Near the end of this interview (at 21:50) he's asked,
"Do you think we've made any progress as a civilization?"
He answers, yes, and gives several examples:
- at the writing of the constition, half the species - women - were not people, they were property...
- it was as recent as 1975 that the Supreme Court gave women the right to sit on juries...
- until very recently mammals were subjected to just about any experimentation you wanted to do...
- there's a slow expansion of the moral sphere...
He included other examples, I don't have time to transcribe it.
He doesn't talk about Buddhism, but there's a similar process in Buddhism, one's moral sphere expands to include all sentient beings, including cockroaches.
"Noam Chomsky: The Singularity is Science Fiction!"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017150117
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