Charlie Blunden

What do the steam engine, not marrying your cousin, and supporting gay rights have in common? The answer, according to this dissertation, is that they’re all part of the story of moral progress. Talking about moral progress can raise hackles. The term has often been used as a fig leaf for cultural chauvinism and worse. It invites the question: “Moral progress according to whom?” Even if this thorny normative question can be addressed, so that we can reasonably identify instances of moral progress according to plausible normative standards, we are still left with difficult social scientific questions about what causes moral progress. I tackle these normative and causal questions directly, and defend a theory of moral progress according to which there are three key kinds of moral progress: (1) Basic moral progress: moral progress claims that rely on widely agreed upon normative standards. I argue that widespread reductions in famine, reductions in absolute basic needs poverty, and improvements in lifespan and health all constitute basic moral progress. (2) Instrumental moral progress: forms of moral change which are causally related to bringing about basic moral progress, but for which their intrinsic progressiveness is subject to widespread disagreement, and which are thus only instrumentally morally progressive. I investigate three important forms of cultural and institutional change which predict the kind of economic prosperity associated with basic moral progress: increases in the rate of innovation, increases in the scale of cooperation, and demographic transitions within societies which lower the birth rate and thus make per capita increases in resources more likely. I explore the norms and institutions which make these social transformations possible, drawing on research from empirical economics, economic history, and cultural evolutionary theory to argue that loose kinship institutions (with low rates of cousin marriage, among other features), cultural individualism, and open-access institutions all play a role. I argue that these cultural norms and institutions are instrumentally (rather than intrinsically) morally progressive, because they are among the causes of basic moral progress. (3) Vindicated moral progress: forms of moral change which are normatively controversial, but for which a theory of error can be provided giving us reason to believe that one side of the disagreement is more likely to be correct than the other. I use the World Values Survey (a large, cross-cultural, and longitudinal dataset) to argue that economic development predicts increased support for the emancipative value of 'Choice': a value which predicts acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce. Drawing on Bernard Williams’ vindicatory genealogy of political liberty, I argue that increased support for 'Choice' is plausibly driven by an epistemically virtuous process in which increased access to the products of truthful inquiry undermines certain forms of justification for constraining the exercise of personal choice. However, I maintain a cautionary note: absent detailed research on the precise causal mechanisms which link economic development and support for 'Choice', this vindicating argument must be viewed as a hypothesis which is consistent with the data, but which requires further testing.

How does moral progress occur? This paper develops a naturalistic account grounded in cultural evolution. We argue that modern morality emerged through institutions facilitating cooperation among increasingly extensive networks of strangers. This process introduced a novel normative infrastructure including expanded moral status, social individualism, moral egalitarianism, political liberalism, and a robust is-ought distinction. We begin by addressing why evolutionary accounts historically struggled to explain moral traits, particularly altruism and cooperation beyond kin groups. We then characterize modern morality and its key features, focusing on the puzzle of the inclusivist anomaly: the granting of moral status to individuals independently of their strategic cooperation value. Drawing on recent research on kinship intensity and institutional development, we explain how the cultural evolution of impersonal prosociality emerged from the destruction of tight kinship institutions in Western and Central Europe over 1.5 millennia. Church policies against cousin marriage, polygamy, and other kinship practices weakened intensive kinship networks, enabling new forms of cooperation among unrelated strangers. Finally, we address whether this genealogical account debunks or vindicates modern morality. We argue that understanding the contingent historical origins of modern morality need not undermine its normative authority, while acknowledging ongoing challenges to its universalization.

