Hmm maybe I spoke too soon. There have been times in different societies when the majority of people would say slavery was good, and times (even before the modern age) when the majority of people would say slavery was bad. But slavery is bad, and according to my argument it’s because it feels bad, even if you are mostly unconscious of it.
So my theory of social change is that we individually learn to feel and understand our emotions better, because emotions are the only reason we care about anything at all. The way emotions feel in my body is certainly very objective to me, and the more I understand them the more I can recognize them in other people. I’m not sure I’m willing to claim that recognizing other people’s emotions is entirely objective, but when we see an angy politician ranting and raving, no one disagrees that they are angry.
So I would say we should collectively agree to a system which reflects the true preferences of most people, but there is a process of understanding what those preferences really are.
The latter. Superman’s powers are magical, but our powers are intimately connected to the state of life for the less fortunate. We know that our economic prosperity is based on a mix of innovation and domination, and the more we reduce our involvement in the domination side of it, the more we address the real root of the problem.