My new favorite book of all time

If everyone was rich enough to own a planet.. but the richest owned all the planets with food on them, then you are screwed the next time a famine happens and they are not.

Besides: the majority of people would be much better off absolutely if there were less inequality given a fixed amount of wealth. So at no point will people not have a reason to consider inequality a problem unless they are wealthier than average.

Uh, maybe. Kuralt didn't live to see Amazon. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/

Or if you prefer Randall Munroe, linear extrapolation can be risky. https://www.xkcd.com/605/

Crime, housing prices, and population growth always go up... until they don't.

Mortality rates might be next to zag, who knows: https://www.vox.com/2016/12/8/13875150/life-expectancy-us-dr...

I think Pinker's right. I hope he is. But it's hard to evaluate claims that extend so far beyond human lifespans. The empires in Persia bounced between progressive tolerance and tyrannical repression for stretches of over two hundred years. From Gobleki Tepe's perspective, our entire known history is a blip... too little data for any coherent long run analysis.

If we said this, what we'd be saying is roughly "what a society does in aggregate is based on what the majority of individuals in a society agree to do" (a tautology).

>Biology is morality free as is physics.

Exactly! Moral facts cannot be determined by empirical observation. If you limited yourself to empirical observation ("Empiricism") as you seem to do, you are left with Moral Nonrealism.

>Even if you insist there's a "pure" moral law somewhere you still have to enforce it or it's a toothless theory.

What's in question is "do morals facts exist". You're saying "Alright, if moral facts exist they'd need to be enforced by a society in order to ensure the society complied with them". This is true; but in the same way that the society's acknowledgement that the moral facts exist doesn't change their existence, the society's enforcement of them also doesn't affect if they exist or what they are.

>Then to enforce it you really have to get down to brass tacks and democracy.

Democracy is one way that certain societies have chosen to organise themselves. They are often very effective at enforcing what a society believes to be correct. But this isn't disputed. What humans do –what they believe, what they say, what ethics they choose to conduct themselves by, how they organise with each other to enforce agreed upon norms– and whether these behaviors help them survive or thrive–is not in contention. These are just observations of what humans do (anthropology, etc).

For Ben Shapiro's explanation, you can see the video starting at 45:44 through 59:20. As he puts it, "you don't get to burn down my house and then use the planks from my house to build your own philosophy". Here's a link to just that section: https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9IwamztdqA?start=2744&end=356...

Just accept that whether or not morality has any universal external existence, neither that existence nor, a fortiori, its actual content can actually be objectively established.

Admittedly, that allows less opportunity for definitive point-scoring, but I'm willing to accept that point-scoring isn't the central purpose of life.

This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.

I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.