I tended to view “moral progress” as the gradual recognition of a widening pool of individuals with moral agency, i.e. abandoning social rules that subjugate women or nonwhites on the tenuous basis that were too stupid/immature/emotional/primitive to make their own value judgments and be in charge of their own lives. Movements that are often called moral crusades are really about putting certain groups of people “back in their place”, as it were, and strike me as inherently amoral in the sense that regulation and control are being used to deny agency and choice, and without those, morality is moot.
Saudi Arabia’s rules, particularly its view toward censorship, treat large number of its citizens essentially like children. I find myself hard-pressed to consider this a moral advantage in any way.
I don’t think moral progress is inevitable at all, especially in terms of societies liberalizing. I think authoritarianism is a natural trait that human beings have, and there’s always going to be an element of that in human societies, whether it’s mainstream or on the fringe. When authoritarianism becomes complete totalitarianism it tends to become very unstable and can collapse easily for a number of reasons.
I think the relatively liberal era we live in now in most of the world is due to a few factors. As the world gets more complex, systems that have constant competition in both the economy and politics tend to do better because having expert opinion guiding your decisions is more valuable than ever before for people in positions of power, and systems that force people in positions of power to constantly have to keep getting approval to stay in power keeps them reliant on experts to advise their decisions.
We are in a time where Nazi Germany and the USSR, arguably the two most brutal totalitarian regimes in the history of the world, have been in the living memory for a huge chunk of the world and has given people a unique distrust for authoritarianism. Unfortunately I think we’re already living through the period where Nazi Germany and the worst of the USSR under Stalin leaves living memory.
I also think multiculturalism helps a lot, because more people end up having to develop more cross-cultural understanding. It also means that in groups are smaller and authoritarian movements that work on ethnic/national etc. lines have less of a breeding ground.
China is a kind of worrying example, because it has meandered between an authoritarian regime that legitimately maintained some balance of power between the most powerful party officials and letting one figure like Mao or Xi Jinping command absolute power without even coming close to the regime being at risk of collapse. At this point they’ve also coopted capitalism throughout the world to impose a ridiculous amount of control on the global economy without actually having to resort the the drastic measures that have caused authoritarian regimes to collapse in the past century.
I do think that Saudi Arabia is sort of the authoritarianism of the past that will continue to diminish over time, and while I hope the future is more like the European Union, it may well be more like China.
I think you need to consider looking at macro level separate from micro level in answering this question.
You could say that overall the world is moving in the direction of what one might call moral progress - choose your measure: wealth, health, equality, democracy, lack of armed conflict, etc. However, you will always find examples of societies, large and small, (Saudi Arabia) that do not check all of the boxes.
Do individual examples negate the overall (one bad apple…)? My conclusion is no, they does not. You may come to a different conclusion, but I suspect there are volumes of philosophical writing on that argument.
Ethical systems and issues are embedded in our culture and civilization and it is difficult (if not impossible) to decide whether a system is superior to another. This is the reason why nowadays they talk about cultural relativity.
Ordinary people, however, compare things all the time. I’ve heard Romanian people who decry the level of theft or pick-pocketing in our country and look up to the Arab societies who will cut a thief’s arm off. There are also Romanian people who think we should reintroduce the death penalty and deal with murderers the way part of the US does. I guess the categories of right and wrong are probably the hardest to determine.
I think it is only the legal system whose improvement can be relatively measured (and probably the extent to which people follow the law). People’s inner moral status, on the other hand, is an ineffable mystery of everyone’s conscience.
In this context, I remember Marx who believed in the progress in people’s consciousness. This moral improvement was a necessary condition in the process of reaching Communism, a society of selfless human beings who fulfilled their duties according to their abilities and asked only for what they needed.
The problem with measuring “moral progress” is that, wherever society is, it’s ***always ***considered to be progress.
If society becomes more pro-LGBT, more feminist, more atheist, etc. - it will pat itself on the back and say, “See, we used to be so homophobic, sexist, intolerant, etc., but now we improved a lot.”
But - if society takes a sudden turn, and within decades, the vast majority of people are now anti-LGBT, anti-feminist, etc. - they will ***also ***pat themselves on the back - “See, we used to embrace all those sick practices and warped teachings, but then we came to our senses and embraced traditional moral goodness.”
