Sunday, May 6, 2012

Are Humans Getting Better? Turns out yes.

Thirty years ago, I wrote a book called The Expanding Circle, in which I asserted that, historically, the circle of beings to whom we extend moral consideration has widened, first from the tribe to the nation, then to the race or ethnic group, then to all human beings, and, finally, to non-human animals. That, surely, is moral progress.
Read it at Project Syndicate
Are Humans Getting Better?
by Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne

Unfortunately there are pockets of resistance to change. :o

Here's a comment I left at MMR on this, expressing my own social and political position relative to this:

I agree with those who think that a community of actual human beings rather than animals still working toward becoming fully human would recognize their species nature and cooperate and coordinate as a species to make life as good as it possibly can be for all. Remember the motto, of the three musqueteers? It’s “All for one and one for all.”

The political challenge that humanity is working on is realizing the motto of the French revolution — liberté, égalité, fraternité. This is the political trifecta yet to be resolved. It will take increasing collective consciousness among humans to realize it as a species. As yet relatively few have been able to do so.

Why is this to the left of Communism? It is the state that Marx envisioned as the goal for a race that is truly free and capable of self-determination as a species, in which all can freely realize their “species-nature,” i.e., humanity, along with individual potential, which is unique. It is also preached in the Gospels and taught in perennial wisdom. It is the ideal that humanity pays lip-service too, although many also scoff at it as ridiculously impractical and highly improbable, if not impossible given what we are. They speak for themselves and reveal what they are.

Here is a post by Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, entitled "Are Humans Getting Better?"

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-humans-getting-better-

As a species we are doing better but we aren’t anywhere near there yet

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