Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about it.

I completely agree with you, moral progress should be incentivised somehow...

Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.

This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.

As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.

It doesn't seem like moral progress actually exists or even can exist given human nature. In every time period and era there are people killing each other, amongother crimes. It is fallacious to think that we have a monotonically increasing meter of moral progress, that we are somehow better than our ancestors. Reality shows that we are exactly the same, as the parent says.

I have no control over the morality of others.

Whereas I have direct control over how I use technology.

The reflex to assign our morally wrong behaviour to the animal part in us is quite ironic. I just don't see jellyfish building concentration camps.

Of course, we all want to live peaceful lives and be free from our baser instincts, but the entire society that allows you to live a "peaceful life" is based on exploitation and war. Just because you don't see it at home doesn't mean you don't profit/benefit from human violence and exploitation.

As for my comment on "monkeys":

1. Larger primates like chimpanzees are known predators that hunt and consume smaller monkeys, specifically targeting babies

2. In the famous Gombe Chimpanzee War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War), a once-unified community split into two factions; over four years, one group systematically hunted down and killed every male member of the other.

3. In captive or introduced settings, groups may relentlessly bully "outsiders" who do not know the social norms, preventing them from eating or resting.

4. Non-lactating females may steal an infant from its mother and refuse to give it back, holding it until the baby dies of starvation or dehydration.

"Insulting to monkeys" is only an idea when you anthromorphize monkeys from the actual animals they are to something like Rafiki from Lion King. Nothing is insulting to monkeys because they don't understand the meaning of insult or care about it. They're raw animals and so are human beings.

If you look at the world around you today and think "yes, this is the result of people wanting to live a peaceful life" then I would say you're not being realistic.