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MORAL PROGRESS: CONCEPT, MEASUREMENT, AND APPLICATION VU UNIVERSITY, AMSTERDAM, 24-25 JUNE 2015 Abstracts 1 Abstracts keynotes (in chronological order) Wednesday, June 24th: 9:30: Slavery, Carbon, and Moral Progress (p. 3) Dale Jamieson, New York University 14:00: Moral Progress and Human Agency (p. 4) Michelle Moody-Adams, Columbia University Thursday, June 25th: 9:30: The Possibility of Moral Progress (p. 5) Martin van Hees, VU University 14:00: Locating Value in Moral Progress (p. 6) Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Lund University 2 Slavery, Carbon, and Moral Progress Keynote Address - June 24th, 9:30 Dale Jamieson New York University [email protected] For more than a half century it has been understood that carbon emissions are a threat to global climate, yet little effective action has been taken. Part of the reason is because of the role of carbon in the global economy. Most of the ten largest corporations in the world are in the fossil fuel business, fossil fuel production is central to the economies of many (perhaps most) United Nations member states, and fossil fuels can generally be said to be the life-blood of the global economy. How is it possible, it may be asked, for there to be moral progress in the face of such economic headwinds? The same question could have been asked about slavery. In 1805-1806, the value of British West Indian sugar production equalled about 4% of the national income of Great Britain. Yet in 1807 the British began a campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade that cost 5,000 British lives and about 2% of national income annually for sixty years. In this talk I examine this episode of moral progress in order to see what can be learned that may be helpful in the campaign to abolish fossil fuels. 3 Moral Progress and Human Agency Keynote Address – June 24th, 14:00 Michelle Moody-Adams Columbia University [email protected] The idea of moral progress is a necessary presupposition of action for beings whose influence on the world is usually quite circumscribed, and whose understanding of the nature of that influence is necessarily limited and incomplete. We must believe that moral progress is possible, and that it might have been realized in human experience at some point in history, if we are to be confident that continued human action has any point at all. But the idea of moral progress is not defensibly understood as capable of yielding a principle, or set of principles, to guide moral or political action, or to appropriately govern deliberations, undertaken with the aim of making the world “a better place.” Thinkers who demand a “theory of moral progress,” and insist on some means of “accounting” for the complexity of “gains and losses” over time, wrongly demand that reflection about the idea of moral progress yield a determinate principle or principles of moral and political action. But while the idea of moral progress cannot directly yield such principles of action, it can serve as a plausible , if contestable, principle of historical interpretation--among other plausible principles--to guide that backwardlooking reflection that helps shape our sense of living in a world in which human action can make sense. 4 The Possibility of Moral Progress Keynote Address – June 25th, 9:30 Martin van Hees VU University [email protected] On one interpretation, moral progress refers to a reduction of the disparities between our moral convictions and our actual behaviour: we make moral progress if we act more often upon our moral beliefs. A second interpretation views moral progress as a development of our moral views. Here progress is achieved when our moral beliefs converge to the 'correct' moral standard. Both interpretations of moral progress are problematic. By defining progress in terms of the beliefs and convictions that we happen to have, the first interpretation introduces an element of arbitrariness. The second interpretation is vulnerable to the same charge, but the arbitrariness now comes in at the level of the chosen standard. Why should we commit ourselves to the standard in question? Drawing on recent work in epistemology on infinite regresses, I describe the outlines of an account of moral progress that does refer to our actual beliefs and convictions but which is less vulnerable to the charge of arbitrariness. In particular, I argue that moral progress can be interpreted as the gradual construction of a moral standard in the face of moral uncertainty. 5 Locating Value in Moral Progress Keynote Address – June 25th, 14:00 Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen Lund University [email protected] Making moral progress is generally considered to be valuable. However, it is not obvious what kind of value accrues to moral progress, nor in what way moral progress is in fact valuable, if it is valuable at all. Just where value should be located in moral progress turns in part on how the two following questions relate to one another: Is the world better today than it was in the past? And has the world of today made any moral progress? This talk consists, then, of two parts. Part one outlines a distinction between a forward- and a backward-looking sense of moral progress. This distinction serves mainly two purposes here: first, it suggests there might be two fundamental ways for something to make moral progress, only one of which seems to be appropriately applicable to persons; second, the distinction facilitates the discussion in Part 2 of not only some key differences but also some challenges when it comes to determining why making moral progress matters. 