Yes, what uke said.

Do you (Aaron), think these changes (a shifting) in morality (human behaviour) are overall improving (getting better), declining (getting worse), or no change (no change) according to your personal views on morality (human behaviour).

Or: overall, do you think people today are more good, more evil, or no change can be determined, when compared to recent and/or more distant history.

My answer is the same: None of the above. I don't see it as progress or regress in the big picture. But it's not staying the same. It's changing. Just not in a forward or backwards direction.

My clause in there was just to note that if I say "morality is shifting" I'm not talking about moral facts changing, but rather the evaluation of human behavioral norms.

A good analogy to understand is with regards to racism. First, there still exists overt forms of racism. But even as overt racism fades in some ways, we've still got existing institutional and systematized racism. It's the same problem, it just looks different.

Is this a tautological point, or just one regarding the limited changes in human behaviour norms in the last centuries/decades/whatever time period you are using? As in, are you going to say that humans never are going to progress or regress according to your morality (due perhaps to a view that humans are fundamentally immutable in their God given true nature or something like this)?

You bring up racism. But if you take a centuries time period, the US has transitioned from a black slave society up to a black president. Racism isn't entirely vanquished, certainly, but this is a striking change in behaviour norms that it seems calling this "same problem, just looks different" is looking from a "big picture" so far above that one loses the inability to distinguish (let alone advocate for) much of anything of practical significance. For most people, this transition represents some form of progress, that a society where all races can become president closer matches our moral views on racism than a society where one race is in slavery to another.

There are those, of course, that question moral ontology, epistemology, and the like, people who don't think there is any basis on which to claim that slavery and genocide and so on are bad. Unless I am mistaken, I was under the impression that you do believe that objective moral values exist (as given by God), that we have some limited understand of what these moral values are as given by the Bible and that we can assent to strong and important moral statements like "thou shalt not use the Lord's name in vain". So why would you not want to then claim that a society that reduces the using of the Lord's name in vain is making moral progress on this particular claim?

I would say that I have a cynical view of human goodness. When taking the broad view of humanity, the last 50-100 years are a blip. I believe that projecting forward into the future based on such a short sample is a mistake. Look at 500-1000 years and that will probably give you a better projection.

I don't think it's logically impossible for progress to be made, especially if we narrow the view to certain things. But plus que ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

It is true that progress has been made on the racial relations front. And racially driven slavery is certainly a thing of the past for the foreseeable future in the Western world. You can count that as a win if you want. But winning a hand doesn't make you a winner. And I'm not even sure if I would say that the hand has been won. For example:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...00-in-the-u-s/

I'm not going to live or die by the 30 million number, but the simple fact is that it's a lot of people. Slavery in the US in the mid 1800s was probably on the order of a couple million people.

Maybe it's not racially derived slavery, but it's still slavery. And back to racism itself, perhaps it doesn't seem like such a big deal in the US (unless you're of Middle Eastern descent) it's still rolling along in Europe quite strongly. Maybe it's not leading to slavery, but racism is still a big issue over there.

I (basically) believe this. But I don't need this to make my point.

I'm not saying that it's not possible to make some sort of progress on some front. But to make a claim like this look like progress, we need to ignore what's happening on other fronts. (If society were completely identical in every way except for this one feature, I would consent that progress has been made.)

Failing with a 50% is somewhat better than failing with a 40%, but it's not like your grade actually got any better.

I think I've claimed elsewhere that I believe the next major oppressive force will be economically based. I see no barriers to the rich getting richer, and hence getting more powerful, and the economics of the situation eventually behaving in a way that causes certain types of progress to relapse. It's not the poor creating the demand for human trafficking.

I didn't get the impression this is what you meant by the "not forward, not backward, but not staying the same" bit, but maybe it is. As in, if your point is something like this: "there are lots of individual areas we can point to and say there is progress or regress, but it is hard to meaningfully evaluate the net change" then fair enough. I got the impression, however that your point was closer to something like this: "different human behavioural norms are all sort of irrelevant to the bigger moral picture".

Yes it is true that 0.05% of the US is in some version of slavery. Mostly sex trafficking and illegal hispanic immigrants under threat of being reported. But compared to 1700 US slavery, is this really "same problem, just looks different"? Is this really "plus que ca change, plus c'est la meme chose"? Is the abolishment of de jure slavery and the dramatic reduction of de facto slavery really nothing more than "possibly winning one hand"? Your characterizations go beyond cynicism.

If there was ever a spot where we could say that something is morally wrong, and than progress on that front has taken us in a positive moral direction, this would be it. To be fair, yes, you have sort of lightly accepted this fits "some sort of progress". But at the same time, you appear to be trying to substantially downplay human progress on a file that seems about as significant as it is possible to be.

Taking a thousand year view is fine, I suppose, but I, at least, am interested in improving politics and society today. Perhaps advocating for legalizing regulated prostitution or amnesty for illegal immigrants coupled with substantive immigration reform - the kinds of policies that could reduce that 0.05% slavery rate you lament. But to advocate for policies, one has to be able to say that they will make progress. And if you are unable to claim progress on slavery without the above equivocations, it seems like you will be stuck with a thousand year "big picture" in which you aren't able to say much of anything at all. Certainly not things like this:


Progress has nothing to do with having met some threshold. A student who gets 40 then 50 on subsequent tests has demonstrated some progress, even if it isn't over the standard threshold (50% is usually a pass in Canada incidentally).

This may not be that pertinent to the conversation, but biblically, original sin and corruption are evident not only in human behaviours, but in the fact that we age and die. The process of aging and death are results of the corrupted state itself, and simply prolonging the process with medicine and general knowledge doesn't invalidate that our bodies degenerate, no more than finding trends of morality invalidate that people are selfish.

