I definitely wasn’t making the argument that anyone was arguing for slavery, just that notional definitions of moral progress are much more complicated than simple economic metrics. There is so much more that goes into what is “right” and “wrong” than pure economic level, at a micro or macro level.

Now you might say I’m making a straw man of their argument, but then what are they even arguing then? I can’t figure it out. What does “advancement” mean? They alluded to social sciences having various measure of human happiness is and that a “Progress Studies” department could synthesize these metrics into... what exactly? Policy proposals? A religion? Metrics of human well being assume an underlying framework of morale agreement to begin with.

You simply cannot philosophically convert an objective metric into an “ought” without making a ton of morale assumptions. You cannot prove that your morality and values are better than anyone else’s because you will infinitely regress into definitions if what “good” means.

I agree with what you are saying, just that the way you originally went about saying it by including a contrived hyperbolic example regarding slavery was a poor way to frame your position, at least in my opinion, and made your argument less likely to be received in good faith.

If an argument is not novel (it's been presented before to many people and there is decent awareness of it), is well-understood, and is valid, then someone can use poor examples to explicate the argument and those examples do nothing to undermine the argument.

This commenter's argument was just such an argument.

If the position was one you didn't agree with, would you still be defending such a hyperbolic example?

Do we agree that how you present an argument is important in how the argument is received by others?

I don't follow why an argument with "decent awareness" (whatever that could even mean) or one that is non-novel has different standards to a novel argument or one that has less awareness.

I've no doubt that the presentation of an argument is important to its reception.

Again, the validity of the argument under discussion doesn't rest on the example that was used to explicate it. The examples are separate from the argument (this isn't always the case).