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Why does cultural relativism excuse horrors of actual modern people with access to and awareness of all modern thinking, modern technology, and modern examples of societies who achieved moral progress, but we’re perfectly comfortable saying slave owners of the past are responsible for their crimes despite being raised by slave owners in a society of slave owners embedded in a world of slave owners with a history absolutely chalk full of slave owners?
For example I think that there were relatively moral people who lived in e.g. the US and Saudi Arabia ~300 years ago and accepted slavery unquestioningly. It would have been better if they had questioned and rejected it, but I don't think they are evil for not doing so. In the modern US I think that only someone tremendously immoral would accept and participate in enslaving others.
This belief makes me a moral relativist (at least by some reasonable definitions). All the same I think I'm much closer aligned with your feelings on the morality of modern Middle Eastern society than GP.
All that to say, being a moral relativist allows you to have weird dissonant views, but it doesn't require it.
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For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, "of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods."
If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
- Aristotle ~350BC
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He also made regular indirect mention of abolitionists and abolitionist causes, which have obviously existed for millennia. It's not just some coincidence that the Industrial Revolution happens and within about a century most of every country (that had benefited from said industrialization) had outlawed slavery. It's not that we became more moral, but rather it became comfortable enough to dispose with slavery. So we did, and then attributed that to "modern thinking."
This line of thought can be traced all the way through to the modern day, and obviously well up to abolition.
There's really not much evidence at all that slaveholders saw their activities the way you describe ("necessary evil"). There's no evidence that we first had a necessity for slavery and then obviated it through automation. In fact, automation in the Americas increased demand on the labor of enslaved people.
If there was any external triggering event of abolition, it'd have been Darwin's On The Origin of Species and contemporaneous breakthroughs in science that destroyed the philosophical foundations that slavery was built upon (natural god-given supremacy, as Aristotle believed).
The abolitionist movement was an intellectual and moral one, through and through. You can just read the writings of abolitionists to hear what convinced them into their positions.
But it never remained abolished because of a simple logical problem you run into. The reality of the world - past, present, and future - is that stronger powers dominate weaker powers -- the same reality upon which Aristotle based his cognitive dissonance. And so so long as slavery provided a significant material benefit, powers that embraced slavery would dominate those that did not. And that dominance would inevitably lead to the institution (or reinstitution) of slavery in the weaker powers. The British Empire and its spread of slavery around the globe is but one of many examples.
So you saw this regular flip flopping. One ideologically minded leader would end slavery, only for it to come back later. What changed with the industrial revolution is that the latest end of slavery no longer had any particularly negative consequences, instead we saw the exact opposite. Countries that abolished slavery, which was primarily a rural/plantation based phenomena, actually started to grow exceptionally rapidly on the back of the emerging systems of industrial wage labor, while rural and plantation style production became less and less economically relevant. Slavery had become obsolete.
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There's some interesting parallels with slavery and modern day conscriptions. A country locks up its borders, prevents people from leaving, starts forcibly conscripting them into the military, gives them a gun, and sends them off to die. This is utterly barbaric, and most people would agree with such. Yet it remains a thing, and will remain a thing for the foreseeable future, for the exact same reason that slavery was perpetuated.
Countries that turn to conscription will be more powerful than those that don't. When this reality becomes no longer true (perhaps due to war becoming more mechanical in nature) we'll certainly finally abolish this barbaric behavior, and then claim it's due to some 'greater moral understanding', as if people alive today can't see with their own two eyes what an unnatural and abhorrent behavior this is. Of course we can! But trying to permanently stop something that's a significant means to power is like trying to stop a train by walking in front of it.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
But we haven't achieved moral progress.
G7/G20 countries have essentially merely physically outsourced slavery out of sight to second world factories and third world hell holes.
Through the magic of fiat money and currency exchange rates, we have deluded ourselves for half a century that we are in fact not colonizers and oppressors anymore.
Just one example are the Coltane mining wars in Congo: 1998-2008 5.2 million killed or dead from hunger (and it'd probably be higher if people hadn't more or less stopped counting after 2006). You probably didn't even know it happened,and yet millions today work at slaves to continue producing minerals for our digital comfort.
Slavery was bad. Slavery is bad. Slavery is not excused. However, frothing at the mouth with rage when speaking about the actions of another society because they don’t share the same moral values as you without thinking a step further is hollow, it is empty, it is meaningless.
Why is “modern thinking” (whatever that means) good? Why is maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole good? I am like you, I believe in that, but if you interact with people from different cultures, you will discover that is not a belief held by everyone. For many people, individual freedom at the expense of the whole is not good and they have observed that from these “modern” societies. Look at how deeply unhappy the U.S is, the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of people. Is limiting access to healthcare an example of “modern thinking”?
Modern thinking: things like pluralism and liberalism. These are actual ideas that emerged in the late 1800s and which are responsible for immense human thriving, immense liberation from suffering all over the world. Upstream of all political and social reform is an intellectual reform, i.e. new "thinking." I am not referring to "maximum individual freedom," and in fact this idea is fundamentally in tension with pluralism and liberalism. Maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole is a bad idea because it yields bad outcomes, just like various forms of theocracy are bad ideas because they yield bad outcomes.
The ideas that yield expanded suffrage, expanded legal protections, expanded access to prosperity are good ideas because they produce good outcomes. Yes sure, the US/the west broadly isn't perfect, etc, but note that we can discuss all the ways in which it's broken so we can get to work fixing it. That's a good outcome and it's a critical part of the path to more good outcomes on more important dimensions.
You're not arguing that other forms get to better outcomes or whatever, you're just arguing that there's no such thing as good or bad outcomes and therefore no such thing as good or bad ideas.
Try going to Qatar or Iran and asking someone for their opinion on their heads of state. I think you'll find their reaction far more chilling than the fact that our health insurance system is broken.
I will argue that by many standards, what we view as barbaric has better outcomes. Have you met a Singaporean? I disagree with their criminal justice system (as I do the U.S. but I rank Singapore’s as “worse”) and yet it has better outcomes for the majority of its citizens by most measures. Are they the measures you and I care about? Probably not, because to you and I, hanging someone for using heroin is not a fair price to be paid for a lower crime rate and higher GDP, but that’s a moral judgement, not some objective “modern” absolute. If you don’t value human life above all else (which many cultures don’t) then killing a few drug addicts a year to make life for millions of others better, that’s inconsequential — and excellent “modern” thinking about doing the most good!
If you can’t imagine why the bad of anti-lgbt sentiment is far outweighed by the good of community-spirit from an anti-lgbt religion then you’re not considering “outcomes”.
I am saying that there are countless dimensions that matter, and there are better and worse locations along those dimensions.
On the dimension of drug addiction rates, Singapore is doing better than the US. On the dimension of personal liberties, Singapore is doing worse than the US.
This observation is not a counter argument to my position, it’s a disproof of yours.
Saying we cannot make value judgments about these things implies we cannot justifiably take action that would nudge us into a different location along any of these different dimensions. How could you possibly decide to change things if there’s no such thing as a better, more preferable possible future state?
Here’s a gut check: are you comfortable with your moral system landing you solidly in the “let’s allow slavery” camp in the 1800s? After all, the disagreement between slave holders and abolitionists was one of culture and opinions, and as we know now there’s no such thing as a better or worse position to hold on such matters. Does that moral system seem like a good one to you?
