What we should be ashamed of

We like to feel morally superior to our ancestors. When we look back at our history, we like to feel outraged about grave sins committed by our great-grandparents (such as nazism, racism, etc.), and think that we, being more civilized than they were, are no longer capable of similar depravity or confusion. This is dead wrong, because we are doing things today that future generations will look at with horror. We are doing them primarily because most people either don't see anything wrong about them, or else don't even notice that they're being done.

What are those things then, that we should be ashamed of? I don't claim to know I'm right, but here are my candidates.

1) The fact that we are not equally compassionate to all groups of people who are suffering. Our compassion seems to depend on politics, ideology and religion. We are outraged at our great-grandparents that they did almost nothing to stop Holocaust; but we are doing almost nothing to help Palestinians suffering from the Israeli government, Chechens suffering at the hands of the Russian government, or the people of North Korea who are being terribly oppressed by the communist government. (Before you click, be warned: reading texts linked above is likely to make you sick to your stomach.)

2) Our inability to recognize that every policy has costs as well as benefits, and that they have to be weighed against each other. In many cases (especially those that involve "moral panic"), we ignore the costs altogether, which leads us to implement cures that are much worse than the disease (such as the drug war).

3) Tribalism. The tribal instinct is very powerful, and it can lead to morally unacceptable attitudes. We recognize the immorality of some of those attitudes (e.g. racism) and try to curb them; but there are many outlets in which we let tribal prejudice run rampant. For example, saying things like "Atheists cannot be moral people" is ethically equivalent to racism--but no one who says them (including politicians) faces any type of social punishment. Similarly, public discourse is full of arguments supporting tightening immigration laws or implementing trade protection measures, on the grounds that it would prevent American jobs from being taken over by foreigners. All such arguments rest on an implicit moral assumption that foreigners are less human than Americans--and yet no one who uses them seems to be ashamed of this fact. In fact, the postulate that immigrants should be treated as people is completely absent from mainstream American politics; as far as I know, only libertarian right and anarchist left support it.

4) The fact that we rely on moral intuitions to settle ethical dilemmas. We seem entirely unaware of the fact that our moral intuitions are often wrong, because they evolved to facilitate efficiency in a small band of hunter-gatherers, not to minimize suffering in a society as complex as ours. For example, according to our moral intuition, we tend to judge actions by the intent of those who act, instead of by the consequences of those actions, ignoring the fact that acting on selfish motives can have good consequences, or that acting on benevolent motives can have terrible consequences indeed.