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