Response to Myk

I always thought the internet was boundless, but for some reason comments are limited to a paltry number of words. Thanks for stifling free speech, Blogger. So, yet another new post.

Myk, you ask which of our current behaviors will be critisized by future generations. I'm willing to bet one of them will be our meat eating practices. Sooner rather than later we'll be eating meat grown in petri dishes, and our society will look back at the industrial slaughter of cows as some kind of primitive barbaric practice. I am honestly looking forward to the looks of horror that my grandkids will give me when I tell them I was responsible for cow genocide.

On to the serious stuff! I agree that every society has moral gaps. I will also concede that our society has gaps we don't even know about yet. But that shouldn't stop us from trying to close them, even with incomplete knowledge.

The idea that "making pronouncements about good and evil is a dangerous business" begs what I think are two far more important questions, which are:

1) We must grapple with the corollary of that quote: "NOT making pronouncements of good and evil is a dangerous business." (See any Orwell essay attacking Britain's intellectual left in the years before WW2)

and,

2) Isn't it apparent that there exists a degree in difference- and even in kind- between various cultures' moral "gaps"?

In other words, the witch trials in Spain four hundred years ago were a kind of moral gap. Do we have any comparable gaps like that in our culture today? In parts of Africa right now, albino children are murdered for their body parts, which are supposedly valuable for black magic rituals. Do you think that we'll be returning to that type of darkness and ignorance any time soon?

Can anyone here honestly make the claim that we can't really know if these behaviors are morally stunted? I feel fairly comfortable making a pronouncement about these practices, and I bet all four people reading this blog do too.

So, then, I can agree with your point about the haziness of absolute moral truth without coming to the conclusion that such a realization dooms our quest to failure. I guess I see moral progress as a kind of asymptotic curve which can get very, very close to absolute truth without necessarily touching it. As Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."

I think this is historically accurate. Can anyone honestly make the assertion that Finland or Sweden or Canada runs the risk of sliding back into slavery or gender apatheid or superstition? Will these countries suddenly come to the realization that Sharia Law is the best political and legal scaffolding for their people? No, of course not. And, as democratic countries with large atheist populations, their morals rely on no deity. No one accues them of relativism when they commit to free speech and universal civil rights, and I'm willing to bet these principles won't be considered hasty or un-nuanced by humans in any future society.

Your paragraph on the 60's seems to touch on this idea of moral progress. Civil rights for homosexuals or the handicapped weren't on the majority of protesters' minds because they were focused on comparatively larger, more flagrant moral issues. Who had time to focus on equal marriage rights when a crippling war was on and racial segregation was still rampant? Once we exploded the idea of legal separation based on skin pigmentation, we were able to turn our attention to the unfairness of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Progress, progress. Maybe not fast enough, but it comes.

It also bears repeating that even though Hitchens and Harris may come across as smug, arrogant or "just as dogmatic as the fundamentalists they decry" (a criticism I've often read by reviewers), they say continually- and very humbly, in my opinion- that science does not claim certainty. Scientific findings, by definition, are always subject to revision in light of new evidence. It seems to me, though often imperfect, this is a principle with the best chance of advancing us to the closest version of moral truth.

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions