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Comment by jhrmnn | Hacker News Reader

I find it sad that while technological progress is seen almost as a given by virtually everyone, moral progress is often not even an aspiration

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Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about it.

I completely agree with you, moral progress should be incentivised somehow...

This has typically been done with social processes. The community publicly condemns or celebrates things according to how they fit our morals.

The problem is, there is no public town square anymore where we can shame the people who are responsible. The billionaires/megacorps control the media through which they communicate to the public.

In other words, the immoral actors have captured the systems meant to socially control them, and are instead using them to temper the moral instincts of society.

Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.

This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.

As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.

a) Germany and Japan started their respective wars, with much worse atrocity records. And with aerial bombing of their own. Japan was already bombing Chongqing in 1938. And during the counterinvasion of some of the islands did things like arm a school, including providing grenades to the children so they could avoid capture.

b) The scale of WW2 is so wildly different from the present that people find it difficult to imagine. The firebombing of Tokyo caused more casualties than one of the nuclear weapons.

(Follow on point from a: the original sin of all war crimes is starting a war of choice in the first place. Which the current war with Iran definitely is.)

Small correction: there was one very publicized school bombing with a lot of casualties, but there's more than one bombed school.

The US and Israel have bombed several schools, hospitals, and civil servants' offices, and residential buildings. I read HRANA's report on the war every morning. [1] It's a quick read, they are a reliable Iranian opposition source (now based in the US).

Each day, there are multiple strikes on civilian infrastructure. No matter how precise they are, they are still war crimes.

[1] https://www.en-hrana.org/

Surely it's the precision that makes them war crimes? If the missiles weren't meter-accurate, and the intelligence didn't eg show the lines painted on the playground (even in images available to the public) then they would be able to pass it off as mistakes or enemy propaganda.

No, what makes them war crimes is the intentional targeting of non-combattants. Being lousy at aiming weapons does not absolve of any war crime.

The accuracy helps with showing intent, though, because when your 50% accuracy radius is a couple of meters and you put a couple of missiles on a target that’s a hundred of meters of anything else, it’s hard to argue they were sidetracked.

To be fair, Germany and Japan started the whole thing and were pretty determined not to lose easily.

Germany and Japan were conducting pre-emptive defensive special military operations.

If Japan had managed to secure the US uranium 250,000 innocent civilians would not have been vaporised in the two greatest disturbances in the force in all humanity.

I have no control over the morality of others.

Whereas I have direct control over how I use technology.

This is a non-statement. The reverse is also true.

I have no control over the technology that others use.

Whereas I have direct control over my own morality.

When asking for moral progress rather then technological progress, it's not an inverse.

People can build technology, or I can build technology, but we generally all get it. Its distribution requires nothing of me or others psychologically.

You can't just build and distribute morality, and adopting it is a massive personal change.

You can build and distribute morality. It's called politics. Or religion. Or culture. Or marketing. Or propaganda. Or education.

There's so many ways in which morality is distributed.

There are also many things that stand in the way of adopting technology. Cost. Personal preference. Moral preference. Availability. Lack of awareness. Lack of specialized skill.

The two are not very different at all in how they diffuse through society.

It doesn't seem like moral progress actually exists or even can exist given human nature. In every time period and era there are people killing each other, amongother crimes. It is fallacious to think that we have a monotonically increasing meter of moral progress, that we are somehow better than our ancestors. Reality shows that we are exactly the same, as the parent says.

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