Part of the answer could lie into "what would someone teleported to another culture think ?" I don't think it totally solves the question, but it's a hint, or a part of the answer.

If you take someone from now, and he's teleported to dark ages, with absolute monarchy, serfdom, capital punishment with the most horrible ways of killing, torture, ... he will be horrified.

If you take someone from the dark ages and teleport him now, he'll probably be very lost at first, but I don't think he would be horrified by the fact we manage to take more-or-less reasonable decisions using democracy (at least as reasonable at what the kings used to do), that the society doesn't collapse into crime and chaos when we suppress death penalty, serfdom, torture, ...

Many people who, in the past, advocated the use of what we now consider barbaric (torture, death penalty, dictatorship, ...) did it saying "there is no alternative", "if we don't maintain order, it'll be chaos and everyone will murder each other", "if you don't have a king, no decision will be taken", ...

The same applies to points which are debated right now in western societies, like "painless" death penalty, or corporal punishment in education. People who are against them are horrified by them, people who are in favor are more arguing "we need them".

And it also applies things like prison, which are almost consensual right now. I find very few people around me who justify prison for the sake of it, but only because we need it to prevent/deter crime. So when we'll find a way to do without prison (or using it much less), by finding alternatives (using technology like electronic monitoring, societal evolution, better understanding of psychology and sociology, ...) people in the future will be outraged thinking how we locked people away for so long, while we, if teleported in that future, would be confused on how they manage to keep society from chaos without prison, but not outraged of it.

That gives a general direction of "ethical progress", which is (to a point) universal to all humans. But it's just a hint to a real theory of moral progress (I didn't read yet the following posts, nor took months formalizing it).

A possibility that I have mentioned here before has to do with positive feedback loops in an isolated society between economic growth and luxury spending on moral coherence. On this account, people always had qualms about slavery but considered it to impractical to seriously consider abandoning it. When feeling rich they abandoned it anyway, either as conspicuous consumption or as luxury spending on simplicity. Having done so, it turned out, made them richer, affirming this sort of apparent luxury spending or conspicuous consumption as actually being moral progress. Viewing them as an ecosystem of godshatter, increased power destabilized the balance of power between dissonant utility functions, allowing certain elements to largely erase others while still further increasing in power. One problem with this story is that it passes some of the buck to economic growth, though only some, as access to resources and population are surely part of the answer there. Another problem is that it doesn't add up to normality, but proposed moralities should only add up to normality when approximated crudely, not when approximated precisely.

Why on earth not? Aristotle thought some people were naturally suited for slavery. We now know that's not true.

No, we don't. We know no such thing.

Wiseman, if everyone were blissed-out by direct stimulation of their pleasure center all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?

Marshall, how is your "usefulness" not isomorphic to the word "good"? Useful for what?

Lowly Undergrad, early societies didn't have this idea of reducing violent death to zero - through what mechanism did they acquire this belief, given that they didn't start out with the idea that it was "moral progress"?

Robin Brandt, is whatever increasing technology does to a society, moral progress by definition, or does increasing technology only tend to cause moral progress?

Tim, if we all cooperated with each other all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?

Paul, do you think that your own morality is optimum or can you conceive of someone more moral than yourself - not just a being who better adheres to your current ideals, but a being with better ideals than you?

Not everyone has the same intuition about the wrongness of slavery, though, and "they're not us and they're more use to us this way" is justification enough for some. People have divergent intuitions about empirical and logical propositions, too, but in those cases there's an obvious (if not always practical) way to settle things: go and look, or find a (dis)proof. You can trivially demonstrate that 1+1≠3, but it's hard to see how you could reject with nearly as much rigor even something as ridiculous as "it's good to enslave people born on a Tuesday." You could put the latter into a calculator if you defined "good" in minute detail, and if you copied the definition out of your own skull you could even get an output you're justified in caring about, but try to claim fully mind-independent truth and you fall right into the Open Question. It still adds up to normality, though, to the extent that definitions of "good" converge under increasing knowledge, reflection, and discussion - probably a large extent, excluding a few sociopaths and other oddballs.

But maybe, as Eliezer's been pointing out, I'm wrong to think 1+1=2 is mind-independently demonstrable either - really, in both cases, a mind needs to be running certain dynamics to appreciate the argument; it's just harder to imagine a mind (that deserves the term) with different arithmetic dynamics than different moral dynamics.

