Any society that feels it needs to publicly torture its citizens as punishment is simply barbarism.
> Any society that feels it needs to torture is simply barbarism.
As a way to compare societies and their values, it seems to me best to exclude the distant past when everyone was basically unaware of their neighbors, and use something like "since tv in most homes", or better yet, "since internet available to most".
There's far less excuses in today's globalized world to justify cultural relativism.
I look forward to a rigorous justification from first principles for the moral values of Western secular humanism.
"no public execution > public executions", or
"no street gay flogging > street gay floggings",
need to be rigorously justified from first principle.