Vindicating Moral Progress?

Strange as it might be, I will start this post on moral progress by talking briefly about the Thirty Years War. This devastating war, centred around central Europe, was fought between 1618 and 1648, and through a combination of violence, famine, and disease it claimed, according to some estimates, 20% of Europe’s population at the time (for comparison, the First World War claimed approximately 5%). Why bring up this terrible conflict? Partly because of the extent to which its waves of violence, hunger, and disease were not so strange to the people living at the time, as the historian Cicely Veronica Wedgwood makes clear in her history of the war:

Even in the actual district of the conflict the impact of war was at first less overwhelming than in the nicely balanced civilization of to-day. Bloodshed, rape, robbery, torture, and famine were less revolting to a people whose ordinary life was encompassed by them in milder forms. Robbery with violence was common enough in peace-time, torture was inflicted at most criminal trials, horrible and prolonged executions were performed before great audiences; plague and famine effected their repeated and indiscriminate devastations (pp. 14-15).

This certainly paints a picture of pretty unremitting misery, not only about life in the shadow of the conflict but also about life in general at the time: as stricken with poverty, famine, disease, torture, violence, and insecurity. However, is our “civilization of to-day” really so “nicely balanced”? In comparison to the past, the answer may be a resounding “yes” in many domains! To discuss only the phenomena described by Wedgwood, over time we have seen the decline of absolute poverty, the decline of physical violence (both peacetime murder and killings in war) since approximately the 15^th century, and reductions in the prevalence and deadliness of famines and the rate of child mortality. We may even be able to say that considerable moral progress has occurred. But to make this claim, we have a lot of work to do.

Questions of moral progress have recently sparked a rising interest among philosophers, political scientists, economists, and cognitive scientists. What is all this interest about? Initially, the idea of moral progress sounds pretty Whiggish, and not a little obtuse. It seems to carry the connotation that “everything is great now”, which is far from obviously true. It is also pretty unhelpful to baldly state that “there has been moral progress.” It is too general, and it’s hard to know what one is even referring to with a claim like this. What has undergone moral progress? A particular society? Humanity in general? What does this moral progress consist of?

What do you mean by ‘moral progress’?

We can get around some of these problems by recognising that moral progress doesn’t mean “things are now great” but rather “things are now better than they were”. It’s a relative claim about improvement. We can also focus more on exactly what the “things” in question are. For instance, we can say: “It is moral progress that women can now vote on equal terms with men in the vast majority of democracies.” Here we mean that this situation is an improvement upon the previous one, say in the early 20^th century, where unequal suffrage was widespread across democracies. This improvement is interesting to note because once noted we can ask questions about how this happened: how was this progressive change achieved, what social or psychological mechanisms were at play in its achievement? However, claiming that this development is moral progress is plainly compatible with criticising existing inequalities between men and women: one need not be a Panglossian to make claims of moral progress.

Why does knowing whether or not there has been moral progress matter? For a number of reasons. If we can identify instances of moral progress (and moral regress) then we can ask questions about how these developments occurred, how they might be accelerated, sustained (or reversed), and how we might learn from how past moral progress was achieved in order to promote future moral progress. Another important reason to ask whether there has been moral progress is to counteract what may be an unjustified pessimism about the ‘moral trajectory’ of the world among the general public. In recent international polls by YouGov and IPSOS Mori, a majority of people surveyed thought that the world is getting worse. This pessimism may have serious implications for how people vote, for how they think it’s reasonable to react in order to prevent this perceived decline, and perhaps also for their motivation to try to solve existing social and political problems. It is therefore important to challenge this pessimistic assessment and see if it can really stand up to scrutiny.

How do we know if it’s moral progress?

Asking whether moral progress has occurred in any particular social domain involves two questions:

(1) What are the normative criteria for something’s being moral progress?

(2) Have developments occurred which meet these criteria?

