Ethical Progress, better today than before
I’ve been thinking how much progress (or not), we as humans have and the challenges around “progress studies” (cf Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison) and the idea that the rate of progress have slowed down recently (say in the last 10 to 20 years) vs. mid 20th century. These have mostly been in the items of human development that we can more easily measure (life expectancy, science innovations, crop yields, mobility and the like) but I wonder about our social progress via the lens of where people mostly put “common sense morality”.
200 years ago, womens’ vote was not the norm and the sane with many notions of equality many societies have today. Further back, slavery was the norm and it isn’t today.
From a personal view, I think in particular the ethical progress we have made with autistic people and other differences in cognitive profile. There are still enormous challenges that I don’t want to be little (I was speaking to someone who noted that autistic children in Sierre Leone are considered under spells of witch craft today by many people). But it strikes me it’s better today than say the 1950s both for parents - where for instance the awful “refrigerator mother” theory was common thinking - and for children - while we still face enormous struggles.
If we can continue to make social progress this should hopefully continue to enrich humanity and it’s important we continue to make this progress even if it might not readily show up in GDP (although I actually suspect it might show up there too eg. in access to work).