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.

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.

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.