6 Abstracts papers (in alphabetical order) Varieties of Moral Improvement, Or Why Metaethical Constructivism Must Explain Moral Progress (p. 12) Caroline T. Arruda, The University of Texas The Evanescence of Moral Progress (p.15) Rachelle Bascara, Birbeck College Ethics and etiquette (p. 17) Sandy Berkovski, Bilkent University Pigments of Reality: Moral Cognition, Political Ethics and Linguistic Epistemology (p. 19) Matteo Bonotti, Queen’s University Belfast Yael Peled, McGill University Incommensurability and Moral Progress (p. 22) Martijn Boot, Waseda University Why we can’t do without moral mytho-poesis – an almost-theistic argument in favor of the possibility of moral progress (p. 23) Govert Buijs, VU University Progressing towards justice: the case of whistleblowing (p. 25) Emanuela Ceva, University of Pavia Cultural moral progress despite biological moral decline? – an empirical and ethical investigation of the notion of “moral progress” (p. 26) Eveline Gutzwiller, University of Luzern Markus Christen, University of Zurich Darcia Narvaez, University of Notre Dame 7 Is moral progress possible? – a historical-philosophical perspective (p. 28) A.M.R. de Dijn, University of Amsterdam Refreshing a legal order: on the constructive role of tragic legal choices (p. 30) Iris van Domselaar, University of Amsterdam A Working Definition of Moral Progress (p. 31) Jeremy Evans, Boston College The Benefits of Population-level Thinking for Ethics (p. 32) Mark Fedyk, Mount Allison University What can we do? Empirical Philosophy (p. 34) Annemie Halsema, VU University Evolution and Moral Progress (p. 35) Julia Hermann, Utrecht University Moral Progress in Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism (p. 36) Hyun Höchsmann, East China Normal University A Liberal Theory of Institutional Moral Progress—The Rights-Protection Theory (p. 39) Hsin-wen Lee, City University of Hong Kong The Snafu that is Progress (p. 41) Abigail Klassen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Moral Progress without Moral Realism (p. 43) Charlie Kurth, Washington University Can we improve our emotional apprehension of moral values? (p. 46) Samuel Lepine, University of Lyon Supervenient Moral Causation: How Moral Facts Cause Moral Progress (p. 48) Andres Luco, Nanyang Technology University 8 Can There Be Moral Progress Without Moral Realism? (p. 50) Michael Lyons, University of Bristol Wellbeing and time: Are we happier than we were ten thousand years ago? (p. 52) Jason Marsh, St. Olaf College Improving Moral Craftmanship by Moral Case Deliberation (p. 53) Suzanne Metselaar & Guy Widdershoven, VU Medical Center Moral Progress and the Divine Command Theory: Can the Good become Better? (p. 55) Annette Mosher, VU University Levels of Moral Enhancement (p. 57) Norbert Paulo, University of Salzburg The concept of moral progress: a Kantian outlook (p. 59) Elena Parthene, Sorbonne University Moral Progress and the Reliability of Moral Intuitions (p. 61) Johnnie Pedersen, Roskilde University Hume's 'General Sense of Common Interest' and Conditions for Moral Progress (p. 63) Björn Petersson, University of Lund Scientific Progress as Moral Progress (p. 64) Simone Pollo, Sapienza Università di Roma Progress through Reason? Liberalism’s Contributions to the Idea of Moral Progress (p. 65) Dr Vanessa Rampton, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology The moral progress of an individual (p. 66) Amber Riaz, Lahore University of Management Sciences 9 Dynamism in Legality: The Significance of Human Dignity in International Law (p. 67) Stephen Riley, Utrecht University Moral Progress: enhancing justice? (p. 68) Alexander Rosas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia Two premisses for assessing moral progress (p. 70) C. A. Santander, University of Valencia Moral Progress and Moral Meddling (p. 72) Nina Scherrer, University of Bern Individual moral development and moral progress (p. 74) Anders Schinkel & Doret de Ruyter, VU University Amsterdam No moral progress without an objective moral ontology (p. 76) Jaron Schoone, Berlage Lyceum Moral progress by increased empirical knowledge and real life experience (p. 78) Thomas Schramme, University of Hamburg Moral Progress, Moral Plurality, and Mill’s Paradox (p. 79) Christian Seidel, Friedrich-Alexander Universität How do we measure people’s Moral Progress? (p. 82) Sean Sinclair, Leeds University Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Some Benefits of Rationalization (p. 85) Jesse Summers, Duke University On Harm as unifying ethical principle (p. 88) Tanja de Villiers-Botha, Stellenbosch University Moral Progress and Motivation (p. 90) Amna Whiston, University of Reading 10 Moral Progress and Moral Ignorance (p. 92) Jan Willem Wieland, VU University Amsterdam The Order of Humanity as the Fulcrum of Moral Progress (p. 93) Anosike Wilson Progress in History – Hegel Reviewed (p. 95) Bart Zandvoort, University College Dublin 11 Varieties of Moral Improvement, Or Why Metaethical Constructivism Must Explain Moral Progress Caroline T. Arruda The University of Texas [email protected] Among the available metaethical views, it would seem that moral realism—in particular moral naturalism—must grapple with the concept of moral progress. We see this in the oft-used argument from disagreement against various moral realist views (Mackie 1977; Shafer-Landau 1994). My suggestion in this paper is that, surprisingly, metaethical constructivism has at least as pressing a need to explain moral progress. There is significant debate over whether metaethical