The idea of progress is indefinable and incoherent if there is no fixed value (even in a merely numerical sense) toward which you are progressing. A series of random numbers does not progress toward anything. It merely changes. And there is no essential difference in position between any particular number in the series and any other. They don’t bear any relation to some final pattern or value toward which each is developing.
So by denying any fixed value as an aim, you lose claim to any such word as progress, or any grounds to prefer or denigrate any value from any point in the chain above any other (except irrational personal prejudice, that it happens to be your number). And since it’s a theoretically infinite chain, with nothing to confine it, no limits of ontological necessity to direct it, then it’s not really even something you can address coherently, except to point to where you stand and observe that this is your number, a mere assertion of identity.
On the other hand, a random series of numbers could be said to be progressive if you allowed that they were all different guesses at the value toward which the series was aiming. And there could be wide variety, but some could be judged as coming closer or less close to the value being aimed at, from multiple directions. And if you allowed that there were some fundamental constraints on what sorts of values you could effectively generate, limits that caused some kind of feedback that allowed worse guesses to be eliminated and better guesses to be favored, while not actually confining what values could be hazarded, you could have an emergent system that would allow you to evaluate those numbers and group them according to empirical performance, as well as develop rational models for comparison according to theoretical models (which would be less costly than making a wholly novel and unlucky guess and maybe falling foul of one of the feedback mechanisms).
To make the metaphor explicit, because humans do have a particular nature and because the world has a particular nature and because life itself has a particular nature, because they have specificity, a set of certain confined, non-infinite, non-random integers and values, it does in fact seem to be the case that morality is more like the second model than it is like the first. And that’s why we feel the pull, even counter to our own theoretical stances, to think in terms of and use words like “progress” and “better”. We know, on a deep level, that the world is much less random and less individual to our own perspective and preferences than we would like. We can easily get flattened by the world and by life, regardless of our beliefs about how it should work. The world, and the nature of biology itself, isn’t especially concerned about pleasing us or conforming to our expectations and preferences. It won’t let us just be happy, all to ourselves. It keeps putting us in our place. It keeps ramming our finitude home.
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