Moral progress and human rights

Metaphilosophy, 1999

This paper shows that moral progress is a substantive and plausible idea. Moral progress in belief involves deepening our grasp of existing moral concepts, while moral progress in practices involves realizing deepened moral understandings in behavior or social institutions. Moral insights could not be assimilated or widely disseminated if they involved devising and applying totally new moral concepts. Thus, it is argued, moral failures of past societies cannot be explained by appeal to ignorance of new moral ideas, but must be understood as resulting from refusals to subject social practices to critical scrutiny. Moral philosophy is not the main vehicle for disseminating morally progressive insights, though it has an important role in processes that lead to moral progress. Yet we have grounds for cautious optimism, since progressive moral insights can be disseminated and can, sometimes, have constructive social effects.

Philosophy Compass, 2021

Societies change over time. Chattel slavery and foot-binding have been abolished, democracy has become increasingly widespread, gay rights have become established in some countries, and the animal rights movement continues to gain momentum. Do these changes count as moral progress? Is there such a thing? If so, how should we understand it? These questions have been receiving increasing attention from philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and sociologists in recent decades. This survey provides a systematic account of recent developments in the understanding of moral progress. We outline the concept of moral progress and describe the different types of moral progress identified in the literature. We review the normative criteria that have been used in judging whether various developments count as morally progressive or not. We discuss the prospects of moral progress in the face of challenges that claim that moral progress is not psychologically possible for human beings, and we explore the metaethical implications of moral progress.

In his recent book The Moral Arc (2015), Michael Shermer makes an admirable case for the occurrence of moral progress at the social level. Society-level moral progress occurs when a change in the norms, practices, and institutions of a society constitutes a moral improvement, relative to the way that the norms, practices, and institutions were before. Shermer argues compellingly that society-level moral progress has taken place with the decline of witch executions, the pacification of international affairs, the rise of democracy, the abolition of slavery, the extension of equal rights to women and homosexuals, and increasing support for animal rights. However, the huge body of historical and sociological information that Shermer draws on will likely fail to convince a proponent of what Philip Kitcher calls the mere-change view (Kitcher 2011: 138 – 140, 210). This is the view that changes in norms, practices, and institutions can never be moral progress, because there is no objective standard by which such changes may be evaluated as resulting in a state of affairs that is morally better than a previous state (Kitcher 2011: 210). As Kitcher aptly quips, the mere change view amounts to the thought that social changes are “simply one damned thing after another” (Kitcher 2011: 7). Against the mere-change view, I shall argue that moral progress does indeed occur, and moreover that it can be understood as increased success in achieving the end of a moral enterprise. The end of a moral enterprise is a state of affairs favored by selection pressures which govern the historical evolution of moral norms. Such an end can be identified through sociological inquiry of the kind that Shermer and others pursue.

Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy, 2020

Most Enlightenment thinkers believed that the World's order (as ultimately based on divine laws) is good and thus every gain of knowledge will have good consequences. Scientific process was assumed to entail moral progress. In fact some moral progress did occur in the Western civilization and science contributed to it, but it is widely incommensurate with the progress of science. The Enlightenment's concept of a concerted scientific and moral progress proved largely wrong for several reasons. (1) Public morality and science evolve largely independently and may either enhance or inhibit each other. (2) There are no objective values to be read in the World's order and simply followed. Instead, our real, subjective values and the moral systems they fuel have all been generated and shaped by evolution rather than designed to be universally good, and thus ought to be managed rather than simply followed. (3) Our evolved morality is flawed, deficient, prone to doctrinal manipul...

2018

It is common knowledge that we live in an era of “advanced civilization” with respect to scientific and technical progress, however, the phenomenon of barbaric violence and corruption that promote human misery makes one raise questions on the relationship between progress in history and morality. Experience shows that progress in history does not correspond to progress in morality. But what is the reason for the disparity and how can a harmony between the two be established? The paper sees in Kant’s theory of history and moral progress plausible answer to these questions, showing that advances in civilization do not coincide with progress in morality because history has only a moral aim but not a moral end. It is therefore by developing a civil society as the proper environment for the full development of man’s rational capacities that man’s natural world could be transformed into a moral world. Where, however, the establishment of a civil society is hindered, it is the courage...

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2023

The aim of this paper is to defend moral relativism from the accusation that it would make it irrational to classify past changes in public opinion as instances of moral progress, for they would constitute an improvement only from our current point of view. The argument is this. For our assessment of a change in public opinion as an instance of moral progress to be rational, we need to take the moral claims made before the change to be false simpliciter while being open to the possibility that we ourselves change our minds at some point. These two things can be made compatible if we construe moral relativism as taking the truth of moral claims to be relative to the context of assessment. Thus understood, moral relativism is in fact the only view that makes room for talk of moral progress, as the rest of candidate positions make it irrational.

The endeavour to locate value in moral progress faces various substantive as well as more formal challenges. This paper focuses on challenges of the latter kind. After some preliminaries, Section 3 introduces two general kinds of Bevaluative moral progress-claims^, and outlines a possible novel analysis of a (quasi) descriptive notion of moral progress. While Section 4 discusses certain logical features of betterness in light of recent work in value theory which are pertinent to the notion of moral progress, Sections 5 and 6 outline the ambiguous character of Bmaking moral progress^.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2016

At first glance, one of the most obvious places to look for moral progress is in individuals, in particular in moral development from childhood to adulthood. In fact, that moral progress is possible is a foundational assumption of moral education. Beyond the general agreement that moral progress is not only possible but even a common feature of human development things become blurry, however. For what do we mean by 'progress'? And what constitutes moral progress? Does the idea of individual moral progress presuppose a predetermined end or goal of moral education and development, or not? In this article we analyze the concept of moral progress to shed light on the psychology of moral development and vice versa; these analyses are found to be mutually supportive. We suggest that: moral progress should be conceived of as development that is evaluated positively on the basis of relatively stable moral criteria that are the fruit and the subject of an ongoing conversation; moral progress does not imply the idea of an end-state; individual moral progress is best conceived of as the development of various components of moral functioning and their robust integration in a person's identity; both children and adults can progress morally-even though we would probably not speak in terms of progress in the case of children-but adults' moral progress is both more hard-won and to a greater extent a personal project rather than a collective effort.