For me, the money quote is this:
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
I'm not doing much musing in this post, but hopefully reading the essay will prompt some musing.
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What You Can’t Say
January 2004. Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on …
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MORAL FASHIONS?
Nonsense!
Morals, like individual human beings, grow up.
I assume you're not a student of history then? What is seen as moral in one age is seen as immoral in the next and then moral again in the following.
That isn't to say that along some dimensions morals don't actually progress (but how do we know?), but that certainly doesn't seem to be the case along all dimensions.
I don't think it's about "believing", it's more about empathy. I know that cats (any animal) are not as "advanced" as the human race, but I wouldn't feel okay massacring a colony of them just to build a mall…
But on that note, there is a line, if it were ants, a massacre we would have, and I actually do like ants…
Either way, it's still more about empathy, then "believing" I have more rights then another being.