English is the world’s dominant scientific language. As a lingua franca, its shared use has allowed communication between scholars from different linguistic backgrounds, which has enabled the flourishing of a global community of knowledge. However, this predominance favours researchers whose first language is English ('L1 users’) and disadvantages those for whom English is a second (or third, fourth or so on) language (‘LX users’). The latter can be at greater risk of linguistic discrimination in academia. Indeed, the effect on academic careers of linguistic injustice — broadly understood as entailing unequal costs of production, unequal opportunities linked to linguistic competence, and unequal respect to linguistically defined identities — is a subject of growing concern. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) could become a powerful tool for addressing linguistic injustice. Large language models (LLMs), in particular, have been praised for their potential to mitigate language barriers in research. Despite apparent reasons for optimism, further ethical deliberation is called for regarding the use of generative AI for empowering LX users and mitigating linguistic injustice in academia. We raise two points of caution to advance this debate. We argue that, while we should not take generative AI to be a silver bullet against linguistic injustice, this does not mean that LLMs cannot become valuable allies in mitigating linguistic injustices in academia, provided that we promote the cautious and responsible use of these technologies.

The literature on moral progress is full of (supposed) real-life examples of moral progress. These examples have two distinct components: one normative and one descriptive. The former picks out the moral criteria by which an episode of change counts as morally progressive; the latter picks out the unit that has undergone progress and the period of time over which that progress has occurred. While there is general agreement that nailing down the normative component of moral progress poses a substantial challenge, potential problems with the descriptive component have received far less attention and have not thus far been systematically addressed. In this paper, we aim to change this. We describe in detail a series of problems that can arise when selecting the unit(s) and time period of one’s progress claims and show how they can undermine the soundness of moral progress examples. We also sketch and evaluate potential solutions to these problems to improve the methodology of research on moral progress.

Moral beliefs, values, and attitudes differ across cultures and change over time. This contingency can invite anxiety about endorsing particular values and about the possibility of non-circular claims of moral progress. One way of addressing this anxiety is through vindicatory genealogies of value. This paper develops such a genealogy for the value of ‘Choice’, a value associated with support for gay rights, legal abortion, and the right to divorce, which has been robustly measured by the World Values Survey (WVS) since 1995. I argue that existing vindicatory genealogies, such as Nicholas Smyth’s vindication of emancipative values, suffer from methodological flaws due to problems of measurement invariance in the WVS, the dataset that ostensibly supports them. By contrast, ‘Choice’, as a specific value within the WVS framework, withstands rigorous statistical tests and is a more defensible target for vindication. With ‘Choice’ defended as an apt target for genealogy, I propose a vindicatory mechanism based on Bernard Williams’ genealogy of liberty, which I label the withering of justification. I apply this mechanism to the value of ‘Choice’, offering an empirically precise and normatively compelling vindicatory genealogy, and positioning ‘Choice’ as a key topic for future research in the philosophy of moral progress.

Several philosophers have proposed that key instances of moral progress in the past, as well as perhaps some present or future progressive changes, rely on people overcoming the notion that their current institutions and social practices are “natural, necessary, and inevitable feature[s] of the social world” (Pleasants, “Moral Argument is Not Enough,” 166). I call this account of how moral progress happens denaturalization. In this paper, I provide a more rigorous account of denaturalization than has thus far been provided in the literature, so that its plausibility and its promise as a mechanism of progressive change can be better assessed. I develop an account according to which denaturalization occurs when people come to have more accurate judgments about the costs of abandoning status quo institutions in favor of alternative institutions. I draw on the philosophy of conventionality to develop an account of costs and provide a limited defense of the psychological realism of the costs account of denaturalization. With this more detailed and explicit account in hand, I explore under what kinds of conditions denaturalization is likely to lead to moral progress.

An important question about moral progress is what causes it. One of the most popular proposed mechanisms is moral reasoning: moral progress often happens because lots of people reason their way to improved moral beliefs. Authors who defend moral reasoning as a cause of moral progress have relied on two broad lines of argument: the general and the specific line. The general line presents evidence that moral reasoning is in general a powerful mechanism of moral belief change, while the specific line tries to establish that moral reasoning can explain specific historical examples of moral progress. In this paper, we examine these lines in detail, using Kumar and Campbell’s (2022, A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How It Made Us Human. Oxford University Press) model of rational moral progress to sharpen our focus. For each line, we explain the empirical assumptions it makes; we then argue that the available evidence supports none of these assumptions. We conclude that at this point, we have no idea if moral reasoning causes 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.

