7 ms·

A belief that morality improves over time as you describe, aka whiggism/meliorism, is itself a kind of religious tenet of a particular set of worldviews (often

A belief that morality improves over time as you describe, aka whiggism/meliorism, is itself a kind of religious tenet of a particular set of worldviews (often called left, progressive etc). So I don't think one can say that rejecting that tenet places one outside of the Overton window of acceptability, while at the same time claiming tolerance of a wide range of viewpoints.

chiyc 6y ago
Rejecting progressivism or meliorism of course doesn't place someone outside that window of acceptability by itself. It depends on what a person is clinging onto. And I think it's still fair for a person to claim tolerance of a wide range of viewpoints while rejecting positions that are bigoted or deemed unacceptable. For someone who rejects meliorism, what moment in human history is the correct frame for evaluating the world? Many social or religious conservatives positions today often overlook that certain perspectives they hold now were unacceptable a century ago. The use of contraceptives being one example.
- zests 6y ago
  I feel like the thread of the conversation has been lost. The answer here is that "no frame" is correct. If you simply believe what is morally fashionable then you likely would have had very objectionable "far right" beliefs in the 90s. This is the premise of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
  - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
    The original thread was a person upset about the definition of what society considers extreme viewpoints. I don't see anyone arguing which frame is correct but merely that the bar moves over time. Which we know it does. Your above link and statement reinforces this. So you can be an extremist today with a viewpoint that was common 30 years ago. That doesn't change the fact that you're an extremist today.
    - zests 6y ago
      Let's say that 30 years from now some of your beliefs would be considered extremist. What value judgement do you place on yourself today? Can we live in a world where "if you believe this now you're evil but if you believed this 10 years ago you're cool."? Replace 10 with any number of years.
      - chiyc 6y ago
        I think the three of us are in agreement here!
      - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
        Yes. What you've described is common. Think of all the encounters with racist old people that we tend to laugh off with "she's from a different era". The brush off we do doesn't change the fact that they have grossly outdated and evil views by todays norms. Also think about old people that did change. We don't judge them too harshly for past behavior given it was the norm at the time. As a personal anecdote; every time i've been slow to adapt to the new societal norms, when i look back it's been me who was wrong, not society. It's just taken me time to realize it. I've learnt to force myself to accept, based on repeated past experience, that it's probably not society that's wrong when the overton window moves, it's probably me. I'm yet to regret adapting my viewpoint even if at the time it irks me somewhat. If you're over 30 think back to the school yard gay insults and compare your own viewpoints now. It's not wrong you've changed is it? Take that lesson into account with todays changes and you won't regret it. What i'm trying to say here is that fighting against changes to the overton window will cause you to end up as a sterotypical old person with grossly outdated views. There's no need to be this way.
        monoideism 6y ago
        If you had been slow to adopt the moral changes of Nazism in the 1930s, would you have been "wrong"? What about women slow to adopt the moral changes of revolutionary Islamic Iran? Are they wrong? And before you ask what my morality is, I'll just sum it up as enlightenment Western liberalism, for want of a longer essay to explain it. And today's left (and right!) are starting to leave that outlook behind, to our detriment.
ribosometronome 6y ago
That's a lot of words for "How dare you not be tolerant of intolerance".
saberience 6y ago
Morality has improved over time though and is still improving. I mean, if you look at how gay people were still treated in the 90s, it was terrible. Most gay people were afraid to be publicly "out" and forget about any sort of trans rights, if you were trans in the 90s you just never transitioned or basically told nobody. Do you think going back to a world where gay people were often attacked and beaten in public is a good idea? Where women were regularly subjected to sexual assault at work? My mum who worked as a teacher in the 80s and 90s told me she was regularly slapped on the ass by male teachers at work. Is this ok? Would you be ok with your daughters getting this treatment?
- rendang 6y ago
  I think your examples touch on the enforcement of certain norms, not on the change in the reigning social view. In other words, in the 90s neither the average man on the street nor the ruling class would agree that publicly assaulting gay people or workplace sexual assault are anything but immoral. Both were also still crimes at that time, of course. I'm also not quite sure that workplace incidents of that kind have declined substantially up to the present, but I'd be interested in seeing data.
landryraccoon 6y ago
Interesting. How do you reconcile the fact that slavery was once widespread and morally acceptable by the majority of society, and defended by the church, with your position that morality does not improve over time? How about the fact that interracial marriage was once considered sin, and that women allowed to own property or vote was also morally acceptable? Would you prefer a return to the morality of the 1800s, since in your view morality does not change, where women and dark skinned people returned to their "rightful place"? Even the Church has undergone massive reformation over the centuries, and what was considered morally acceptable in the 1200s is not acceptable to modern Christians.
- rendang 6y ago
  I don't believe, correct me otherwise, that there are any major religions whose main stream/expression universally taught that interracial marriage was a sin. Certainly some Protestants in 1800s USA did, but Christians in 200, 500, 1300 etc did not. Atlantic chattel slavery could be argued to be crueler than ancient/traditional forms of slavery and hence a temporal decline in moral goodness from the middle ages to late 1800s. It may also be noted that in a low-tech society, feudalist and traditional slave economies may have had some advantages over e.g. a laissez faire wage worker economy. (In a famine perhaps? A question for historians). The cruelty of nature itself on human lives in a low tech society interacts with moral judgments about economic systems etc. in ways that complicate these questions - I would say be careful not to credit to improved virtue what is really the due of technological innovation. A counterexample of moral improvement could be respect and care for elders and parents, broadly speaking. The point being only that the march of progress is not always consistent nor can it be counted on to be so.
  - monoideism 6y ago
    Exactly. Morality rises and falls. It's not an inevitable progress toward "better". Some new moral "innovations" lead to horrible moral outcomes, like when John Punch was turned from an indentured servant into a lifetime slave, presumably on the basis on his skin color. And how to describe Nazism except as a moral abberation? That wasn't moral progress after the (already declining) morality of the Weimar republic. And I'm getting weird dystopian vibes from a significant % of the present left. The moral crusading. The authoritarianism. The absolutism. The shaming. The religious ferver of its movements.