The first of these two questions can only be given a positive answer if there are such things as normative criteria in morality: i.e., if there are such things as moral standards of some kind, by which we can judge whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. If we are moral nihilists (believing that there are no moral values, and no sense in which things can be morally good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong) or moral skeptics (believing that moral knowledge is impossible) then there are no such moral standards, and so it follows that we aren’t going to be able to use such moral standards to make moral progress judgements. Making judgements of moral progress might also be impossible if we are extreme moral relativists: for instance, if claims about what is morally right or wrong are indexed to particular individuals then we’re unlikely to be able to make claims about moral progress that would be true for more than a small smattering of people.    

However, many people are in fact not moral nihilists, skeptics, or (extreme) relativists: we make moral judgements regularly and express confidence in them. How should those people approach the two questions about moral progress? Are there any special problems for making moral progress judgements that remain even if we grant that there are some valid moral standards?

Let’s look again at the two questions above. If we have plausible normative criteria and we have good evidence that social developments which meet those criteria have occurred, then we can make some plausible judgements about moral progress. And, indeed, many developments which seem like good candidates for moral progress have occurred and have been widely documented: for instance, the spreading of human rights that protect people’s vital interests and the abolition of slavery (after it had been, in the historian Samuel Drescher’s words, “the perennial institution” for millennia), in addition to the declines in violence, disease, famine, and child mortality discussed earlier. Some of these developments involve changes in people’s moral attitudes (these are sometimes termed ‘narrow moral progress’) and others, such as reductions in child mortality, are morally relevant changes but are not obviously brought about by changes in people’s moral attitudes (sometimes termed ‘wide moral progress’). However, while these developments have all occurred and all seem to be morally progressive, we need to be careful about the normative part of moral progress judgements. We’ve granted above that there are such things as moral standards, but exactly which moral standards should we apply when making moral progress judgements?

Many philosophers (for instance, Dale Jamieson, Allen Buchanan, Russell Powell, Nigel Pleasants, and Michael Huemer) who have written about moral progress have claimed that some instances of social change, such as the abolition of slavery, are so obviously morally progressive that no further argument is needed to justify the idea that these developments are moral progress (Julia Hermann endorses a different version of this claim: the idea that if there is such a thing as moral progress then the abolition of slavery is certainly an instance of it). The underlying idea is that the judgement that slavery is morally wrong is, nowadays, basically uncontested: it enjoys extremely widespread agreement, and so it can be taken as a starting point for other judgements about moral progress or regress. And it is worth emphasizing that even at the time, slavery was recognized as morally heinous by many, and predominantly considered justifiable by those who stood to benefit from it and/or those with false racist beliefs. Similar arguments have been made regarding the decline of physical violence, judicial torture, and child mortality.

Making arguments for moral progress on the basis of widely shared moral judgements seems to be a more promising strategy than first trying to get everyone on board with one particular moral theory, such as utilitarianism, before claims of moral progress can be made. In addition, many of the moral judgements that are relied upon to make moral progress judgements (e.g., enslaving people is wrong, all human beings are moral equals, etc.) are judgements that many promising moral theories (such as consequentialism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, contractualism, care ethics, and so on) endorse, albeit offering different arguments in their support.

This approach to making moral progress claims does not entail that which moral judgements are justified is simply a majoritarian matter. Moral judgements are not necessarily made true by being widely believed. Instead, it might be said that widespread agreement about a particular moral claim is good, but defeasible, evidence of its being justified, in the same way as widespread agreement about other claims (e.g., what time is the meeting, where is the café, etc.) is good, but defeasible, evidence of their being justified. How exactly justification for a moral judgement might be defeated is a matter discussed below.

However, philosophers have perhaps been too inattentive to the question of exactly how widely shared the kinds of moral judgements that are used to ground moral progress judgements are. This is something to be very mindful of, particularly in the wake of findings about the psychological peculiarities of the WEIRD (western, educated, and from industrialised, rich, and democratic countries) people who have made up the bulk of research subjects in psychology and the cognitive sciences in the past. Many of the people who have recently written about moral progress are (most likely, given their countries of origin) fairly WEIRD by global standards: therefore, their moral judgements may not be uncontroversial for everyone. This worry is a challenge for the methodology currently used by many philosophers who write about moral progress. Can we say anything about it? There are a few moves that can be made in response to the worry about the potentially biased nature of moral judgements, and all of them require substantial engagement with empirical research in moral psychology, social psychology, political science, and cultural anthropology.