constructivism, hereafter constructivism, is realist or anti-realist about moral facts (Bagnoli 2002; 2013; Copp 2013; Enoch 2009a; 2009b; Street 2010; Wallace 2010). For the moment, then, I will provide an ecumenical account of constructivism, as I will show that constructivists’’ views about the status of moral facts does not mitigate the demand that it explain moral progress. Ecumenically speaking, metaethical constructivism is the view that morality is underwritten by the practical attitudes of agents. Those constructivists who fall closer to the realist side of the debate argue that moral objectivity (and thus moral truth) is a product of what a practically rational agent would endorse (Bagnoli 2013; Korsgaard 1986; 1996; 1997; 2008; 2008a; 2008b; 2009;1 O’Neill 1989; Rawls 1999/1980; Wallace 2010).2 By contrast, those constructivists who align themselves with moral anti-realism take, to use Sharon Street’s (2010) phrase, valuing to be underwritten by what creatures capable of valuing actually or counterfactually would value. Why think, however, that constructivism must explain moral progress? Let’s begin by defining ‘moral progress’. I take moral progress to be, minimally, the opportunity to access and to act in light of moral facts of the matter, whether they are mindindependent or -dependent. For the metaethical constructivist, however, I add that moral progress ought also mean that agents come to be or could come to be motivated to act in light of the right kind of moral judgments (Bagnoli 2002). This is what I call the moral motivation requirement. 1 But compare with Hussain and Shah (2013). This description does not distinguish between those forms of constructivism that are more robustly (or perhaps “purely”) proceduralist (e.g., Rawls’ view) and those that are not (e.g., Korsgaard’s view). On this issue, see Engstrom (2013). 2 12 Together I take this to mean that, for all forms of constructivism, moral progress must be explained as form of moral improvement, or agents aspiring to be better sorts of moral agents. In what moral improvement consists differs for various forms of constructivism. Here I distinguish between three different versions of metaethical constructivism: Humean constructivists as represented by Street (2008; 2010; 2012), Kantian constitutivist constructivists as represented by Korsgaard, and constructivists about practical reason as represented by Carla Bagnoli (2002; 2013).3 I then show why each of these three forms of constructivism must explain moral progress qua moral improvement and in what such improvement consists for each view. I begin with Humean constructivism (Street 2006; 2008; 2010). Recall that this view is anti-realist (Street 2008; 2012). On this view, I argue, moral progress qua moral improvement is local in that it may be directed only at certain kinds of attitudes that we have as valuing creatures. The pressure for moral improvement is self-generated insofar as it is a product of taking stock of what we value, if indeed we decide to engage in such a procedure. In this sense, this view meets what I have called the moral motivation requirement only by the skin of its teeth. In this regard, Humean constructivism does not provide a stable account of moral progress, given what kind of view of moral progress constructivists must defend. I then turn to consider Kantian constructivism, best represented by Korsgaard’s (1986; 1996; 1997; 2008; 2008a; 2008b; 2009) Kantian constitutivism.4 Recall that Kantian varieties of constructivism are closer to, if not squarely in the domain of, moral realism.5 I show that moral progress qua moral improvement on this view has three characteristics. First, moral improvement must be global in that it requires that we improve upon the conception of the self at which we aim. Second, it is generated by virtue of rational pressure to be coherent, practically rational agents. Third, like Humean constructivism, it has a difficult time meeting the moral motivation requirement. The last version of constructivism that I consider is constructivism about practical reason, best represented by Carla Bagnoli’s (2002; 2013) work. In contrast to the other forms of constructivism discussed here, Bagnoli (2013:155) argues that constructivism is not directly a view about morality. Rather, it a view about our practical knowledge of our 3 I limit the discussion to the above three forms of constructivism, setting aside contractualist forms of constructivism since contractualism is about a group of idealized rational agents and not individuals agents themselves. 4 I set aside contractualist varieties of Kantian constructivism for reasons that I make clear in footnote 3. 5 This characterization, as I note earlier, is up for debate. 13 self-legislating capacities. In this sense, this view does not require a strong view about moral improvement. Given that it is a view about practical reason, however, it entails a view about the outer constraints on what constitutes moral improvement. Namely, our moral improvement must be consistent with our improvement as practically rational, self-legislating beings. It also must retain strong commitment to what I have called the moral motivation requirement. I conclude by evaluating which view of constructivism is best able to account for moral improvement. I argue that Bagnoli’s constructivism, or constructivism about practical reason, provides the best means for explaining moral improvement while Kantian constructivism has the most difficult time doing so. 14 The Evanescence of Moral Progress Rachelle Bascara Birbeck College [email protected] Moral progress