I don't think you need to look at racism and murder to prove that we are immoral by nature, but that simply by the definition of being human, wanting to survive and to reproduce and putting our own needs in front of others, shows what our nature entails. More obvious and extreme examples, such as murder, arise out of that nature which is selfish and looks to itself first and foremost.

Can we change this nature? Not just resist it and choose not to "sin", but can we change this "sinful" nature? Christianity says we can't but what does Jesus say?

Jesus said: The kingdom of the Father is like a man who wanted to kill a powerful man. He drew the sword in his house and drove it into the wall, that he might know his hand would be strong (enough). Then he slew the powerful man.

I disagree with that premise. Though we may still wrestle with our sin nature, to say that we cannot change our sinful nature is misleading. That's what being born again entails, dying to the flesh and being made alive in the spirit. There is a change there.

Romans 6:5 "For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin.

You say there is a change there but the change is a re identification or discovery of your true nature. This is a useful aspect of religion but this is not the end but rather the beginning of the spiritual journey. It's why so many Christians who are "born again" continue to sin.

I'm talking about a much bigger change. Jesus is talking bigger than this. He says, "two will recline on a couch, one will die, one will live." He doesn't say you will "wrestle" with him; he says you will kill him.

Where the **** did this come from??

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, if the change is a re-discovery of your true nature, one would not continue to struggle with sin either.

Either way, the bible entirely contradicts what you're saying, the "change" is what a large portion of Paul's letters are alluding to. It's what the Holy Spirit does in us, which is also a sign of our inheritance.

You can believe what you want, but you will have a hard time proving that from the bible without picking verses out of context. The fact that you're quoting non-canonized books says a lot about what you believe. That's not meant to be disrespectful, if you've come up with a theory based on a few things, that's fine, it's just not biblical.

Yes, I am not limited by the constraints of Christianity. I'm trying to get you guys to open your minds and take the next step. People on this board like you and Aaron are ready to move on and develop your ability to discern truth from within.

BUT it doesn't matter what I think and I'm aware of that so I'll try to stay on the right side of that line of how hard to push..

I'm not sure how else to express progress in some area while simultaneously expressing regress in another that isn't something like "neither progress nor regress but also not stationary."

And you can by narrowly defining your goals and desired outcomes in a way that you can view progress by neglecting other facets of humanity. If your policy of advancement of women in the workforce is measured by wages or whatever, you can do that. But then if (for example) during the same interval there is an increase in murder rates, your policy advocacy can still report progress despite other areas in which regress has happened.

My position is grounded in taking the broad view.

Some teachers are required by policy to NEVER give a score below 50%. For example:

http://www.wcnc.com/news/iteam/CMS-s...207945941.html

"Progress in some areas, regress in others" might have done it. i.e. both (rather than the confusing "none of the above").

Dragging thoughts out of someone one sentence at a time is not my idea of fun (especially when they can be quite verbose when they so choose), so I'll bow out of this part.

Indeed, saying this would have prevented any confusion. If this is truly what you meant, then I don't have much of a problem. However, your posts read much more like this being a more palatable fallback position to assume, and not what you were originally going for. You said things like " "same problem, just looks different" and "plus que ca change, plus c'est la meme chose". You gave an example of racism was the same; you pushed back on slavery talking about how there is present day slavery. Those comments seem much more consistent with a view not of progress and regress in different areas, but that the changes taking place DON"T progress or regress morally, that they are just different looking versions of the same thing, that the more they change, the more they actually stay the same.

Okay.

I don't know what this means, or how it relates to the previous paragraph.

BTW, since you were happy with a 500 year timeframe, if your position truly is that in some areas we have progressed and other areas we have regressed, can you give some examples of moral regression in our society over the last 500 years?

At least in Western cultures (though we're starting to see it in Eastern cultures), a sense of respect of elders and the duty of caring for them has dropped off quite dramatically over the last 500 years. (And really, in the last 100 years.)

Along the same lines, I think the general fragmentation of communities that comes from the individualistic ethos has created a number of social systems which are fostering a mentality of selfishness and self-centeredness. This comes from the individualistic morality and the general sense of moving away from a sense of corporate morality -- to think of the impact on others as the norm, rather than framing actions primarily in terms of the impact on the individual.)

For all the good that the industrial age has created, it has also created a culture of wastefulness and excess, which is at least debatable with regards to morality. (It depends on what assumptions you hold and how you view man's responsibility and relationship to the environment, and so forth.)

You might have missed the more important of my two posts due to the page flip.

Accepting your observations as true*, how do you rectify them with your previous suggestions. Why is an individualistic ethos of the 21st century not just the "same problem, just looks different" from individualism or the lack thereof of the 16th or 19th century? Is it perhaps not that the more things change the more they stay the same? Consider, when it came to racism and slavery, you pushed back fairly hard talking about the racism and slavery that exists today and so on. As in, when presented with examples of progress it seemed like you really wanted to minimize them, to make it seems that it was just more of the same. But with your examples of regress there appears to be no such qualifiers. It feels like you are fighting pretty hard and more than a bit unfairly to bolster your cynical view of social change.

*although I am not convinced they are. Are people actually more selfish and self-centred than they were 100 or 500 years ago? Possibly, but it seems pretty wishy washy, especially when compared to the fairly clear cut things on the "positive" column like the abolishment of legal slavery in the west. Others on your list, like caring for elderly which certainly I agree the expression of it has changed, seems more related to economic changes than moral ones (for example, given economic security and strong social safety nets there is less economic incentives for grandparents to live with their children). Is that the same as abridging on a sense duty to care for elders? Not convinced. Especially given your previous insistence on quantitative arguments, much of this all seems very wishy washy.