A moral rule is essentially 'advantage-reducing.' It prohibits you doing something you could do that would serve your interests at someone else's expense.

Morality has in the past made progress when we broadened the category of things we weren't permitted to harm (animals, 'infidels'); saw through some delusions and rationalisations about what harms are good for people themselves (prison punishment, hysterectomies for unhappy 1950s wives); and readjusted our for-the-good of others criteria so as to demand only reasonable sacrifices (ceasing to use children as handy chimney sweeps).

The higher the coefficient of inequality (Gini coefficient) in a society, the worse things tend to be for those at the bottom.

A moral rule is essentially 'advantage-reducing.' It prohibits you doing something you could do that would serve your interests at someone else's expense.

You can reasonably make the intellectual journey from thinking it's permissible to eat shrimp to thinking it's not permissible, or vice versa, whereas our slavery journey was uni-directional. We are as certain we are not going back to that old kind of slavery as we are that we aren't going back to the geocentric universe.

Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.

Highly unequal societies are morally defective because they get to be that way through the exploitation by the clever and well-positioned ones of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of others. The well-off then use their acquired political power to refuse to make sacrifices for others. This system brings us a wonderful range of products and experiences for consumers at the top of the privilege scale, but it also degrades and benumbs the workers at the lower end, as Adam Smith and Marx both said.