Alien genocide and other moral horrors

The Nazi alien thought experiment showcased in "Rapist insects and Nazi Aliens from Planet X-1951" was intended to demonstrate the implausibilty with species-relative analyses of morality. I am happy to report that the last fifty hours have seen a number of interesting comments by way of response, but nothing that hinders the argument. 

Sorceror responds by talking about ethics as akin to a game like chess. I would appreciate it if he would develop this analogy a bit more, put a little more meat on the bones as it were, so it would be clearer what he was actually intending to communicate. How do you know if you've won the ethics game, for instance? Because if winning this game entails the possible commission of moral horrors then Sorceror's analogy falls flat. (E.g. if a person wins by leaving the most progeny, and raping leaves the male with the most progeny, then the male can win the ethics game by raping which means that he ought to rape. Obviously this outcome would count against this type of moral analysis. So unless Sorceror can explain how the rules of this game map reasonably well onto our moral intuitions, the analogy must be rejected.)

Sorceror then finds fault with the Nazi aliens thought experiment: "Just as changing from a plastic to a marble chess set doesn't change the rules of chess, throwing a birthmark onto human beings doesn't change their whole moral scheme."

But we are not talking about human beings. We are talking about a distinct species with a completely different evolutionary history which happen to look like human beings. That's it. In the same way that you could have a marsupial and a mammal that look very much alike but are very different, so we have homo sapiens and our aliens from X-1951. The problem is that a species-relative analysis of morality means that rape, cannibalism, torture and genocide could be moral goods for the aliens from X-1951 even though these actions are bad for human beings. Since this is highly counterintuitive, the thought experiment counts against species-relative analyses of morality.

Then there is the issue of moral progress. I view the eradication of slavery (in principle if not yet in practice given the 27 million people currently in slavery), the Declaration on human rights, the animal rights movement, women's suffrage, and many other developments as objective improvements in our moral understanding and moral practice. This is easy enough for me to say since I believe there are objective moral virtues and vices and moral duties.

 But how do the rest of you account for this progress? Sorceror claims "I'd say our current "moral strategies" are quite a bit better than any previous age... though that doesn't mean they can't be improved." But in what sense are they "better"? (Again the game analogy begs for elucidation.)

Incidentally, I happily admit that we no longer consider genocide to be morally licit (as one finds it in the Bible). And this constitutes objective moral progress of the species over the Ancient near east of the Israelites when genocide was widely practiced (as were other horrific practices of war like systematic rape of defeated warriors). The issue once again is how you explain this as objective moral progress. (I have dealt at some length with biblical treatments of genocide in this blog for those who are interested.)

 AnAtheist.Net attempts to defuse relativism in a way that I can only consider deeply confused. Here is what he says:

Lots [sic] not conflate what I have been saying (and others, I suspect) with moral relativism. I don't think that our beliefs on this matter are that far apart. I do believe that one can make an 'objective' moral case against all of the horrors that you list - rape, cannibalism, torture, genocide, etc. But such a case would be grounded firmly in reason and argumentation. It just doesn't cut it to declare that it is just "true" in some absolute literal sense.

Sorry but OF COURSE IT IS MORAL RELATIVISM. It is not cultural moral relativism but it is species moral relativism. AAN, he whole point of the Nazi aliens is to point out that your analysis of morality is just as implausible as the moral relativist who says that what the Nazis did was wrong for us but not necessarily for 1930s Germany.

When it comes to actual moral progress, I think both Sorceror and Crannog have a point. Read Samantha Powers' A Problem from Hell. On the one hand, we are now cognizant of genocide as a concept and as a moral horror as never before. On the other hand genocide continues on a horrifying scale as Powers amply demonstrates.