Has humanity made moral progress?. I say it has, Others in this thread disagree.
Morality is sometimes concerned with our treatment of the other animals. However, it is primarily concerned with how we humans treat each other. So, if we can say that we are treating each other better now than at any time in the past, we can claim that our species has made moral progress -- and that is precisely the claim made here.
Average human beings today are kinder people than their average ancestors of any past era. It's as if our brains, using the reward and punishment method, have been training us to be kinder to each other and to the other animals.
Like a simple binary code, pain and pleasure signals from our brains provide us with an on-board moral guidance system. We are punished with the pain of guilt after we have intentionally caused harm to someone innocent. When we treat others with kindness, we are rewarded with pleasure. We feel good about it. We refer to this collection of pain and pleasure feelings as our conscience.
The pain of guilt is not severe, but it can nag us for a lifetime. A black family, living in one of the northern states of the USA, received an anonymous letter. The postmark showed it had been mailed from a town in one of the southern states. In it, the writer apologized for having taken part in a lynching 50 years before in which a relative of the family was murdered.
Humanity is now, and probably has always been, making moral progress; we are treating each other better right now than at any time in our history. However, that encouraging fact is not obvious. There are four factors that can cloud our view:
1. Population growth causes the volume of criminal acts to increase even when the crime rate, expressed as a percentage of the population, goes down.
2. Advances in weapons technology makes it possible for each disturbed person, or small group, to do far more harm today than in the past.
3. Advances in communications technology makes it possible for us to see video footage of violence from halfway around the world the same day.
4. Early in the 20th Century, a man could beat his wife and children and molest his daughters with impunity. The fact that we are reading of more crimes against women and children might make it seem like the problems are growing when they are actually being rooted out and punished.
So, if we only use the bad news offered by the daily news media as our evidence, we might jump to the conclusion that there is little hope for humanity's future. In order to see humanity's moral progress, we need to compare human behavior today to what it was in the distant past.
• The world's religions are still making trouble for each other. However, they are not nearly as violent as they were between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.
• The sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam contain some terrible moral guidance that, wisely, has been mostly ignored over the years. This is evidence that those texts were not divinely inspired as claimed and evidence also that human cultures of two thousand years ago, when those texts were written, were morally immature compared to today's.
• Children of the poor are still used as cheap labor in some cultures, but compared to the past, before Child Labor Laws, much progress has been made;
• In morally advanced cultures, men are learning to treat women as equals;
• Caste systems, like India's, which have resulted in unfairness for many over centuries, are gradually crumbling;
• Not very long ago, violent strikes were common during management and labor negotiations; it happens less often today;
• Employers have learned that it is profitable to give both employees and consumers more respect and better treatment than they once did;
• Government corruption and oppression are still a problem but much progress has been made since governments for the people have been replacing governments for the privileged;
• During past wars in human history, civilian populations were attacked; today, attempts are being made to limit the targeting to combatants;
• Because of the Geneva Convention and other similar efforts, prisoners of war are treated better now than at any time in our history;
• We still hear about prisoners being tortured but, in the Middle Ages, torture was a thriving industry. Clever devices were designed and made to maximize pain.
• NFL Football provides mild violence as entertainment, but it is nothing compared to the spectacle of slaughter seen in Rome's Colosseum.
• At one time, men who cruelly abused their wives and children were immune to punishment under the law. This is no longer true in morally advanced cultures.
• Slavery is still a problem here and there, but not nearly to the extent that it was until just a few centuries ago;
• Oxford sociologist Manuel Eisner's study persuasively demonstrated a long-term pattern of declining homicide rates across Europe over 800 years.
• Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker makes a well-documented case for humanity's moral progress in his book History and the Decline of Human Violence. A brief summary of his argument can also be heard on his TED Talks video: The Surprising Decline of Violence.
