Atheism and Ethics

[Mister Agenda]

Cultures and social systems are subject to evolution in a sense. Not hereditary, but spectacularly bad ideas for ordering a society tend to get winnowed out. Unfortunately, we can always try new bad ideas or old ones we've forgotten the lessons from.

So do you see evolution of cultures and social systems as somehow discovering / making true moral progress towards an objective standard by which people ought to live, even if that is just at the societal level and not universally binding?

Yes I do. If you define evil as unnecessary suffering, there are definitely social systems that are objectively better at that than others. And though it may not seem like it from the news, we have measurably less violence and poverty per person on average than fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago. However we must keep in mind too that as conditions change, what's best to reduce suffering can change too. For instance, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the last fifty years, but we don't know yet if that's sustainable. Conceivably it could lead to more suffering in the future than there would otherwise have been.