Preserving morality doesn’t mean that we have nothing more to decide, that there are no new ideas to create. New ideas (and new normative considerations) can be created while keeping morality. Value drift is destruction of morality, but lack of value drift doesn’t preclude development, especially since morality endorses development (in the ways it does).
Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Current normative considerations that we have (i.e. morality) describes what kinds of change we should consider improvement. Forgetting what changes we consider to be improvement (i.e. value drift) will result in future change that is not moral (i.e. not improvement from the current standpoint).
I find myself in agreement with all this, except perhaps:
Forgetting what changes we consider to be improvement (i.e. value drift) will result in future change that is not moral (i.e. not improvement from the current standpoint).
Perhaps we are using the term ‘value drift’ differently.
Would you consider the change from our ancestors values to modern western values to be ‘value drift’? What about change from the values of the age-10 version of yourself versus the age-20 or the current?
The current world is far from an idealization of my ancestor’s values, and my current self is far from an idealized extrapolation of it’s future according to it’s values at the time.
I don’t find this type of ‘value drift’ to be equivalent to “forgetting what changes we consider to be improvement”. At each step we are making changes to ourselves that we do believe are improvements at the time according to our values at the time, and over time this process can lead to significant changes in our values. Even so, this does not imply that the future changes are not moral (not improvement from the current standpoint).
Change in values implies that the future will not be ideal from the perspective of current values, but from this it does not follow that all such futures are worse from the perspective of our current values (because all else is not equal).
Preserving morality doesn’t mean that we have nothing more to decide, that there are no new ideas to create. New ideas (and new normative considerations) can be created while keeping morality. Value drift is destruction of morality, but lack of value drift doesn’t preclude development, especially since morality endorses development (in the ways it does).
Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Current normative considerations that we have (i.e. morality) describes what kinds of change we should consider improvement. Forgetting what changes we consider to be improvement (i.e. value drift) will result in future change that is not moral (i.e. not improvement from the current standpoint).
I find myself in agreement with all this, except perhaps:
Perhaps we are using the term ‘value drift’ differently.
Would you consider the change from our ancestors values to modern western values to be ‘value drift’? What about change from the values of the age-10 version of yourself versus the age-20 or the current?
The current world is far from an idealization of my ancestor’s values, and my current self is far from an idealized extrapolation of it’s future according to it’s values at the time.
I don’t find this type of ‘value drift’ to be equivalent to “forgetting what changes we consider to be improvement”. At each step we are making changes to ourselves that we do believe are improvements at the time according to our values at the time, and over time this process can lead to significant changes in our values. Even so, this does not imply that the future changes are not moral (not improvement from the current standpoint).
Change in values implies that the future will not be ideal from the perspective of current values, but from this it does not follow that all such futures are worse from the perspective of our current values (because all else is not equal).