On one hand, if freedom is the highest aim in your moral system, then a free-market system might be morally improving upon human character.
Indeed, in its provocation to your own conscience the overall effect was morally improving in a rather old-fashioned way.
Following publication of the non-fictional A Confession in 1882, Tolstoy aimed to concentrate on morally improving tales.
The idea of history as a morally improving magic lantern show is one that many professional historians, myself included, would treat with extreme caution.
Currie examines whether literature might--or might not--have a morally improving effect on us.
Why, indeed, should a man be morally improved by massacring farmers in a distant land?
Las Vegas still retains a little shady cool from her gangster past, but this is a safe town now, and if not morally perfect it is certainly morally improved.
Meanwhile, another society, Götiska Förbundet (Gothic Society), advocated, from its start in 1811, that study of the "Gothic" past could morally improve society.
Hadn't Lucas done the same thing when he rereleased "Star Wars" in 1997 with a digitally added Jabba the Hutt and a morally improved Han Solo?
It's as if Kubrick is messing with the power of culture to morally "improve" society, just as he denied the film's own power to degrade it.
Science fiction writers have made the opposite error, and created worlds, often distant, in which everyone has somehow become much smarter, and morally improved.
