> Is morality declining? "People believe [...] last few centuries. " I'm sorry but is this what morality is resumed to: being moral is not killing, raping or

> Is morality declining? "People believe [...] last few centuries. " I'm sorry but is this what morality is resumed to: being moral is not killing, raping or extreme forms of violence? > "On average, modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did—which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year, for millennia." In my humble, uneducated and unqualified opinion, this is a false or at least an incomplete equivalence. You can be "more moral" today by this definition because you're not killing/raping people(i.e not doing extreme things) but can be less moral in day-to-day(average behavior) life by behaving less nicely (i.e the rest of the spectrum, -[extreme things]). This is not even accounting for the >good< things that one does, which is (imo) less common, on average, today. > "Although there are no similarly [...] measures of such things." And here lies the problem. On average humans are definitely "more moral" in the sense that they're not doing extreme bad things, so the "upper bound" of "bad behavior" has decreased for most. (A little caveat: as your "average human", because we're still definitely raping, killing, torturing , etc. but with a smaller # of humans). However, you have to taken into account where does the "lowest bound" of "nice behavior" is, or at leas where it's average is. You cannot seriously claim that day-to-day etiquette and good manners are as good as they were in certain periods in the past. The problem is that variance of behavior is harder to quantify due to increased population. Ultimately this is a problem of viewing morality as a 0-sum game or not: is the moral spectrum between [behaving neutrally] - [extreme bad behavior] or is it [positive behavior] - [behaving neutrally] - [extreme bad behavior] ? This is also a cultural POV issue, because one would assume in the west(mainly Christian world) the spectrum would be the latter. So by having the more "complete" spectrum of including positive behavior, one would definitely say morality is declining, like many people do.