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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

There's an unjustified leap from the concerns of individuals in their daily lives to the concerns of society as a whole in your post, and it casts a severe political shadow over your post.

Individuals out of sight of the state or their overlords may have similar experiences in different ages, but there are also people who don't exist near the median who are persecuted to different degrees; not to mention that wealth distribution can also be radically different. These are also differences between modern societies, and may thus easily be inferred for past societies too. And your free choice of society today is not arbitrarily based in fashion or taste.

Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!

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I think parent's point is that the "progress of society" is subjective and not necessarily absolutely "good" or "evil". The Aztecs were technologically very advanced to the benefit of their people, but ritually practiced vast human sacrifice.

The progress is also not necessarily linear; Oscar Wilde would've no doubt preferred ancient Greece to his own time, about 2000 years later, when it comes to their attitude toward social progression. The sciences, by contrast, do tend to show unequivocal progress because they're essentially our growing understanding of the universe.

I don't accept that justice is subjective. Some societies are objectively more just.

I agree that progress is not linear. Science also: people forget things, and are sometimes wiped out and their records lost.

Why do you think some societies are objectively more just, and what definition are you using for "just"?

"Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!"

This logic breaks down because it's not an inexorable march forward. However there were a number of societies pre-victorian Britain, in which homosexuality was fully accepted. Such as ancient Greece and at times Rome, and some pre-Roman Celtic societies.

Had their been progress between 0CE and 1900CE? Scientifically and economically, absolutely! Culturally? Well we don't watch people kill each other in the coliseum, or collect the heads of our enemies. OP's point is that all of this cultural 'progress' is just the fashion of the times and that there is no easy to discern linear progress like in science.

Science is less susceptible to falling back than social progress (and I use progress here as an ordering operator of more just society, rather than a time operator of strictly later), but it happens also.

I think this is a good way of putting it.

But it draws to the main point: what is a 'just society' who decides it, what is just for you may not be for me? For example in the USA punishment for crime (including 'victimless' crimes like downloading a song or film) is a major part of the justice system. Whereas in Sweden the main reason behind the justice system is rehabilitation. Is one more just than the other? What if it isn't a victimless crime? Do you think everyone agrees with you?

Does what is 'just' change over time, the idea of eye for an eye used to be pretty popular, whereas now, it is much less so.

I think this is what OP was getting at, the idea of what a just society is changes (changes is fashion). But I think you really got to the crux of it!

We went from aqueducts to no running water for a while.

Could you be more explicit, and explain in what sense there has been any progress whatsoever, as opposed to just change? Are you sure you are not simply projecting your personal system of values, conditioned as it is by the era you were born into, onto the historical process?

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