Do we really disagree?

Firstly, we can look to existing research on cross-cultural moral psychology to see whether there are values that are widely shared across cultures, and which could ground very broad moral progress judgements such as “the legal abolition of slavery across the globe has been moral progress”. For instance, research by Oliver Curry and his co-authors has suggested that norms promoting various forms of cooperation are extremely widely shared across cultures. These norms include caring for one’s family, friends, and offspring; norms of reciprocity in trade; norms of fairness in distributing resources; and norms of property ownership. Shalom Schwartz and his co-authors have found that various values are shared cross-culturally: including, hedonism, self-direction, benevolence, respect for one’s traditions, and security. If certain social developments that have occurred widely have made people safer, enhanced cooperation, given people greater opportunities for leisure, created social conditions where multiple religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions can largely coexist and be practiced in peace – then, given the cross-cultural reach of the values enumerated above, we may be able to claim that these developments represent a widespread form of moral progress. By the same token, we can also use these widely shared moral norms and values to diagnose widespread cases of moral progress and regress. How confident we can be in making these claims will then depend on the quality of our evidence for cross-cultural agreement about values. Thus, the methodological quality of the evidence we appeal to is extremely important, and not something we should be complacent about: arguments for moral progress that appeal to cross-cultural value agreement must be based on good data.

Dealing with disagreement

But sometimes our moral values are not widely shared. Probably the best example of this kind of case can be drawn from the World Values Survey (WVS) data. The WVS is a survey that explores people’s values and beliefs that has been being collected for 40 years in almost 100 countries, representing approximately 90% of the global population. One of the value orientations investigated by the WVS are so-called emancipative values. Emancipative values include support for freedom of choice and equality of opportunity, tolerance of other people’s lifestyles and choices where these do not harm others (e.g., tolerance of LGBTQ+ people, people of diverse religions and ethnicities, etc.) and intolerance of sexual, racial, and other forms of discrimination. Support for emancipative values has increased in nearly every country surveyed by the WVS over the past 40 years, but the inter-society variation in support for emancipative values is very large. For instance, mean support for emancipative values among the surveyed population in Sweden is three times as large (on the scale used to measure emancipative values) as the mean support among the surveyed population in Nigeria. Given this divergence in values, it is perhaps not surprising that, in a 2020 Pew Research Center study, 94% of people surveyed in Sweden said that homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared to only 7% of respondents in Nigeria. Here we genuinely do seem to have a difference in values: at the very least we have a strong difference in reported moral judgements. Thus, if we were to say that “increasing acceptance of gay people obviously counts as moral progress”, this would only be obvious to people in certain societies.

How can people who believe that the increasing acceptance and securement of equal civil rights for gay people amounts to moral progress respond to this kind of disagreement? To put it in more general terms, what are the implications of large cross-cultural differences in moral norms and values for moral progress judgements? There seem to be two general options.

Relativising moral progress

The first would be to say that we cannot say anything about the relative justifiability of the two (or more) different moral judgements, norms, or values under consideration, and that therefore we should relativise moral progress judgements: to say something like “increasing acceptance of gay people counts as moral progress in such-and-such cultures but would not count as moral progress (or would count as moral regress) in such-and-such other cultures.” This may seem very morally counter-intuitive. But it’s worth bearing in mind that the moral judgement which makes this claim seem so unpalatable (namely that it just seems very wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexuality) is precisely the moral judgement which we have empirical evidence is not widely shared across cultures. However, this strategy for relativising moral progress judgements has other problems: the same kinds of problems that apply to moral and cultural relativism in general.

It is hard to know exactly how to draw the line between cultures in these kinds of judgements. Cultures are not like discrete lumps of rock that can easily be told apart. Instead, there is a continuous range of cultural differences which do not neatly cut off at national borders. Perhaps a more subtle version of the relativising claim would be something like: “increasing acceptance of gay people counts as moral progress in such-and-such cultures to a large extent and then would gradually count less as an instance of moral progress (and perhaps more as an instance of moral regress) were it to occur at increasing cultural ‘distances’ from the cultures in which it counts as moral progress.”

