The problem with societies like Egypt and Rome is that the labor and talents of society were used by the ruling class to carry out their own vanity projects. Yes, the pyramids of Egypt are awesome structures, but did the Egyptian people themselves over the millenia derive any benefit from them?

I echo what Jim Baerg wrote above. Slavery impeded technological advancement.

For all of Rome's vaunted engineering achievements, it was also backwards in many ways. Some people make a big deal out of the roads the Romans built to traverse the empire, but they were so narrow that two way wagon traffic was impossible, so the roads did nothing to develop overland commercial trade.

However, I have seen the argument that slavery impeded the development of technology & science because those who had the power to make decisions saw no point in labor saving technology since "there are plenty of peasants". Also slavery made any sort of manual labor not respectable so scientific experimentation wasn't done.

So rather than the pessimism following from the beliefs, I wonder if instead, your visitor's beliefs simply serve to justify his/her lack of willpower.

And you don't see how justifying a lack of willpower by appealing to the belief that that lack of willpower is the most that any human can aspire to might discourage personal moral development?

Ebonmuse, to me your visitor's words only convey a frustration with his/her limitations and a desire for something better. The "absolute inability" talk seems to me like hyperbole. If he/she actually concludes that there is no point in trying to be good, well that is very unfortunate, but I don't think that the pessimistic viewpoint follows directly from the religious premise. E.g. if I were Christian, I imagine that knowing that I was saved despite my imperfection would take some of the pressure off, and that might make it easier for me to live a more moral life. So rather than the pessimism following from the beliefs, I wonder if instead, your visitor's beliefs simply serve to justify his/her lack of willpower.

Ethical behavior is a skill

Precisely. And how I love to grow it!

I suspect that both slavery and the subjugation of women arose mostly out of power structures: people did it because they could. It's one thing to say that having women looking after the children was an important structure, necessary for survival, and quite another thing to say that the near-universal valuing of men over women was also necessary. I don't think the latter was necessary for survival or society at all, I think it arose because women were (a) physically weaker and (b) vulnerable during pregnancy and after childbirth.

Did we need slavery to get to where we are now? I don't know. But regarding serfdom, consider as an example the Stedingers. They were doing just fine running themselves until they were excommunicated for being too independent of any nobility and subjected to a politically-motivated crusade. It wasn't that the peasants couldn't run themselves. In this case they even did a fairly good job of defending themselves, too. They just couldn't hold out against a united nobility and church that wasn't willing to see relatively free peasants anywhere.

This does not follow from the text you quoted, and it seems like a strawman to me. Did your visitor actually express this idea?

Yes, he did. As you can see in the quoted excerpt, he bemoaned his "absolute inability to... not do certain things that I have designated as bad", and says that anyone who tries will find the same outcome.

This is not a rare or unusual idea. It's an explicit tenet of evangelical Christian faith, which holds that humans are universally and utterly depraved, that we are incapable of being righteous, and that only through God's undeserved mercy is there any hope of salvation.

This strikes me as an argument from lack of imagination. That a social organization based on slave labor cannot survive without it is trivially true, but your argument seems to implicitly presume that any "intermediate" civilization must be based on slave labor--alternate approaches are surely logically possible. Ditto for the gender roles thing; it does not logically follow that a civilization requires enforced gender roles and/or the oppression of one gender in order to keep reproductive rates up, nor is this always desirable, as continuous population growth in any society inevitably results in the population outstripping the available resources, which tends to be destructive in varying degrees to that society, depending on how it is handled.

Adam:

I agree. However, I'm curious: how would you be inclined to regard a person who insists, seemingly sincerely, that they are trying hard to improve themselves, yet over a significant timescale there is no discernible improvement in their harmful behaviors?

This does not follow from the text you quoted, and it seems like a strawman to me.

Perhaps you have not heard of the doctrine of moral depravity? This is no strawman, it's an actual position. Whatever we do, including rushing into burning buildings to save small children is seen as sinful to god unless and until we are saved. After you are saved, it's a done deal, but god compells you to want to do good deeds/works.

I disagree that we "need a savior" because we are imperfect, and of course, those who believe that they are saved by faith alone may have less motivation to be moral. But in general, having a savior is not equivalent to giving up on morality.

It is not giving up on morality, but being incapable of being moral without a savior.

In fact, I suggest that (in theory) having a savior gives a Christian more atheistic values.

One could only hope.

For the good of society as a whole. In sufficiently primitive times, producing children would have been the number one priority for an adult. Strict gender roles helped ensure that enough children were born for a society to grow and flourish.

Societies like ancient Egypt and Rome wouldn't have been possible without slavery. Medieval society wouldn't have been possible without the serfs who weren't significantly better than slaves. Slavery enabled a leisure class. Without a leisure class, the scientific progress that enables today's society wouldn't have been possible.

My theory is that a democratic society that embraces individual liberty isn't practical without a certain degree of technological sophistication. Essentially, if the needs of a society are great enough, those needs outweigh the needs of the individual. The realities of life in the past were sufficiently different that those of life today that I don't believe that we can conclude that what would be immoral today was immoral then.