27/05/2014 13:53:26 ¶ ●

## http://yxoque.tumblr.com/post/86946904373/ive-been-thinking-about-moral-progress-lately

yxoque:

> I’ve been thinking about moral progress lately.

> The part where I’m stuck is that because morality isn’t strictly objective, you can’t talk about any kind of progress, because you can’t call one particular moral state “better”“.

> But that doesn’t work, because I do feel qualified to differentiate…

Speaking as a mathematician-in-training, I’d say it looks like you’re using a difficult-to-define metric (“goodness”) where a more specific one might do better. Which one, I’m not equipped to say, but is “murderousness” measurable? “hurtfulness”? “big-picture awareness”? I doubt “compassion” is all that easy to define precisely enough, but it sure would be nice if it were.