I don't believe, correct me otherwise, that there are any major religions whose main stream/expression universally taught that interracial marriage was a sin. Certainly some Protestants in 1800s USA did, but Christians in 200, 500, 1300 etc did not.
Atlantic chattel slavery could be argued to be crueler than ancient/traditional forms of slavery and hence a temporal decline in moral goodness from the middle ages to late 1800s. It may also be noted that in a low-tech society, feudalist and traditional slave economies may have had some advantages over e.g. a laissez faire wage worker economy. (In a famine perhaps? A question for historians). The cruelty of nature itself on human lives in a low tech society interacts with moral judgments about economic systems etc. in ways that complicate these questions - I would say be careful not to credit to improved virtue what is really the due of technological innovation.
A counterexample of moral improvement could be respect and care for elders and parents, broadly speaking. The point being only that the march of progress is not always consistent nor can it be counted on to be so.
Exactly. Morality rises and falls. It's not an inevitable progress toward "better". Some new moral "innovations" lead to horrible moral outcomes, like when John Punch was turned from an indentured servant into a lifetime slave, presumably on the basis on his skin color.
And how to describe Nazism except as a moral abberation? That wasn't moral progress after the (already declining) morality of the Weimar republic.
And I'm getting weird dystopian vibes from a significant % of the present left. The moral crusading. The authoritarianism. The absolutism. The shaming. The religious ferver of its movements.
I don't mean to start a flame war, but how is the left more authoritarian? I don't really get it.
Conservative leaders, at least in the US, seem far more authoritarian and xenophobic than left leaning leaders. I'm curious what you see as authoritarian about the modern left.
Also, it is interesting that you associate shaming with authoritarianism. Shaming is intrinsically a grass roots thing - it's the people, not some autocrat, that shames people. Authoritarian governments don't need to shame people, they simply imprison them or take other direct coercive measures.
Societies shame people because they cannot physically do anything to them. That's a huge distinction.
I never said the left was more authoritarian than the right. That's your tribal brain making that assumption. I belong to neither your tribe, nor the other. The right has its own problems.
But as for all the others I insist that they are primarily left-wing phenomena.
And regarding your argument for shaming, what happens when the folks who do the shaming gain power?
I don't think this argument helps your case at all.
If you say morality was better in the past, which past are you talking about? After all, as you just admitted, morality changed in the past just as much as it did in the present.
Not only was morality not constant in the past, it was not constant geographically, nor even within the same religion (Protestant vs Catholic, Southern Baptist vs Episcopalian). Protestants in the US did not agree with Catholics in Europe, to say nothing of Muslims in the middle east and Buddhists in Asia.
What "eternal constant morality" are you appealing to? Are we talking about Protestantism in 1800? Roman Catholicism in 1400? Buddhism in 800 AD? Theocratic Judaism in 200 BC? Kantian categorical imperatives of the early 20th century?
So, again, if you claim that morality is constant based on some "past", it is incumbent upon you to answer : Which past, and in what country/tribe/kingdom, was the absolute "constant" morality that you claim we should now uphold here in the 21st Century?
Atlantic chattel slavery could be argued to be crueler than ancient/traditional forms of slavery and hence a temporal decline in moral goodness from the middle ages to late 1800s. It may also be noted that in a low-tech society, feudalist and traditional slave economies may have had some advantages over e.g. a laissez faire wage worker economy. (In a famine perhaps? A question for historians). The cruelty of nature itself on human lives in a low tech society interacts with moral judgments about economic systems etc. in ways that complicate these questions - I would say be careful not to credit to improved virtue what is really the due of technological innovation.
A counterexample of moral improvement could be respect and care for elders and parents, broadly speaking. The point being only that the march of progress is not always consistent nor can it be counted on to be so.