Richard: I would say that moral ‘progress’ is caused by economics as well, but in a complex manner. Historically, in Western Civilization, possibly due to the verbalized moral norm “do onto others as you would have others do onto you” plus certain less articulate ideas of justice as freedom of conscience, truth, and vaguely ‘equality’, there is a positive feedback cycle between moral and economic ‘progress’. We could call this “true moral progress”.
However, the basic drive comes from increased wealth driving increased consumption of the luxury “non-hypocrisy”, which surprisingly turns out to be an unrecognized factor of production. Economic development can cause societies with other verbalized governing norms to travel deeper into the “moral abyss”, e.g. move away from the attractor that Western Civilization moves towards instead. Usually, this movement produces negative feedback, as it chokes off economic progress, which happens to benefit from movement towards Western moral norms within a large region of possibility space stretching out from the evolutionary psychology emergent default.
In rare cases however, it may be possible for positive feedback to drive a culture parasitically down into the depths of the “moral abyss”. This could happen if a cultural discovers a road to riches in the form of decreased production, which is possible if that culture is embedded in an international trade network and highly specialized in the production of a good with inelastic supply. In this case, the productivity losses that flow from moral reform can serve as a form of collusion to reduce production driving up price.
Richard: I would say that moral ‘progress’ is caused by economics as well, but in a complex manner. Historically, in Western Civilization, possibly due to the verbalized moral norm “do onto others as you would have others do onto you” plus certain less articulate ideas of justice as freedom of conscience, truth, and vaguely ‘equality’, there is a positive feedback cycle between moral and economic ‘progress’. We could call this “true moral progress”.
However, the basic drive comes from increased wealth driving increased consumption of the luxury “non-hypocrisy”, which surprisingly turns out to be an unrecognized factor of production. Economic development can cause societies with other verbalized governing norms to travel deeper into the “moral abyss”, e.g. move away from the attractor that Western Civilization moves towards instead. Usually, this movement produces negative feedback, as it chokes off economic progress, which happens to benefit from movement towards Western moral norms within a large region of possibility space stretching out from the evolutionary psychology emergent default.
In rare cases however, it may be possible for positive feedback to drive a culture parasitically down into the depths of the “moral abyss”. This could happen if a cultural discovers a road to riches in the form of decreased production, which is possible if that culture is embedded in an international trade network and highly specialized in the production of a good with inelastic supply. In this case, the productivity losses that flow from moral reform can serve as a form of collusion to reduce production driving up price.