(BTW, like Ben, I think novel interpretations of the Bible re: slavery were mostly rationalizations of already-changing fundamental values.)

There is a tendency for older generation to feel nostalgic for the time of their youth and for the younger generation to strive for changing the status quo. So I wonder whether the modern perception of moral progress (as opposed to perennial complaints of moral degradation popular among our ancestors) comes from the youth being more economically and politically empowered than ever before, which allows it to dominate public discourse.

Yvain: I think you're equivocating between two definitions of utility, "happiness" and "the quantity that's maximized". This dual meaning is really unfortunate.

Sebastian: moral progress might be random except that people (very plausibly) try not to return to a rejected past state. This would be directionless (or move in an arbitrary direction) but produce very few reversals.

poke: pursuing knowledge could be painful and depressing but still intuitively moral.

I see a bit of what looks like terminal/instrumental confusion in this thread. I don't think discovering better instrumental values toward the same terminal values you always had counts as moral progress, at least if those terminal values are consciously, explicitly held.

I think a lot of people are confusing a) improved ability to act morally, and b) improved moral wisdom.

Remember, things like "having fewer deaths, conflicts" does not mean moral progress. It's only moral progress if people in general change their evaluation of the merit of e.g. fewer deaths, conflicts.

So it really is a difficult question Eliezer is asking: can you imagine how you would have/achieve greater moral wisdom in the future, as evaluated with your present mental faculties?

My best answer is yes, in that I can imagine being better able to discern inherent conflict between certain moral principles. Haphazard example: today, I might believe that a) assaulting people out-of-the-blue is bad, and b) credibly demonstrating ability to fend off assaulters are good. In the future, I might notice that these come into conflict, that if people value both of these, some people will inevitably have a utility function that encourages them to do a), and this is unavoidable. So then I find out more precisely how much of one comes at how much cost of the other, and that persuing certain combinations of them is impossible.

I call that moral progress. Am I right, assuming the premises?

My view is similar to Robin Brandt's, but I would say that technological progress has caused the appearance of moral progress, because we responded to past technological progress by changing our moral perceptions in roughly the same direction. But different kinds of future technological progress may cause further changes in orthogonal or even opposite directions. It's easy to imagine for example that slavery may make a comeback if a perfect mind control technology was invented.

One possibility: we can see a connection between morality and certain empirical facts -- for example, if we believe that more moral societies will be more stable, we might think that we can see moral progress in the form of changes that are brought about by previous morally related instability. That's not very clear -- but a much clearer and more sophisticated variant on that idea can perhaps be seen in an old paper by Joshua Cohen, "The Arc of the Moral Universe" (google scholar will get it, and definitely read it, because a) it's brilliant, and b) I'm not representing it very well).

Or we might think that some of our morally relevant behaviors are consistently dependent on empirical facts, in which we might progress in finding out. For example, we might have always thought that beings who are as intelligent as we are and have as complex social and emotional lives as do we deserve to be treated as equals. Suppose we think the above at year 1 and year 500, but at year 500, we discover that some group of entities X (which could include fellow humans, as with the slaves, or other species) is as intelligent, etc., and act accordingly. Then it seems like we've made clearly directional moral progress -- we've learned to more accurately make the empirical judgments about which our unchanged moral judgment depends.

The discussion in the comments has been interesting, but I believe I have a simple answer to Eliezer's question (please tell me if I am mistaken). Consider a society that has a moral idea say, like valuing bodily autonomy, but they don't give woman that right. They often kill women for the organs to give to men and children, due to an old tribal culture mainly forgotten. Unfortunately, certain rituals and dogma still continue on. One day, a leading public intellectual points this out on tv, and they change their actions to fit in with their true moral beliefs, and stop acting on non-moral ones. Wouldn't this be an example of moral progress?

Inspired by this article http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/news-mainmenu-2/1-latest/5517-higher-intelligence-associated-with-liberalism-atheism.html I think one way of doing it might be to show directionality in terms of evolutionary novelty. That is, look at what parts of our evolutionary psychology we have rationally worked against as a culture, and why we came to those more intellectual conclusions. That way, the measure of our progress could be in how we learn to fix the mistakes of the stupid natural selection.