chiyc 6y ago

Rejecting progressivism or meliorism of course doesn't place someone outside that window of acceptability by itself. It depends on what a person is clinging onto. And I think it's still fair for a person to claim tolerance of a wide range of viewpoints while rejecting positions that are bigoted or deemed unacceptable. For someone who rejects meliorism, what moment in human history is the correct frame for evaluating the world? Many social or religious conservatives positions today often overlook that certain perspectives they hold now were unacceptable a century ago. The use of contraceptives being one example.

zests 6y ago
I feel like the thread of the conversation has been lost. The answer here is that "no frame" is correct. If you simply believe what is morally fashionable then you likely would have had very objectionable "far right" beliefs in the 90s. This is the premise of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  The original thread was a person upset about the definition of what society considers extreme viewpoints. I don't see anyone arguing which frame is correct but merely that the bar moves over time. Which we know it does. Your above link and statement reinforces this. So you can be an extremist today with a viewpoint that was common 30 years ago. That doesn't change the fact that you're an extremist today.
  - zests 6y ago
    Let's say that 30 years from now some of your beliefs would be considered extremist. What value judgement do you place on yourself today? Can we live in a world where "if you believe this now you're evil but if you believed this 10 years ago you're cool."? Replace 10 with any number of years.
    - chiyc 6y ago
      I think the three of us are in agreement here!
    - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
      Yes. What you've described is common. Think of all the encounters with racist old people that we tend to laugh off with "she's from a different era". The brush off we do doesn't change the fact that they have grossly outdated and evil views by todays norms. Also think about old people that did change. We don't judge them too harshly for past behavior given it was the norm at the time. As a personal anecdote; every time i've been slow to adapt to the new societal norms, when i look back it's been me who was wrong, not society. It's just taken me time to realize it. I've learnt to force myself to accept, based on repeated past experience, that it's probably not society that's wrong when the overton window moves, it's probably me. I'm yet to regret adapting my viewpoint even if at the time it irks me somewhat. If you're over 30 think back to the school yard gay insults and compare your own viewpoints now. It's not wrong you've changed is it? Take that lesson into account with todays changes and you won't regret it. What i'm trying to say here is that fighting against changes to the overton window will cause you to end up as a sterotypical old person with grossly outdated views. There's no need to be this way.
      - monoideism 6y ago
        If you had been slow to adopt the moral changes of Nazism in the 1930s, would you have been "wrong"? What about women slow to adopt the moral changes of revolutionary Islamic Iran? Are they wrong? And before you ask what my morality is, I'll just sum it up as enlightenment Western liberalism, for want of a longer essay to explain it. And today's left (and right!) are starting to leave that outlook behind, to our detriment.

