[grinnbearit]

> The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and lazy.

Its not exactly arbitrary, its more dependent on the current state of the world. Take the trolley problem, if killing one person would save billions does murder become moral?

Similarly, (and more contentiously) we might look at pre industrial agrarian societies as barbaric for favouring male children but when your society/family is absolutely dependent on human labour and men are capable of providing far more for roughly the same amount of resources consumed you can see how that moral position could emerge.

Were they fundamentally evil for holding it?

* http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd... is short story which also talks about this.