An additional question we could ask about this approach is why, for instance, gay people in Nigeria, who face mob violence, death by stoning in some areas, and long-term imprisonment in others for the crime of being gay, are to be held morally hostage by the majority opinion of their society, even though they themselves might see the prospect of their emancipation as unequivocally morally progressive. To unpack this idea, we need to turn to the second general response to value disagreement.

Defusing disagreement: error and vindication

The second response is to acknowledge the empirical evidence of value disagreement, but then to construct an argument that one side of the disagreement is more morally justified than the other. Here we would say that, while normally widespread agreement is good evidence of the truth or justifiability of some moral judgement, in this case, widespread disagreement about some moral judgements, such as the kinds of judgements that issue from emancipative value, need not indicate that emancipative values are not true or justified. However, to make this claim we need what Bernard Williams called a ‘theory of error’ to explain why the people who do not support emancipative values are in some sense mistaken. The flip-side of such a theory of error would be a vindicating argument aiming to show why the moral judgements associated with strong support for emancipative values are more justified, or more likely to be true, than opposing moral judgements.

How can we understand a ‘theory of error’ for moral judgements? In some cases, it’s quite easy. Take the following moral judgement: “Being gay is unnatural and so morally wrong.” We can break this down into two claims: “Being gay is unnatural” and “Something’s being unnatural makes it morally wrong.” The first can be interpreted as an empirical claim, in which case it’s false on any standard interpretation of the word natural: homosexual behaviour is quite common among other animal species. The second claim is the one doing the moral work in the judgement. It can’t exactly be proved wrong with empirical information, but we can quite easily think of counterexamples. Dental anaesthesia is unnatural yet it seems like a good thing from the moral point of view (plausibly assuming that reducing suffering is good). Perhaps arguments like these, targeting the empirical components of moral judgements with better information and targeting the normative components with consistency challenges, could be used to show that certain moral judgements are in error. To the extent that moral judgements about, for instance, gay rights are based on particular religious beliefs, we might also want to question whether religious revelation is a good source of moral knowledge.

Vindicating arguments take a different tack. They aim to show that the epistemic conditions in which certain moral judgements were formed are more conducive to forming justified moral judgements than the epistemic conditions in which certain other moral judgements are formed (such an argument has recently been offered by Nicholas Smyth). Let’s go back, for a moment, to the WVS data. This data shows that societal average support for emancipative values varies widely across different societies. Furthermore, it shows that support for emancipative values has been increasing over time in the majority of surveyed societies. So we have differences between societies at a single time and differences between the same society at different times. Which variables do the best at explaining these differences? Put a different way, if you could be given some information about a random society surveyed in the WVS, and then you had to use this information to predict the societal average support for emancipative values in that society, which information would serve you best?

One intuitive idea is that it might help to know whereabouts in the world the society was located, or what the main religious or philosophical tradition in that society was (e.g., Confucianism, Islam, Protestantism, or Orthodox Christianity). If we have information about the cultural background of the society, maybe this will help us predict its level of support for emancipative values. However, while this information is somewhat predictive, its power to explain variation in societal support for emancipative values between countries and across time is much weaker than information about the extent to which people in that society have access to material security, education, and informational connectedness to their fellow citizens. How wealthy, educated, and informationally connected people are in a society has more of an influence on the extent to which that society endorses emancipative values on average than the cultural background of that society in terms of its dominant religious tradition and geographical location (see Welzel 2013 Chs. 2 & 3 and Inglehart 2018 Ch. 3).

Such an argument builds on findings about the influence of material, educational, and connective resources on emancipative values to suggest that it is more plausible that these kinds of circumstances should lead to justified or true moral judgements than it is plausible that material insecurity, lack of education, and informational disconnectedness from one’s fellow citizens should lead to the formation of justified or true moral judgements. Smyth draws an analogy with other epistemic domains and points out that we wouldn’t think that these latter conditions were epistemically promising for advancing mathematical or scientific knowledge, and so it is unclear why they would, uniquely, be the right social-epistemic conditions for delivering true or justified moral judgements. Smyth is arguing that the judgements that issue from emancipative values are justified not by relying on those judgements themselves (which would be plainly circular), but instead by appealing to the kind of social-epistemic conditions in which these kinds of judgements arise.   

