Dr. Moore,Dr Moore wrote: ↑Tue Nov 17, 2020 11:15 pmEven assuming, hypothetically, there is in fact no God, it's ridiculous to assert that evil people somehow "win" the final victory at anything.
Humanity -- including all of its atheists -- has managed to improve upon itself through social healing and evolution since the dawn of recorded history.
To be born today as human number N+1 means increasingly high odds of inheriting the sum benefits of all of humanity's collective learning -- the good, bad and ugly. On balance metrics such as health, lifespan, access to basic needs, educational and socialization opportunities are all becoming more robust and healthy over time. For a species with so much chaos and variability on whatever "good vs evil" spectrum can be objectively defined, I think humans are doing pretty well.
It's all a matter of framing, is it not? Sure, if you insist on solving for the egocentricity of any individual person, then bad outcomes are horrific (and hence the appeal of an all-knowing, personal God). But solve for the perpetuation and durability of the species, and the picture is rather encouraging in the scheme of things.
There's certainly moral progress, as you're describing, across time. But why is such progress valuable?
Here's a story from my Utah History course in college that I'll come back to shortly. In early pioneer Utah, Ute warriors raided a pioneer settlement, killing several of the settlers. When Brigham Young demanded that the Utes turn over the offenders for punishment, the tribe dutifully rounded up and turned in several Utes. But it quickly became apparent that the several men turned over by the tribe, who included elderly and lame tribe members, could not have been the actual offenders.
Back to the question, why is progress valuable? Because it benefits individual human beings in the future. Since human beings are subjective at the individual level rather than at the collective level, the future humankind who will reap the benefits of that progress will reap it one individual at a time, so to speak. Also, human beings aren't interchangeable.
I think it's wonderful that in the future we will have, for instance, much more reliable medicine and medical care. But it doesn't, for me, somehow make for the fact that my little brother Charles died at 25 from combining the wrong medicines. Nor does it make up for that to my parents, to our other siblings, or to anyone who knew the wonderful person Charles was and the great life he was going to live. I can only imagine how much truer this is for those who've had a child murdered.
There is nothing egocentric about valuing individuals as individuals, especially not when realize that "humankind" is a collection of individuals and that human experience necessarily happens at the individual level, making the individual the locus of value. (In other words, what is of value to humanity is only of value because it of value in human experience, and this experience is always experienced at the level of the subjective organism--the individual.) So to devalue individual human beings would be to devalue humanity itself.
Back to the Ute-pioneer story. The Utes had turned over the men it had, not because they were guilty, but because no one particularly liked them and they would not be much missed. They had turned over, however, a number of men equal to the number of pioneer victims. This was no coincidence. Justice, as they understood it, meant, We killed X number of your people; now you get to kill X number of ours. There was nothing particularly individual about this concept of justice. In fact, it was distinctly non-individual. Such conceptions of justice were also common among other groups with tribal styles of organization, such as the Arabs of Muhammad's time. Which style of justice do you find moral? The kind that holds the individual accountable, or the kind that indiscriminately takes its toll on a certain number of non-guilty parties? The shift to justice at an individual level was surely a moral advance. To argue otherwise would be silly.
From a different angle, in the above you are arguing for a giant backward step in human morality--one in which the individual ceases to matter, so long as the group is benefited--never mind that every group is comprised of individuals and that the locus of experience, and therefore of value, is always individual.
I'm not accusing you of actually holding a deficient view of justice, because I find it hard to believe that you really hold this view even if it's hypothetically laid out in your post above.(If your child were killed, would you really think that everything about this would be made right by the fact that there would be future advances in humankind benefiting (only) other children? Is the Holocaust really morally squared for you if there's future progress so that millions of other men, women, and children aren't herded, stripped, enslaved, and gassed? Whatever you post by way of argument here, I'm going to have to be skeptical that you really believe this.)
So if justice can't really be served simply by future human progress, how do we hope for justice for those who have suffered?
Don