Implicit cognition is cognition that happens automatically and (typically) non-consciously. In moral psychology, implicit cognition is almost always understood in terms of dual process models of moral judgment. In this chapter, we address the question whether implicit moral judgment is usefully cashed out in terms of automatic (“type 1”) processes, and what the limitations of this approach are. Our chapter has six sections. In (1), we provide a brief overview of dual process models of domain-general (moral and non-moral) cognition. (2) reviews a recent debate regarding the soundness of dual process models to begin with. Section (3) is about dual process accounts of moral judgment specifically. The last three sections then survey attempts to go beyond a simplistic automatic/controlled (“type 2”) distinction in conceptualizing implicit moral cognition. Recently, three main theoretical approaches have emerged, which all revolve around the questions whether type 2 processing can successfully penetrate implicit moral cognition. First, rational learning approaches highlight how episodes of moral learning can feed back into and shape our moral intuitions (4). Second, so-called triple process models suggest that automatic cognitive outputs can under certain circumstances be reined in by reflective cognition (5). Finally, recent evidence shows that moral reasoning is not as impotent as earlier developments in empirical moral psychology claimed to demonstrate (6).

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways.

In the last few decades, several philosophers have written on the topic of moral revolutions, distinguishing them from other kinds of society-level moral change. This article surveys recent accounts of moral revolutions in moral philosophy. Different authors use quite different criteria to pick out moral revolutions. Features treated as relevant include radicality, depth or fundamentality, pervasiveness, novelty and particular causes. We also characterize the factors that have been proposed to cause moral revolutions, including anomalies in existing moral codes, changing honour codes, art, economic conditions and individuals or groups. Finally, we discuss what accounts of moral revolutions have in common, how they differ and how moral revolutions are distinguished from other kinds of moral change, such as drift and reform.

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.

The Market Failures Approach (MFA) is one of the leading theories in contemporary business ethics. It generates a list of ethical obligations for the managers of private firms that states that they should not create or exploit market failures because doing so reduces the efficiency of the economy. Recently the MFA has been criticised by Abraham Singer on the basis that it unjustifiably does not assign private managers obligations based on egalitarian values. Singer proposes an extension to the MFA, the Justice Failures Approach (JFA), in which managers have duties to alleviate political, social, and distributive inequalities in addition to having obligations to not exploit market failures. In this paper I describe the MFA and JFA and situate them relative to each other. I then highlight a threefold distinction between different types of obligations that can be given to private managers in order to argue that a hybrid theory of business ethics, which I call the MFA +, can be generated by arguing that managers have obligations based on efficiency and duties based on equality to the extent that these latter obligations do not lead to efficiency losses. This argument suggests a novel theoretical option in business ethics, elucidates the issues that are at stake between the MFA and the JFA, and clarifies the costs and benefits of each theory.

In his paper ‘A libertarian case for mandatory vaccination’, Jason Brennan argues that even libertarians, who are very averse to coercive measures, should support mandatory vaccination to combat the harmful disease outbreaks that can be caused by non-vaccination. He argues that libertarians should accept the clean hands principle, which would justify mandatory vaccination. The principle states that there is a (sometimes enforceable) moral obligation not to participate in collectively harmful activities. Once libertarians accept the principle, they will be compelled to support mandatory vaccination. In my paper, I argue that the cases Brennan uses to justify this principle are disanalogous to the case of non-vaccination and that they are not compelling to libertarians. The cases Brennan offers can be explained by a libertarian using the individual sufficiency principle: which states that if an individual’s action is sufficient to cause harm, then there is a (sometimes enforceable) moral obligation not to carry out that action. I argue that this principle is more appropriate to Brennan’s examples, and more appealing to the libertarian, than the clean hands principle. In order to get libertarians to accept the clean hands principle, I present a modified version of one of Brennan’s cases that is analogous to the case of non-vaccination. Using this case, I argue that whether the clean hands principle will justify mandatory vaccination is dependent on whether the herd immunity rate in a given population is approaching a threshold after which a collective risk of harm will be imposed onto others.