AVI asked earlier if we are experiencing an illusion of moral decline. There are arguments for and against this idea.
He presents a long comment as evidence that it might be, and evidence also that deniers are just looking at evidence they prefer to look at. I have a counterargument to that idea, which I've been making for some years.
For some years I've argued that 'moral progress' is a mere illusion. Joseph W. and I used to fight about this, in that joyous and pleasant way in which we contested each other's ideas. My sense is that mostly people's values change by encountering other people -- ideas 'rub off,' as it were. Now people closer to you rub off on you more than people further away. It is possible to be distant in both time and space, such that people further away from you in time will look less like you than people closer. That means that we should ordinarily expect to see an illusion of progress, because (a) we take our own values to be right, and (b) the further back you go, the less people agree with us.
There are some obvious additional factors that make it easier or harder for people to 'rub off' on you: sharing a language makes it more likely at distance; belonging to a civilization makes it more likely that you will share at least some values with your ancestors, too. Still, by and large I think it's obvious that you would think of society as progressing morally simply by looking back and discovering that, the further away from yourself you go, the less people agree with your (obviously correct!) moral values.
A consequence of this reading is that the conservative and progressive moral projects are both illusions (but see the important exception at the link). Conservatives are always under the illusion that things are getting worse because there has been constant movement from a prior time they've marked out as an ideal: their childhood, the Victorian era, Arthur's Camelot, the Age of Muhammad and his Companions, the ancient Roman Republic.
Progressives, by contrast, assume wrongly that there is moral progress in their direction just because the current age agrees with them and all prior ages disagree more and more. Thus, there is an arrow of morality that points in their direction.
Both of these views are illusions.
However, there's an important empirical point AVI gets to and returns to as well: we can say that rates of violence, for example, goes up or down. That's not perfect; some violence is moral, and the loss of that kind of violence may worsen society. (Consider a society, like the present-day Canada, that bars violent self-defense. You may run from a criminal, but not resist him.)
That kind of empirical consideration of morality is what I was getting at by the end of the linked post.
I once heard a Buddhist argument that held something like: "To say that you have forgiven but not forgotten is to say that you have not forgiven." This is that argument in a developed form.
If you truly did forget, you would lose both any sense of moral progress, and any sense of moral crumbling. What would be left? Would it be enough?
There's a good debate in the comments of that post featuring many of you, dear readers. You might want to review what you thought at the time and see how it compares to what you might think now. For that matter, it might be helpful to write down what you think now first to see how it compares to what you thought then.