is to be measured by the obliteration or reduction of an injustice, without the same injustice being replicated elsewhere. The conferment of human status to slaves in Western societies, the permission to pursue education and own properties to people previously considered unqualified, the introduction of sexual harassment and anti-discrimination laws are among the historical milestones which have been asserted as evidence of moral progress. Indeed, in a sense, they are. Such laws could be construed as the state recognizing a wrong and taking a stand. But sometimes the formal admission of equality can also function as a means to obscure the lack of moral progress. At worst, they could provide the appearance of legitimacy to an injustice. They could render valid an ahistorical and severely skewed distribution of social goods for they encourage the perception of just deserts. In this paper, I argue that the removal of overt means of oppression could further reinforce the same oppression, but in a more insidious way. After the emancipation of slaves, an underclass of people with no education, no property, no highly marketable skills were rendered free to participate in the free market of competition. It is like stabbing someone’s knee, apologizing, and then challenging them to a race. The acceptance of women into the traditional paid labor force has been repeatedly championed as an instance of gender progress, whilst there is insufficient acknowledgment that more affluent women have outsourced their so-called domestic duties to women of lesser economic and social standing, obscuring the lack of gender progress in the domestic setting. When laws were introduced prohibiting marital rape and sexual harassment, we have the impression that women’s interests are being given sufficient consideration, which renders invisible the strong socio-cultural disincentives that prevent victims from seeking formal redress from such forms of violence and mistreatment. Despite the granting of de jure equality, blatant de facto inequality stubbornly persists. Despite legal mechanisms for the prevention, eradication, and redress for gender-based wrongs, cultural norms and conventions contribute to the persistence of the injustice in a subtler manner. In fact, one could argue that these injustices have taken on a new and improved facade of legitimacy. If women and ethnic minorities are no longer formally disqualified from climbing the corporate ladder, then the continued 15 predominance of white men in positions of power must be the result of choice and fair play. If women are still getting abused and mistreated, they must be choosing to endure the abuse, for there are laws that could be appealed to for their protection. However, despite the pitfalls of de jure equality and the inadequacies of legal remedies, they continue to be indispensable. Though they may have the tendency to obscure and conceal injustice, formal legislation can pave the path for genuine progress. The recognition of an injustice and the subsequent preventative or retributive legislation is still the first step in addressing an injustice. For in order for real moral progress to be possible, we need to be able to appeal to the ideals and aspirations enshrined in our laws. I take the case of criminalizing the non-reporting of suspected or known child abuse as a possible scenario in which we can use the law to generate obligations that invoke an aspirational and better moral world. 16 Ethics and etiquette Sandy Berkovski Bilkent University [email protected] It is common to dismiss the moral significance of etiquette. The rules of etiquette are thought to be arbitrary, not subject to rational command, and generally petty. Here I want to suggest that these criticisms are premature. Humans share with animals susceptibility to ‘urges’. Their behaviour can be causally determined by physiological needs, such as hunger, and by primitive emotions, such as anger. A fusion of these—partly through habit, partly inherited—is also possible, whereby people are pulled by complex emotions and desires, such as avarice or fame. As Elias’ classic study has shown, one chief purpose of etiquette is to bridle human urges and exercise self-control. Now one might think that the further purpose of this restraint is purely instrumental. Urges are impediments for smooth interaction. Once they are removed, interaction can flow smoothly. That this was a historical motive for introducing etiquette rules, and that it remains a contemporary motive for maintaining them, we do not have to dispute. But habituation of these rules leads to several effects of obvious moral significance. One is the softening of human dispositions. Public displays of cruelty become socially unacceptable. Cruelty may persist in privacy, where etiquette fails to penetrate. Yet, as it is no longer encouraged, its manifestations are expected to be fewer and weaker. Secondly, etiquette promotes respect for others. Deliberate insults and careless disregard for the needs and opinions of others are sneered at. Again, even though moral inhibitions may have nothing to do with the original motivation for prohibiting such behaviour, the routine practice of this behaviour cultivates nothing less than a moral norm of respect. The third effect is the formation of volitional agency. Instead of succumbing to urges, the agent develops the ability to control them in accordance with the rules. Control is achieved by selecting which desires and emotions can be displayed on a public occasion, and in what way. This ability is clearly a prerequisite for the performance of any moral action. Fourthly, etiquette dictates that no distinction should be made in the treatment of people on the basis of their qualities. If anything, strangers should be accorded an even more courteous treatment than the kin. Sick, disabled, generally queer people should not be made fun of and humiliated. And so, at least on many occasions, impartiality is encouraged. Of course, all these effects are at the same time conditions for the continuous practice of the etiquette-based behaviour. 