ribosometronome 6y ago

That's a lot of words for "How dare you not be tolerant of intolerance".

saberience 6y ago

Morality has improved over time though and is still improving. I mean, if you look at how gay people were still treated in the 90s, it was terrible. Most gay people were afraid to be publicly "out" and forget about any sort of trans rights, if you were trans in the 90s you just never transitioned or basically told nobody. Do you think going back to a world where gay people were often attacked and beaten in public is a good idea? Where women were regularly subjected to sexual assault at work? My mum who worked as a teacher in the 80s and 90s told me she was regularly slapped on the ass by male teachers at work. Is this ok? Would you be ok with your daughters getting this treatment?

rendang 6y ago
I think your examples touch on the enforcement of certain norms, not on the change in the reigning social view. In other words, in the 90s neither the average man on the street nor the ruling class would agree that publicly assaulting gay people or workplace sexual assault are anything but immoral. Both were also still crimes at that time, of course. I'm also not quite sure that workplace incidents of that kind have declined substantially up to the present, but I'd be interested in seeing data.

landryraccoon 6y ago

Interesting. How do you reconcile the fact that slavery was once widespread and morally acceptable by the majority of society, and defended by the church, with your position that morality does not improve over time? How about the fact that interracial marriage was once considered sin, and that women allowed to own property or vote was also morally acceptable? Would you prefer a return to the morality of the 1800s, since in your view morality does not change, where women and dark skinned people returned to their "rightful place"? Even the Church has undergone massive reformation over the centuries, and what was considered morally acceptable in the 1200s is not acceptable to modern Christians.

rendang 6y ago
I don't believe, correct me otherwise, that there are any major religions whose main stream/expression universally taught that interracial marriage was a sin. Certainly some Protestants in 1800s USA did, but Christians in 200, 500, 1300 etc did not. Atlantic chattel slavery could be argued to be crueler than ancient/traditional forms of slavery and hence a temporal decline in moral goodness from the middle ages to late 1800s. It may also be noted that in a low-tech society, feudalist and traditional slave economies may have had some advantages over e.g. a laissez faire wage worker economy. (In a famine perhaps? A question for historians). The cruelty of nature itself on human lives in a low tech society interacts with moral judgments about economic systems etc. in ways that complicate these questions - I would say be careful not to credit to improved virtue what is really the due of technological innovation. A counterexample of moral improvement could be respect and care for elders and parents, broadly speaking. The point being only that the march of progress is not always consistent nor can it be counted on to be so.
- monoideism 6y ago
  Exactly. Morality rises and falls. It's not an inevitable progress toward "better". Some new moral "innovations" lead to horrible moral outcomes, like when John Punch was turned from an indentured servant into a lifetime slave, presumably on the basis on his skin color. And how to describe Nazism except as a moral abberation? That wasn't moral progress after the (already declining) morality of the Weimar republic. And I'm getting weird dystopian vibes from a significant % of the present left. The moral crusading. The authoritarianism. The absolutism. The shaming. The religious ferver of its movements.