The question of what makes a value a moral value is metaethical, not part of object-level ethics.
Sure. But any answer to that metaethical question which allows us to class some bases for comparison as moral values and others as merely values implicitly privileges a moral reference frame (or, rather, a set of such frames).
Beyond that, I don’t see where you are going.
Where I was going is that you asked me a question here which I didn’t understand clearly enough to be confident that my answer to it would share key assumptions with the question you meant to ask.
So I asked for clarification of your question.
Given your clarification, and using your terms the way I think you’re using them, I would say that whether it’s valid to class a moral change as moral progress is a metaethical question, and whatever answer one gives implicitly privileges a moral reference frame (or, rather, a set of such frames).
If you meant to ask me about my preferred metaethics, that’s a more complicated question, but broadly speaking in this context I would say that I’m comfortable calling any way of preferentially sorting world-states with certain motivational characteristics a moral frame, but acknowledge that some moral frames are simply not available to minds like mine.
So, for example, is it moral progress to transition from a social norm that in-practice-encourages randomly killing fellow group members to a social norm that in-practice-discourages it? Yes, not only because I happen to adopt a moral frame in which randomly killing fellow group members is bad, but also because I happen to have a kind of mind that is predisposed to adopt such frames.
Sure. But any answer to that metaethical question which allows us to class some bases for comparison as moral values and others as merely values implicitly privileges a moral reference frame (or, rather, a set of such frames).
Where I was going is that you asked me a question here which I didn’t understand clearly enough to be confident that my answer to it would share key assumptions with the question you meant to ask.
So I asked for clarification of your question.
Given your clarification, and using your terms the way I think you’re using them, I would say that whether it’s valid to class a moral change as moral progress is a metaethical question, and whatever answer one gives implicitly privileges a moral reference frame (or, rather, a set of such frames).
If you meant to ask me about my preferred metaethics, that’s a more complicated question, but broadly speaking in this context I would say that I’m comfortable calling any way of preferentially sorting world-states with certain motivational characteristics a moral frame, but acknowledge that some moral frames are simply not available to minds like mine.
So, for example, is it moral progress to transition from a social norm that in-practice-encourages randomly killing fellow group members to a social norm that in-practice-discourages it? Yes, not only because I happen to adopt a moral frame in which randomly killing fellow group members is bad, but also because I happen to have a kind of mind that is predisposed to adopt such frames.