17 The mere emergence of etiquette and the faithful adherence to its rules do not create a morally good character. Actions sanctioned by etiquette are not necessarily morally right. But I submit that no community could recognise and follow these rules for any protracted period of time, unless it develops and follows a canon of moral norms. Among the central elements of that canon will be the very same elements I have numbered. Hence the claim: effects of the behaviour sanctioned by etiquette constitute a sufficient condition for the gradual emergence of moral norms. The moral significance of etiquette should, therefore, be appraised dynamically in tracing the evolution of behaviour. As moral improvement within the community is constituted by the entrenchment of moral norms, a community that practises etiquette is predicted to have registered such improvement over a period of time. I conclude by addressing two outstanding problems. One is the question whether some codes of etiquette might include rules that are morally repugnant (e.g., those condoning cruelty and discrimination). I reply that this does not appear to be a logical possibility. If etiquette is designed to facilitate interaction, it is strange to suppose that positively immoral rules could achieve this goal. Another question is how terrible atrocities could be committed by civilised communities, agents that could well follow rules of etiquette to the letter. Here the response is, once again, that the moral role of etiquette can only be felt in a process. A sustained practice of etiquette results in improved moral dispositions within a community over a period of time. I bring up statistical data from the history of modern England intended to show how the prominence of etiquette was correlated with the drop in committed atrocities. 18 Pigments of Reality: Moral Cognition, Political Ethics and Linguistic Epistemology Matteo Bonotti Queen’s University Belfast [email protected] Yael Peled McGill University [email protected] Is our moral cognition “coloured” by the language(s) that we speak? Surprisingly, perhaps, despite the crucial significance of language to the human experience and perception of the world, very few attempts have been made thus far to consider the possibility of language-based epistemic diversity effects on moral cognition. Within contemporary normative analytical political theory such an omission is particularly intriguing, considering the centrality of language to key notions such as deliberative democracy6, public reason7 and epistemic injustice8. Within the context of normative political theory, the literature on culturally and linguistically-divers societies seemingly invites, if not necessitates, closer attention to the possibility of linguistic relativity effects on the moral perceptions of individuals and groups from diverse backgrounds, origins and traditions who aim to negotiate political and ethical commonalities. The possibility of linguistic relativity has traditionally been associated with a strong definition of the principle, according to which language determines thought. Such strong interpretation, however, seems to have been more of a straw man than a serious proposition9. Emerging research across a broad range of disciplines, from linguistic anthropology to neuroethics, is presently engaged in a detailed and systematic effort to explore the weak definition of the linguistic relativity principle, according to which language shapes particular cognitive “habits” or “tendencies”, directing specific attention at some aspects of the world by codifying specific concepts, such as the Anglo concept of “fairness”10, the Japanese concept of “wa” (和, “harmony”, “peaceful group conformity”)11 or Bantu “Ubuntu” (humane-ness”, “the sharing of a universal bond of 6 Kymlicka and Patten, 2003: 14-16. Rawls, 2005. 8 Fricker, 2007. 9 Gumperz and Levinson, 1992: 33. 10 Wierzbicka, 2006: 141-170. 11 Wierzbicka, 1997: 248-253. 7 19 humanity”)12. Such concepts are not beyond the understanding of individuals who do not speak English, Japanese, or Bantu. Rather, it is simply that native English, Japanese or Bantu speakers have the respective ethical notion readily-encoded in their language, therefore requiring fewer cognitive resources for accessing and processing them in their localized semantic environment. This recent cutting-edge strand of research, across a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, offers normative political theorists an innovative angle on the interface between ethics, moral cognition and language. As such, it offers a framework that combines the normative theorising of plurilingual societies with a growing empirical and experimental body of work across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. This combined framework established in the paper therefore draws, in addition to core works in normative political theory, on the intellectual history of language (particularly Humboldt and Herder), as well as on current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff and Lucy), linguistic anthropology (Wierzbicka and Everett) and neuroethics (Costa et al.). More specifically, the paper explores documented and potential linguistic relativity effects on moral cognition in plurilingual societies, and analyses the implications that such effects have on contemporary thought in political and applied ethics. It argues for the necessity to establish a more epistemically-informed analytical frameworks in normative political theory, in order to overcome the danger of epistemic linguistic injustice (the failure to consider moral concepts embedded in less prominent languages as possessing equal epistemic status with those embedded in English, German or French as a source of valid and important knowledge), and fine-tune core notions in the discipline such as democratic deliberation and public reason. It likewise argues that greater sensitivity to linguistic relativity effects on real-world human communication and relationability is likely to generate benefits to the lives of pluralist societies that are intellectual and practical alike. References: - Costa, A., et al. (2014). “Your Morals Depend on Language”. PLoS ONE 9(4): e94842. - Everett, D. (2009). Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the - Amazonian Jungle. New York: Pantheon Books. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 12 Ramose, 2002; Louw, 2006. 20 - Gumperz, J. J., Levinson, S. C. (1992). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Herder, J. G. v. (1999). Philosophical Writings (ed. Forster, M. N.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Humboldt, W. v. (1999)[1863]. On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Kymlicka, W., and Patten, A. (2003). “Introduction: Language Rights and Political Theory: Contexts, Issues and Approaches”. In Language Rights and Political Theory (eds. Kymlicka, W., and Patten, A.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-52. - Lakoff, G. (1990). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal - about the Mind. Illinois: Chicago University Press. Louw, D. J. (2006). “The African Concept of Ubuntu and Restorative Justice”. In Handbook of Restorative Justice: A Global Perspective (eds. Sullivan, D., and Tifft, L.). New York: Routledge, 161-173. - Lucy, J. A. (1992). Language Diversity and Thoughts: A Reformulation of the - Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morton, M. (1989). Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unity and Diversity in On Diligence in Several Learned Languages. State College: Pennsylvania State University. - Ramose, M. B. (2002). “The Ethics of Ubuntu”. In Philosophy from Africa 2 (eds. Coetzee, P. H. and Roux, A. P. J.). Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 324-330. - Rawls, J. (2005). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. - Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding Cultures through Their Keywords: English, - Russian, Polish, German and Japanese. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 21 Incommensurability and Moral Progress Martijn Boot Waseda University [email protected] This paper concerns the question whether we can rationally and adequately compare two different moral states and whether we can determine which state forms a moral progress compared to the other. I will argue that – due to the incommensurability of heterogeneous moral values – the ranking of different moral states can only be incomplete. This means that some but not all moral conditions can be ordered according to the level of morality or overall moral progress. Morality is a multifaceted concept. Its multiple aspects are related to heterogeneous human values. The central question is how the divergent moral elements can be integrated and weighed in such a way that we are able to assesss whether one moral state, which is better with respect to one element, forms a moral progress compared to a different moral state, which is better with respect to another element. We are often required to weigh the competing elements against each other in order to be capable of answering this question. I will argue that, in particular cases, incommensurability of competing ethical values or elements of morality may prevent a determinate weighing. In those cases the answer to the question whether a particular state of morality is superior to another is indeterminate. These considerations support the idea of moral pluralism, which has to be distinguished from moral relativism. Unlike the latter, the former believes in universally valid moral principles but recognizes that these principles can be weighed and ranked differently, without necessarily making one ranking morally better than another. This approach promotes respect for divergent moral states in which universally valid moral principles are ordered differently. 22 Why we can’t do without moral mytho-poesis – an almost-theistic argument in favor of the possibility of moral progress Govert Buijs VU University [email protected] Imagine the following: in an infinite space there is just one flying object, a meteorite. Would it be possible for any observer (which may well be we ourselves) to determine whether this object is making progress? Can we ever know whether it is flying forwards or backwards or sideways? We can only say so when we first choose another point of reference. In this paper I argue that the same holds mutatis mutandis for our moral universe. However, there is no objective fixed point. For example, there are very interesting studies indicating a decline of violence as an overall development, either in Western culture (Norbert Elias) or in mankind at large (Steven Pinker). But whether this is to be considered