How convincing is this type of argument? This really depends on how convincing one finds the analogy between the kinds of conditions that would foster true or justified beliefs in the domains of mathematics and science and the kinds of conditions that would foster true or justified beliefs in the domain of morality. If one thinks that the kinds of human epistemic capacities that give rise to true or justified beliefs in non-moral domains are also the kinds of capacities that give rise to true or justified beliefs in moral domains then one will likely find this analogy convincing: and, indeed, if one believes that there isn’t really a sensible division to be drawn between a moral and a non-moral domain of cognition then one may also find Smyth’s line of argument convincing. However, if one thinks that the kinds of socio-economic conditions which tend to produce advances in knowledge in the sciences (e.g., conditions of wealth, safety, security, high levels of education, and high levels of connection to other people who might have contributions to make towards the enterprise of gaining knowledge) are unrelated to, or even the opposite of, the conditions that make people likely to gain moral knowledge or justified moral beliefs, then one will be unconvinced. Perhaps moral knowledge is best gained through experiencing the conditions of poverty, or perhaps it is gained by only being connected to a small group of people with whom you are intimately acquainted: if so, emancipative values cannot claim any justification simply because they arise in conditions of wealth, security, education, and connectedness.

How could we adjudicate this kind of dispute about which epistemic conditions are best for moral belief formation? Admittedly, these are tricky and abstract waters. However, one way to try to resolve this impasse is to use a strategy suggested by Dan Lowe, which begins by returning to the first response to the problem of biased moral judgements that we discussed above. First, we attempt to find some instances of social change that are plausibly moral progress according to many people across many societies (and from the perspective of many plausible moral theories). Lowe offers the judgement that the abolition of slavery was moral progress as his canonical example. We can then look at the social epistemic conditions and mechanisms which led to the widespread adoption of this belief (and the belief that slavery is morally wrong), and to the attendant social and institutional changes associated with it. We then have an example of some social epistemic conditions which lead to the formation of true or justified moral beliefs. With several such cases in hand, we can then start to construct arguments that the social epistemic conditions we have identified in these paradigm cases, or very similar social epistemic conditions, are also good social epistemic conditions for the formation of other moral beliefs, perhaps moral beliefs about which there is currently cross-cultural disagreement. However, this strategy is only sketched here in the most abstract terms: to see whether it would actually work would require more research.

Concluding remarks

Once we take moral skepticism, nihilism, and some extreme forms of relativism off the table, it’s hard to see why making moral progress judgements would not be possible: begin by stating moral intuitions which are taken to be non-controversial, and then move from this starting point to argue that certain developments are moral progress and to investigate the history of how these developments occurred to see if we can learn anything from these past successes that can be useful in the future. However, while I don’t think there is anything wrong with this methodology in principle, philosophers should be more cautious in how readily they claim that certain moral intuitions are non-controversial. We need to engage with empirical research in cross-cultural moral psychology to know which judgements are widely shared and which are not. Where moral disagreement is discovered, philosophers have many options in response: relativising the moral progress judgement, finding reasoning errors in the judgements of one side of the disagreement, or engaging in vindicating arguments aimed at showing that the judgements on one side of the disagreement originate in better social epistemic conditions than the judgements on the other. Each of these strategies has its own difficulties, but we won’t know whether these can be overcome until serious attempts are made. Working out which claims of moral progress are likely to receive the most widespread agreement, and which claims can be plausibly maintained in the face of disagreement, are important tasks for thinking about the potential for future moral progress.

Charlie Blunden

Charlie Blunden is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University (the Netherlands), working at the Ethics Institute on a project about moral progress. He is interested in political philosophy, economic ethics, psychology, and the links between these subjects (he also has an interest in natural history, but philosophy departments are, in general, woefully short on discussions about giant ground sloths, so this is more of a hobby).