I don’t think differing attitudes toward moral realism are important here. People mostly agree on a variety of basic goals such as being happy, safe, and healthy. Moral rules seem to be mostly attempts at generating societies that people want to live in.
Some moral progress is due to increased wisdom, but most of what we label as moral progress results from changing conditions and/or tastes.
E.g. for homosexuality, I don’t see much evidence that people a century ago were unfamiliar with the reasons why we might want to accept homosexuality. Here are my guesses as to what changed:
a shift to romantic relations oriented around love and sex, as compared to marriage as an institution that focused on economic support and raising children. People used to depend on children to support them in old age, and on a life-long commitment of support from a spouse. Those needs decreased with increasing wealth and the welfare state, and were somewhat replaced by ambitious expectations about sexual and emotional compatibility.
better medicine, reducing the costs of STDs.
increased mobility, enabling gay men to form large enough social groups in big cities to overcome ostracism enough to form gay-friendly cultures.
Let’s look at an example where we have less pressure to signal our disapproval of an outgroup: intolerance toward marriage between cousins has increased, at least over the past century or so.
Patterns in the US suggest that the trend is due to beliefs (likely overstated) about the genetic costs. So it could fit the model of increasing wisdom causing moral progress, although it looks a bit more like scientific progress than progress at being moral.
But worldwide patterns say something different. Muslim culture continues to accept, maybe even encourage, marriage between cousins, to an extent that seems unlikely to be due to ignorance of the genetic costs. Some authors suggest this is due to the benefits of strong family bonds. A person living in the year 1500 might well have been justified in believing that those bonds produced better cultures than the alternative. That might still be true today in regions where it’s hard to create trusted connections between unrelated people.
I expect that there are moral rules that deserve to be considered universal. But most of the rules we’re using are better described as heuristics that are well adapted to our current needs.
I don’t think differing attitudes toward moral realism are important here. People mostly agree on a variety of basic goals such as being happy, safe, and healthy. Moral rules seem to be mostly attempts at generating societies that people want to live in.
Some moral progress is due to increased wisdom, but most of what we label as moral progress results from changing conditions and/or tastes.
E.g. for homosexuality, I don’t see much evidence that people a century ago were unfamiliar with the reasons why we might want to accept homosexuality. Here are my guesses as to what changed:
a shift to romantic relations oriented around love and sex, as compared to marriage as an institution that focused on economic support and raising children. People used to depend on children to support them in old age, and on a life-long commitment of support from a spouse. Those needs decreased with increasing wealth and the welfare state, and were somewhat replaced by ambitious expectations about sexual and emotional compatibility.
better medicine, reducing the costs of STDs.
increased mobility, enabling gay men to form large enough social groups in big cities to overcome ostracism enough to form gay-friendly cultures.
Let’s look at an example where we have less pressure to signal our disapproval of an outgroup: intolerance toward marriage between cousins has increased, at least over the past century or so.
Patterns in the US suggest that the trend is due to beliefs (likely overstated) about the genetic costs. So it could fit the model of increasing wisdom causing moral progress, although it looks a bit more like scientific progress than progress at being moral.
But worldwide patterns say something different. Muslim culture continues to accept, maybe even encourage, marriage between cousins, to an extent that seems unlikely to be due to ignorance of the genetic costs. Some authors suggest this is due to the benefits of strong family bonds. A person living in the year 1500 might well have been justified in believing that those bonds produced better cultures than the alternative. That might still be true today in regions where it’s hard to create trusted connections between unrelated people.
I expect that there are moral rules that deserve to be considered universal. But most of the rules we’re using are better described as heuristics that are well adapted to our current needs.