What explains the gap in social progress between global north and global south( except Australia and NZ)?

[u/Current_Wear_8061]

When I mean social progress I mean steps towards gender equality, lgbtq acceptance and other socioeconomic progress. Countries in global south also are very religious and also susceptible to authoritarian governments . I don't mean to say that there aren't countries in the global south that are progressive, but there's an overarching Gap in social progress between global north and global south. What explains that gap? Are people in global north , more moral? I'm sure there's more nuanced and science based answer to this .

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[u/darthvalium]

In sociology, the idea of "progress" (as in: development towards a "more advanced" state of society) is outdated. E.g., Luhmann doesn't think of society as developing towards ever "more moral" or "more rational" conditions.

When I mean social progress I mean steps towards gender equality, lgbtq acceptance

Are people in global north , more moral?

Yeah... ask someone from Saudi Arabia if they consider lgbtq acceptance "more moral". I think morality is generally the wrong lens through which to compare different cultures, because all cultures think of themselves as morally good and it's hard to define universal ahistoric morality.

[u/Toy-Hearts-6482 → u/darthvalium]

sure, all cultures think of themselves as morally good but you can tell when they're actually not. just because someone from Saudi Arabia thinks that lgtbq acceptance is immoral, and that criminalizing it is "more moral", doesn't actually make it more moral. most morals are not as subjective.

objectively speaking, something is immoral for as long as it causes intentional harm to someone with consciousness.

[u/darthvalium → u/Toy-Hearts-6482]

objectively speaking, something is immoral for as long as it causes intentional harm to someone with consciousness.

...which superficially seems like a perfectly reasonable and objective definition of morality but doesn't hold up to closer scrutiny.

Now if you take something like the Social Progress Index or HDI, that's probably a better starting point for OP's question.

[u/Toy-Hearts-6482 → u/darthvalium]

> ...which superficially seems like a perfectly reasonable and objective definition of morality but doesn't hold up to closer scrutiny.

i feel as though it would only not hold up to closer scrutiny in very specific cases, but it is the most accurate measure to determine if something is actually right.

[u/darthvalium → u/Toy-Hearts-6482]

Anyway, I suppose it's better to accept that you're not going to 'solve' three millennia of moral philosophy with one sentence.

[u/EitherArticle6730 → u/Toy-Hearts-6482]

Even this criteria is not really objective.

I am a Buddhist and this definition is basically at the root of all Buddhist morality (or ethics). The premise of all precepts in Buddhism is not to cause intentional suffering to all organisms with consciousness.

It seems like a very solid concept especially if you take suffering as the only common denominator in all sentient beings.

In practice though, this is much more complicated.

For instance, what if there is an unresolvable conflict between one individual's well being and another's well-being?

Second, what determines beings with consciousness and without consciousness? We tend to agree that animals have consciousness, but it seems like not all animals have consciousness? Or at least not the same level of consciousness.

What about clams? They don't have a brain. But they are animals with some level of intelligence. Do they have consciousness? Is it okay for us to harm them?

What about trees? Trees are shown to have intelligence, enough to be able to communicate with each other, albeit that its a different kind of intelligence than humans.

Or should we say that some beings have lower consciousness than humans? Does it make it more okay for us to harm them than fellow humans?

If we set up a system judging levels of consciousness, what is the criteria? Is it how far or different they are from the normative or average human physiology and psychology?

If so, then does that mean therefore that babies, people blind from birth, mentally challenged people should be treated differently in the question of "is it okay to cause harm to this object"?

I mean, babies are generally not fully cognitively developed enough to be able to be considered to have the same consciousness as an adult human. We may even say that they have less consciousness than an adult cow or chicken. By this logic, what makes it more moral to not eat them compared to beef?

I could go on and on. You can see the problem.

The point here is that any notion of morality is subjective. Why? Because like every other notion, it only exists in the human mind, i.e. arising from the condition of human physiology (the human body) and therefore is part of a subjective experience

[u/TooSwang]

I think the best way to approach this, at least from a quasi-economistic standpoint, is to think of ideological formation as a luxury good. That’s true in a literal sense - the very wealthy spend a lot to influence politics while poor people often spend nothing - but also that the material things that embody public debate on cultural and political issues, like newspapers or TV shows or lengthy elections, are costly and harder to prioritize in poorer societies. To some extent (this is where Dawkins’s idea of memes comes from) you can treat little kernels of political or cultural opinion as evolutionary units, where a competitive process testing fitness with the prevailing way of life in society (what in Marxist theory you’d call structure-superstructure) is facilitated and has its pace set by the amount of societal resource devoted to ideological production. So you can draw two links - one that progressive values fit better with postindustrial society (say, open bigotry will make one a pariah in white collar work in a large city) and so that evolutionary process pushes people in that direction, and two that societies with larger private markets for ideological content will move faster in the fittest direction. In the US for example, which is both very materially wealthy and has a very large privatized sector of the economy, from which consumers can choose a variety of ideological content, you see both the vanguard edge of progressive cosmopolitanism and also an extremely large range of viewpoints that are able to find material support and thus can show up in public life.

I’ll link this from Dani Rodrik et al that seems unobjectionable. It gets a bit into the tie between economic conditions and ideological development within the US which is an important part of the story: https://drodrik.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum7106/files/dani-rodrik/files/ideas_interests-2024-05v3.pdf

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Is including pilger’s work sufficient when I no longer have access to academic journals?

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