How Do We Know We’ve Made Moral Progress?

[Neo]

The Debate That Changed Destiny's Philosophy

This a recent philosophy debate between Destiny and T.K. Coleman that has around 335k views at the time of writing this, so I figured I’d discuss a question Destiny brought up at about the 30 minute mark until about 30:31

Before I started reading about CF, maybe I would have struggled to think of an answer to the question he poses here, but now it seems pretty straight forward. Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t we know if we’ve made moral progress by comparing it to what we had before? And if the newer view works for important goals the old one fails at, you count that as progress? Or it’s more “universal” because it passes binary checks the rival theory fails, like handling more cases, needing fewer arbitrary exceptions, etc., and that hints at progress having been made?

Also, when we say things like progress we’re not assuming a start and finish directional thing, and we can’t empirically test moral claims?

[Elliot]

@Neo

Before I started reading about CF, maybe I would have struggled to think of an answer to the question he poses here, but now it seems pretty straight forward. Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t we know if we’ve made moral progress by comparing it to what we had before? And if the newer view works for important goals the old one fails at, you count that as progress? Or it’s more “universal” because it passes binary checks the rival theory fails, like handling more cases, needing fewer arbitrary exceptions, etc., and that hints at progress having been made?

Yes those are reasonable things to consider.

Also: brainstorm criticism of both the claims that we did and did not moral make progress.