathy, defined as increasingly satisfying, increasingly accurate mental models of sentient beings, including oneself, and 2) increased ability to predict the future, to map out the potential chains of causality for one's actions.

Inspired by this article http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/news-mainmenu-2/1-latest/5517-higher-intelligence-associated-with-liberalism-atheism.html I think one way of doing it might be to show directionality in terms of evolutionary novelty. That is, look at what parts of our evolutionary psychology we have rationally worked against as a culture, and why we came to those more intellectual conclusions. That way, the measure of our progress could be in how we learn to fix the mistakes of the stupid natural selection.

However, that sounds a lot to me like r... (read more)

I was going to say something about moral progress being changes in society that result in global increase in happiness, but I ran into some problems pretty fast following that thought. Hell, if we could poll every single living being from 11th century and 21st century and ask them to rate their happiness from 1-10 why do I have a feeling we'd end up with same average in both cases?

If you gave me exensional definition of moral progress by listing free speech, end of slavery and democracy, and then ask me for intensional definition, I'd say moral progress is global and local increase in co-operation between humans. That does not necessarily mean increase in global happiness.