Benedict Lane

This paper introduces and defends the concept of “deliberative injustice” for hermeneutic technology assessment. Attempts to ethically assess emerging technologies—for example, quantum technologies—often centre on the imagined futures associated with these technologies. Competing sociotechnical “visions” shape public debate and guide decisions about funding, research, and regulation. The paper argues that these visions are not idle speculation or mere prediction, but powerful tools that shape which (and whose) futures are seen as possible, desirable, or legitimate. However, not everyone has equal power to wield these tools. Using David Lewis’s idea of the “conversational score,” the paper shows how imbalances of social power can lead to some voices being ignored or dismissed in the context of societal deliberation about emerging technologies. Those whose voices are ignored or dismissed are wronged not only because they may suffer consequences in the future, but because they are both degraded and damaged in their capacity as deliberative agents in the present. By defining deliberative injustice in terms of whose contributions to public debate receive “uptake” and on what basis, the paper shifts attention away from future outcomes and toward present-day structures of power, offering a new, deontological approach to the ethics of emerging technologies. It illustrates the manifestation of deliberative injustice in current practices of societal deliberation about emerging technologies, with a particular emphasis on quantum technologies. It concludes with a call for ethicists of technology to pay greater attention to deliberative injustice in the future.

One of the most ethically significant features of new and emerging 21st century technologies is their potential to disrupt the social status quo, for better or worse. Correspondingly, one of the most pressing questions in the philosophy and ethics of technology is how to understand and respond to this potential for social disruption. A prominent account of social disruption is what I call the “epistemic account,” according to which socially disruptive technologies are _sources of moral-epistemic uncertainty_ and _trigger moral inquiry_ into the novel circumstances they bring about and the new actions they make possible. This paper begins with a critique of the epistemic account and develops an alternative account according to which socially disruptive technologies undermine the _very possibility of progressive inquiry_ (as opposed to simply triggering it). It continues to draw attention to an underappreciated connection between the concept of social disruption, the notion of progress through inquiry, and our capacity to “go on in the same way,” drawing on the literature surrounding Wittgenstein’s famous rule-following considerations. A picture of social disruption is sketched out – the “language-game” picture – that challenges many widespread philosophical assumptions, including the objectivity of disruptive power, the explainability and predictability of social disruption, and the justificatory status of our ethical responses to social disruption.

Moral revolutions are rightly coming to be recognised as a philosophically interesting and historically important mode of moral change. What is less often acknowledged is that the very characteristics that make a moral change revolutionary pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of moral progress. This is because moral revolutions are characterised by a diachronic form of deep moral disagreement: moral agents on either side of a moral revolution adopt different standards for assessing the merits of a moral argument, and according to the standards they adopt, agents on neither side of the revolution ought to accept the arguments being put forward by those on the other. This threatens to undermine the progressive status of many of our most celebrated historical examples of moral revolutions: if a moral revolution only looks progressive in light of a change in evaluative standards it itself brought about, then moral progress seems relative to a particular historical perspective; if prior to a moral revolution taking place the moral arguments in its favour fall short of the relevant standards, moral revolutions can never be the outcome of rational argumentation. This apparent relativism and irrationality sits uncomfortably alongside our common-sense intuition that the moral revolutions upon which our contemporary moral worldview rests count as genuine moral progress. In this paper, I deepen currently popular Kuhnian-inspired accounts of moral revolution by incorporating Wittgensteinian ideas from _Philosophical Investigations_ and _On Certainty_. The result is an original way of thinking about deep moral disagreements, moral revolutions, and moral progress.

How do we justify the normative standards to which we appeal in support of our moral progress judgments, given their historical and cultural contingency? To answer this question in a noncircular way, Elizabeth Anderson and Philip Kitcher appeal exclusively to formal features of the methodology by which a moral change was brought about; some moral methodologies are systematically less prone to bias than others and are therefore less vulnerable to error. However, we argue that the methodologies espoused by Anderson and Kitcher implicitly appeal to the substantive principle of “moral universalism.” This sets up the positive project of the paper: an attempt to vindicate moral universalism with a pragmatic genealogy. Using resources from cultural evolutionary theory and the history of ideas we argue that the universalistic norms widely committed to in many societies today have the function of maintaining cooperation in large anonymous groups. Furthermore, while universalistic norms play this instrumental role, their functional benefits are best secured when people following such norms do so for intrinsic rather than instrumental reasons. Finally, having elaborated our pragmatic genealogy, we close by considering how this genealogy should affect our commitment to moral universalism and how it can complement the methods of Anderson and Kitcher.

Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question.