Progress absolutely requires that the next is superior to the prior. That is how we discuss progress. If it is not, what you are discussing is change. That is what philosophy does. It changes and adapts itself to the new generation and prevailing societal thought. Never has there been a undeniably true standard of ethics and morals.
While I agree with Jorick's definition of progress, I shall, for now, accept yours as having merit.
What makes you think that science is making progress? For many individuals, ignorance is bliss. We aren't
supposed to understand our world, we should just live it as it is presented to us. The more we understand the world around us, the less likely we are to achieve wonder. It is the incomprehensible that creates wonder, and many devote themselves to finding things that they cannot understand just to make themselves feel insignificant.
Is the discovery of nuclear fission and fusion superior to its non-discovery, if that discovery leads to the creation of the atom bomb?
Progress in science is thus just as subjective as progress in philosophy. Truly, there is no such thing as an entirely objective thing—or at the very least, none that we shall ever be able to access.
This is untrue. You are falling into the trap of thinking on the precedence and context of western history. Ancient china already had a system of meritocracy in place where people could test into bureaucracy by passing state exams. Some of its most famous statesmen where women. No philosopher needed to write a treatise on human rights for that to happen.
Did you know that the ancient Chinese meritocracy was instated in response to Confucianism, a philosophical movement?
You are free to accept deny the result of measurement, but then you would not be rational and this entire discussion would be pointless. The point of objective measurement is that it exists whether we believe it or not. You can believe forever and forever that you can fly if you jump off a building. That does not change the result. The same cannot be said for points of view in philosophy!
There may be objective truths, but there are no objective ways of measuring them. Considering such possibilities as the brain-in-a-jar theory, we have no way of determining if any of our senses are actually to be believed, or if they are just fabricated by some other entity.
Science is a belief system, like any other. It just so happens to be the most consistent belief system, due in large part to the
philosophy of science, upon which all science is founded.
Science exists
because of philosophy. Neither can be objectively measured, only believed in.
Science does not need physical products to prove it has progressed. Those are merely results of a greater understanding of the world. The myriad philosophical publications are rehashings of old arguments or merely new viewpoints. That is not progress.
All science does is rehash with new viewpoints. The change between having a flat planet and a round planet was not a new Earth—it was a new way of looking at how the Earth worked that made more consistent sense.
Even things like the atom were thought of in Ancient Greece. All we've done since is rehash the idea and expand upon it, much like the ideas philosophy rehashes from ancient Greek philosophers.
The whole point of science is that a hypothesis is, like you say, provably false. The same cannot be said for any point of view in philosophy. Philosophy never produces universal truths.
Science also does not produce universal truths. For it to be universal, it would have to be accepted by everyone. Quite a number of individuals are still faithful to Creationism and other such belief systems, so science is not universally accepted, and thus not a universal truth.
How can you claim philosophy has made any progress if you cannot even measure it? If philosophy is completely based on points of views and axioms, none of which can be proved true, then philosophy has made infinite progress because infinite view points exist: we just haven't set down to list them all out. Something that takes all possible paths and all possible viewpoints basically does not. Philosophy cannot make progress because we can't prove anything true or false.
Once again, the same goes for science. Science attempts to
approach an absolute truth, but it can never reach it.
We have "proven" many things true in science in that past that decades later were shown to be false. Nothing we know in science is irrefutable, even the things we take as false. Science just
assumes certain things function in every context, just because it functioned in the limited number of contexts we studied.
Just as in philosophy, there are infinite pseudo-truths and pseudo-falseties.