There are plenty of comments of that nature on LessWrong and they are very rarely poorly received. While the first example I gave was eventually down voted this is only because he proposed particularly bad reasoning based on that axiom. If you consider the criticism in the thread very few people attacked moral progress directly.
Also in wider society there is a strong assumption, almost a civic religion based on notions of moral progress. Even those of us who believe that we don’t belive in moral progress probably have many cached thoughts and biases directly related to the belief that we haven’t yet noticed and repaired.
I’d actually take it half a step further and said that we’ve spent most of the years since WW2 on how to distance ourselves from ethical questions so as to allow ourselves to commit greater atrocities than ever before and still happily go home to watch Paradise Hotel afterwards.
I s’pose examples would be in order:
Undermining food production while at the same time burning food.
Specifically undermining the life quality of vast amounts of people so as to keep up a standard of living and increased consumption in quite a small part of the world. This includes, but is not limited to, instigating wars for the sake of resources, letting children deal with poisons, dumping nuclear waste where fellow human beings live and so on and so forth.
The linked article has a negative karma, so this example did not convince me that LWers do this type of wrong reasoning all the time.
There are plenty of comments of that nature on LessWrong and they are very rarely poorly received. While the first example I gave was eventually down voted this is only because he proposed particularly bad reasoning based on that axiom. If you consider the criticism in the thread very few people attacked moral progress directly.
Also in wider society there is a strong assumption, almost a civic religion based on notions of moral progress. Even those of us who believe that we don’t belive in moral progress probably have many cached thoughts and biases directly related to the belief that we haven’t yet noticed and repaired.
I’d actually take it half a step further and said that we’ve spent most of the years since WW2 on how to distance ourselves from ethical questions so as to allow ourselves to commit greater atrocities than ever before and still happily go home to watch Paradise Hotel afterwards.
I s’pose examples would be in order:
Undermining food production while at the same time burning food.
Specifically undermining the life quality of vast amounts of people so as to keep up a standard of living and increased consumption in quite a small part of the world. This includes, but is not limited to, instigating wars for the sake of resources, letting children deal with poisons, dumping nuclear waste where fellow human beings live and so on and so forth.