TGGP, I’m afraid you’ve committed the moral analogue of replying to some truth claim with a statement of the form: “As a non-X-ist, I don’t find the notion of truth to be meaningful”.
By “moral progress” I simply mean the sense in which Western civilization is nicer today than it used to be. E.g. we don’t keep slaves, burn live cats, etc. (If you have any doubts about whether such progress has occurred, you underestimate the nastiness of previous eras.) In particular, please note that I am not invoking any sort of fancy ontology, so let’s not get derailed that way.
As for why we should expect moral progress to correlate with other kinds: well, maybe for arbitrary minds we shouldn’t. But we humans keep trying to become both smarter and nicer, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we succeed in both dimensions more and more over time.
TGGP, I’m afraid you’ve committed the moral analogue of replying to some truth claim with a statement of the form: “As a non-X-ist, I don’t find the notion of truth to be meaningful”.
By “moral progress” I simply mean the sense in which Western civilization is nicer today than it used to be. E.g. we don’t keep slaves, burn live cats, etc. (If you have any doubts about whether such progress has occurred, you underestimate the nastiness of previous eras.) In particular, please note that I am not invoking any sort of fancy ontology, so let’s not get derailed that way.
As for why we should expect moral progress to correlate with other kinds: well, maybe for arbitrary minds we shouldn’t. But we humans keep trying to become both smarter and nicer, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we succeed in both dimensions more and more over time.