Again, TEIN, I have to disagree with you. If you look at history, you'll find our morality has actually improved, not degraded. What used to be commonly accepted and perhaps not even seen as worthy of note has gradually become unacceptable behavior. The fact that we have developed technologies that allow us to carry out the remaining barbarisms more "efficiently" does not alter the fact that a greater percentage of the human race is less willing to accept barbarity on a day-to-day basis.
Look at the growing intolerance for some cultures' displacement of women; the fact that racist crimes do draw so much attention and concurrently censure, rather than simply being seen as part of the day-to-day; the growing intolerance of child abuse as opposed to the fact that even in Victorian England (and America of the same period) parents that caused the death of a child due to neglect, starvation, overwork, etc., would often face nothing more than ostracism; the fact that legal punishments have become increasingly more humane over the years (take a look at the Newgate Calendar, for instance, if you doubt this, where a person was often hanged for stealing thrupence or even bread on which to live)...
The list goes on and on. The general zeitgeist (as Dawkins has pointed out) has almost consistently been toward a more humane, liberal, and compassionate interaction between human beings as a whole (however much individuals may fall short of that). Look at the statements of even liberal thinkers of a century ago on race, for example, and compare it to those widely accepted now. Those issued then by even the most liberal thinkers often sound like the white supremacists of today.
I long held a view similar to yours, and it took a bit of shaking up and getting me to actually look at facts to realize that I had things nearly inverted. Another factor is simply that we hear about such barbarous acts now more quickly and easily due to the speed and pervasiveness of communication; whereas in earlier periods you'd have to go digging through obscure records or lengthy investigations to find out about many of these incidents. (Not that they necessarily weren't recorded; a huge number of them were. Simply that they didn't receive public attention nearly so readily.) This, too, tends to color our perception of things and make us see the past as better morally, when often it was precisely the opposite case....