However, that sounds a lot to me like reversed stupidity, which I now know to be a false means of winning, but I do think it at least explains our perception of moral progress, if not progress as an absolute. If we somehow discover that when cultures step away from their evolutionary psychology that it is always for the sake of positive rational morality, then the concept might hold more weight in terms of a holistic moral progress.

I see moral progress as 1) increased empathy, defined as increasingly satisfying, increasingly accurate mental models of sentient beings, including oneself, and 2) increased ability to predict the future, to map out the potential chains of causality for one's actions.

As I said previously, I think "moral progress" is the heroic story we tell of social change, and I find it unlikely that these changes are really caused by moral deliberation. I'm not a cultural relativist but I think we need to be more attuned to the fact that people inside a culture are less harmed by its practices than outsiders feel they would be in that culture. You can't simply imagine how you would feel as, say, a woman in Islam. Baselines change, expectations change, and we need to keep track of these things.

As for democracy, I think there are many cases where democracy is an impediment to economic progress, and so causes standards of living to be lower. I doubt Singapore would have been better off had it been more democratic and I suspect it would have been much worse off (nowadays it probably wouldn't make a lot of difference either way). Likewise, I think Japan, Taiwan and South Korea probably benefited from relative authoritarianism during their respective periods of industrialization.

My own perspective on electoral democracy is that it's essentially symbolic and the only real benefit for developing countries is legitimacy in the eyes of the West; it's rather like a modern form of Christianization. Westerners tend to use "democracy" as a catch-all term for every good they perceive in their society and imagine having an election will somehow solve a country's problems. I think we'd be better off talking about openness, responsiveness, lawfulness and how to achieve institutional benevolence rather than elections and representation.

Now, you could argue that because I value things like economic progress, I have a moral system. I don't think it's that clear cut though. One of the distinctive features of moral philosophy is that it's tested against people's supposed moral intuitions. I value technological progress and growth in knowledge but, importantly, I would still value them if they were intuitively anti-moral. If technological progress and growth in knowledge were net harms for us as human beings I would still want to maximize them. I think many people here would agree (although perhaps they've never thought about it): if pursuing knowledge was somehow painful and depressing, I'd still want to do it, and I'd still encourage the whole of society to be ordered towards that goal.

This has been mentioned many times, by Peter Singer, for instance, but one way towards moral progress is by expanding the domain over which we feel morally obligated. While we may have evolved to feel morally responsible in our dealings with close relatives and tribesmen, it is harder to hold ourselves to the same standards when dealing with whoever we consider to be not part of this group. Maybe we can attribute some of moral progress to a widening of who we consider to be a part of our tribe, which would be driven by technology forcing us to live and interact with and identify with larger and more diverse groups of people. Clearly this doesn't solve all the problems of moral progress, but I think this idea could chip away at parts of the problem.

Re: if we all cooperated with each other all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?

If we all cooperated with each other all the time, that would be moral progress.

Moral progress simply means a systematic improvement of morals over time - so widespread cooperation would indeed represent an improvement over today's fighting and deceit.

If you take the list of things that were moral yesterday and the list that are moral today, and look for pairs between the lists that are kind of the same idea, but just in different quantity (e.g. like and love) then you could step back and see if there is an overall direction.

The key idea is to recognize when two things with different names are really different amounts of some higher more abstract idea.

I'm by no means sure that the idea of moral progress can be salvaged. But it might be interesting to try and make a case that we have fewer circular preferences now than we used to.

" the future will be even less different from the present than the present."

instead of

" the future will be even less different from the present than the present from the past."

?

I don't think anyone can really argue that a large-scale decrease in global violence and violent death is a sign of moral progress. So I must point to this Steven Pinker conference where he lays out some statistics showing the gradual decline of violence and violent death throughout our history: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

I was going to say something about moral progress being changes in society that result in global increase in happiness, but I ran into some problems pretty fast following that thought. Hell, if we could poll every single living being from 11th century and 21st century and ask them to rate their happiness from 1-10 why do I have a feeling we'd end up with same average in both cases?

If you gave me exensional definition of moral progress by listing free speech, end of slavery and democracy, and then ask me for intensional definition, I'd say moral progress is global and local increase in co-operation between humans. That does not necessarily mean increase in global happiness.