The more pessimistic argument is that moral progress arises as a function of economic and technological progress, and can’t occur in isolation. We didn’t give up slaves until it was economically convenient to do so, and likely won’t give up meat until we have cost and flavor competitive alternatives.
It’s tempting to wash away our past atrocities under the guise of ignorance, but I’m worried humanity just knowingly does the wrong thing.
I would put it something like “as a rule, we do what is most convenient to us”.
And I would also like to add that even if one causes terrible suffering “knowingly”, there’s still the irreducible ignorance of being disconnected from the first-hand experiencing of that suffering, I think. I.e, yes, we can say that one “knows” that one is causing extreme suffering, yet if one knew what this suffering is really like (i.e. if one experienced it on “oneself”), one wouldn’t do it.
(Come to think of it, this would also reduce one’s moral uncertainty by the way.)
That conclusion doesn’t necessarily have to be as pessimistic as you seem to imply (“we do what is most convenient to us”). An alternative hypothesis is that people to some extent do want to do the right thing, and are willing to make sacrifices for it—but not large sacrifices. So when the bar is lowered, we tend to act more on those altruistic preferences. Cf. this recent paper:
[Subjective well-being] mediates the relationship between two objective measures of well-being (wealth and health) and altruism...results indicate that altruism increases when resources and cultural values provide objective and subjective means for pursuing personally meaningful goals.
FWIW this assessment seems true to me, at least for eating non-human animals, for I don’t know enough about the economic drives behind slavery. (If one is interested, there’s a report by the Sentience Institute on the topic, titled “Social Movement Lessons From the British Antislavery Movement: Focused on Applications to the Movement Against Animal Farming ”.)
I would put it something like “as a rule, we do what is most convenient to us”.
And I would also like to add that even if one causes terrible suffering “knowingly”, there’s still the irreducible ignorance of being disconnected from the first-hand experiencing of that suffering, I think. I.e, yes, we can say that one “knows” that one is causing extreme suffering, yet if one knew what this suffering is really like (i.e. if one experienced it on “oneself”), one wouldn’t do it. (Come to think of it, this would also reduce one’s moral uncertainty by the way.)
That conclusion doesn’t necessarily have to be as pessimistic as you seem to imply (“we do what is most convenient to us”). An alternative hypothesis is that people to some extent do want to do the right thing, and are willing to make sacrifices for it—but not large sacrifices. So when the bar is lowered, we tend to act more on those altruistic preferences. Cf. this recent paper: