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Assessing our Moral Beliefs in Light of Predicted Future Moral "Progress":

At the excellent Overcoming Bias blog, Hal Finney makes an insightful point about our perceptions of past and future moral progress:

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I see social standards of morality as, on average, a matter of attempting to address threats to an empowered group coming from individual behavior. (Of course some such attempts may go and have gone wildly awry.) I see the technological and scientific changes of preceding centuries as typically having broadened the sphere of those whom we are expected to consider with regard (increasingly as equals) and the precision and rationality with which we are expected to calculate the consequence of our actions. As our calculating powers become greater, I expect moral concerns to become more stringent and precise, as a reasonable person "ought to know better" in more and more circumstances.

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