In the thread
Message 275 Scottness asserts the following:
scotness writes:
In a world where we currently are growing more immoral, the temptation for some to use science to rationalize their behavior is becoming systemic.
I keep seeing this assertion in various threads but completely disagree with this casual and unsubstantiated observation. While morality is quite subjective and difficult to define, I would like to point out that by any measurable quality one may call moral that we are growing more, not less, moral over time.
For example, women, which last I saw made up roughly 50% of the population had no rights 1000 years ago in virtually all parts of the world, and the vast majority of men, unless they happened to be high ranking among royal or religious circles likewise had few if any rights. Today in industrialized nations, women and men are accorded some inalienable rights. While there are still some nations that hold women are the property of their fathers or husbands, I would venture to say that 1000 years ago that was true of all major nations on the planet. As a specific example, women in China are no longer expected to bind their feet and in India are no longer expected to immolate themselves upon the funeral pyre of their husbands.
For another example, slavery is illegal in nearly every nation today which was not the case 1000 years ago. Even just 200 years ago slavery was accorded to large numbers of people based upon place of origin, be it the Americas or Africa. Estimates of deaths due solely to Cross-Atlantic transportation in the African slave trade vary from 20 to 100 million.
Entertainment in the modern world may be vacuous, but it rarely results in the death of the participants. This can hardly be said of the Roman Colisseum or in the case of the Aztec ritual sacrifice.
Science, however despised it may be by some members of this forum, has saved billions from starvation and disease just in the last century. This would not have been possible under past monopolies of power exercised by the team of castle and church.
Even warfare and genocide, while consuming vast numbers of people under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, is less a threat overall today than in the past if one takes into account the percentage of the world’s population, rather than the raw number of people actually killed. For those unfamiliar with history, this is particularly true in the case of the Thirty Year War between Protestants and Catholics which is believed to have reduced the population of Germany in half, or in the depredations of Atila, Gengis Khan, or of colonialism. In the case of the latter, the Congo saw its population halved under the stewardship of Belgium’s Leopold II, and the Americas saw the reduction of the indigenous population by war and disease to less than 10% its former number.
So at least under the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as a measure, it is difficult for me to see how the world is becoming less moral. For anyone who disagrees, please provide actual historical evidence of this purported decline of morality.
Not sure where this should go? Social issues?
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