[AtlasBarfed]

How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great.

Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them.

But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society.

Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.

[jlawson]

Simple example, but racism is simply a form of genetic ingroup preference.

Can you imagine, perchance, how groups who practiced ingroup preference would, over time, come to outcompete and ultimately defeat/destroy/dissolve groups that didn't?

Does it seem clear to you why all historical societies practiced ingroup preference, and the vast majority still do? Or are you confused on how that works?

Our society's concept of who the ingroup should be defined as is novel and still in flux. In fact it's pretty much the core question that is dividing our civilization at this point. Confusion on this point may well still lead to our downfall in the long term, so don't feel so certain about the simplistic moral narratives that are taught in school.

We still don't know how any of this will turn out. Certainly rival societies like China are not following our path - be humble enough to recognize that they may turn out to be right.

[calf]

Have you ever experienced racism or do you have friends who have experienced it? Imagine telling your friend what they went through was simply evolution.

[mst]

Murdering all of the men of the losing side of a war and taking their women as slaves to bear more of your children is evolutionarily adaptive - and I would presume that as a result I'm descended from at least one person who did so, and so would be the person I was talking to in your scenario.

"Adaptive" and "morally horrifying" can both be true of the same behaviour.

I hope that the things I consider moral win in the long run, but that's unfortunately not guaranteed.

[jlawson]

Yes I have experienced racism, of various types and many times over the years.

The fact that I understand why it happened doesn't harm me. Does it make you feel better to believe that the bad things that have happened to you are due to spiritual evil? Personally I find a mechanistic, value-neutral explanation more conforting (and far more useful since it's, yknow, correct).