as progress or as regress, all depends on the point of reference that is applied: earlier there was fear that the West would lose its heroic values and become effeminate. How are moral points of reference identified? This question inevitably refers to ‘mythopoetic’ activity, in which the moral nature of origins of our universe are identified. Based on the work of (early) Ricoeur and others, it will be argued that there are a number of different types of myths that all engender their own idea of moral progress and regress. Both in ancient and modern times myths are constructed (myths of original violence, of original peace, of a educational process of mankind, etc.) However, the myths are not entirely random constructions. They refer to and provide interpretations of basic human experiences. In this paper it is argued that the must fully developed type of myths that can serve as yardstick for moral progress and regress have the structure of a ‘cosmic command’: ‘let there be an earth…’ together with ‘let there be mankind…’ and ‘let them be there together’. On the basis of this myth one can talk about moral progress in terms of a growth of both ecological and humanitarian value (in close mutual connection). However, can this myth be somehow true (what Plato would call an alethinos logos) and not just another ethnocentric construction (cf. Rorty)? In this paper it will be argued that there are reasons to consider this myth plausible, given certain (at this stage: four) elements of our human moral experience: the conatus essendi, teleology, suffering and language itself. 23 In this way an almost-theistic argument is developed in order to find a point of reference that makes it possible to talk about moral progress in a meaningful way. 24 Progressing towards justice: the case of whistleblowing Emanuela Ceva University of Pavia [email protected] The paper contributes to the philosophical discussion of political corruption by offering an account of those who reveal cases of corruption to the public as agents of moral progress. Politically corrupt behaviour occurs when people who occupy institutional roles, entrusted with the public power to implement public rules and operate public procedures, do in fact bend such rules and procedures in a partisan manner for the sake of obtaining some undue personal advantage. I clarify the moral wrongness of this form of corruption as an instance of relational injustice insofar as those who engage in acts of political corruption disrupt the respectful relations of mutual accountability that should hold between citizens in a democracy. As a response to this kind of injustice, I consider the action of whistleblowers and their role in achieving relational justice. I show that by calling the attention of the public on particular instances of corruption, whistleblowers play an important communicative function aimed at re-establishing the interpersonal relations of mutual accountability that corruption disrupts. On this basis, I suggest viewing their action as a direct contribution to progressing towards justice. I conclude by drawing from this particular analysis some more general implications on the role of conscientious law-breaking in bringing about moral progress in society. 25 Cultural moral progress despite biological moral decline? – an empirical and ethical investigation of the notion of “moral progress” Eveline Gutzwiller University of Luzern [email protected] Markus Christen University of Zurich Darcia Narvazez University of Notre Dame Moral progress may be a matter of time scale. If intuitive measures for moral progress like the degree of physical violence within a society are taken as empirical markers for moral progress, then most human societies have experienced moral progress in the last few centuries (Pinker 2011). However, if the development of the human species is taken as relevant time scale, there is theoretical and anthropological evidence that humanity has experienced a global moral decline. Small-band hunter-gatherers (SBHG), who represent a lifestyle presumed to largely account for 99% of human history, lived in a strikingly cooperative social world in face of a difficult and sometimes unpredictable physical world (Narvaez 2014). Human morality may be an advanced adaptation to enable the uniquely derived lifestyle of human foragers, which requires generosity and sharing due to extreme mutual interdependence for survival, thriving and dispersal (van Schaik et al. 2013). Compared to a SBHG baseline, the current mode of human existence involves considerable degree of organized violence and destructive behavior towards non-humans, which is likely an expression of moral decline. An immediate counter-argument to such a diagnosis of moral decline is the fact that the living conditions of the modern world that emerged since sedentariness and the beginning of agriculture (the neolithic revolution that happened about 12,000 years ago) are completely different compared to those of SBHG. Culture and technology have led to a rich differentiation of the social world as well as to an enormous increase of humans that inhabit the earth (the number of humans that populated the world around 12’000 B.C. is estimated with 2 Mio.; HYDE database). We therefore suggest that two notions of moral progress should be distinguished: a “biological notion” that refers to the inherited capacities that are typical of the evolutionary niche of mammals and that unfold in a typical way in the human species (i.e., a strong impetus of generosity, sharing, 26 egalitarianism, and cooperation) as part of a community of humans and non-humans; and a “cultural notion” that relates moral progress to dealing with an increasing diversity of temptations and possible wrongdoings in a human social world whose complexity accumulates in time. If such a differentiation makes sense, the question emerges, how these two notions of moral progress interact. In our contribution, we analyze this question from an empirical and a normative perspective. First, we outline both the notions of biological and cultural moral progress based on recent findings in neuroscience, anthropology and theoretical approaches that provide game-theoretic models of cultural evolution. Second, we provide evidence (based on data mainly of Western countries) that a tension between the biological and cultural notion of moral progress has emerged that shows up in various cultural practices, in particular in parenting. Third, we critically analyze the argument that the claim of biological moral decline is inadequate given the cultural complexity of the modern world. Fourth, we bring in the SBHG perspective that promotes a humbler, sustainable human orientation to living with non-humans as a moral ideal. Finally, we provide suggestions and justifications for re-aligning biological and cultural moral progress. References: - HYDE database (History Database of the Global Environment): accessible at: http://themasites.pbl.nl/tridion/en/themasites/hyde/index.html - Narvaez D (2014): Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality. Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc - Pinker S (2011): Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin Books. - Van Schaik C (2013): Morality as a Biological Adaptation – An Evolutionary Model Based on the Lifestyle of Human Foragers. In: Christen M et al. (eds): Empirically Informed Ethics (pp. 65-84). Berlin: Springer. 27 Is moral progress possible? – a historical-philosophical perspective A.M.R. de Dijn University of Amsterdam [email protected] Is moral progress possible? There seem to be good reasons to think so. When surveying the history of moral reasoning, it is hard to escape the idea that we are at least in some ways more moral than our ancestors, that we have learned to treat human beings better in various instances. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, ‘anyone who is a feminist has to think that there is at least something to that view.’ And that is not just true for feminists. The abolition of slavery, or, more recently, the radical sea-change in the treatment of gays, all these examples suggest that moral progress is not just possible, but that it has actually happened with a certain regularity in the not-too-distant past. But that observation immediately raises questions: are these really genuine examples of moral progress? Even more fundamentally, what is moral progress and how should we distinguish it from mere changes in our moral outlook? In this paper, I will argue that the best way to answer these questions is to draw inspiration from historians and philosophers of science, who have long been engaged in a similar enquiry about the possibility of scientific progress. More specifically, I will argue for a Kuhnian approach to the problem of moral progress. Just like Thomas Kuhn has shown that it is possible to think of progress within scientific reasoning, I aim to demonstrate that it is possible to think of progress within moral reasoning. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I outline Kuhn’s conception of scientific progress. In his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn made clear that there is no cumulative progress in scientific reasoning, but that the way in which science works can be better understood as a series of paradigm shifts, paradigms being scientific models which aim to describe the world. While these paradigms are noncommensurable, shifts between them happen because an accumulation of facts leads to the breakdown of paradigms, thus making way for new ones. In this sense, it is still possible to speak of scientific progress, since it is likely that one paradigm will be replaced with another which provides a better fit with the known facts about the world. Next, I will argue that this model can also be applied in principle to moral reasoning. Just like scientists use paradigms to understand the world, I argue, human beings can be thought of as starting from certain ‘moral paradigms’ to ground their moral outlook. Moreover, these moral paradigms typically depend on factual information 28 about the world and human beings. Thus, the moral paradigm ‘all human beings deserve to be treated equally’ depends for its persuasiveness on the factual claim that ‘all human beings are equal’. One might therefore speculate that, just like in the scientific world, the accumulation of new information about the world will trigger changes in moral reasoning, which will lead to new moral paradigms that provide a better fit with known facts about the world. I conclude by applying this Kuhnian approach to concrete historical examples of changes in moral reasoning. More specifically, I will show that the Kuhnian approach works well to explain how the 17th-century Cartesian Francois Poulain de la Barre became to first thinker in history to advocate the full equality between men and women. 29 Refreshing a legal order: on the constructive role of tragic legal choices Iris van Domselaar University of Amsterdam [email protected] ‘Wisdom comes through suffering’ is a famous comment made by the chorus in Aeschylus' tragic play The Oresteia. The phrase succinctly hints to the idea that a confrontation with a ‘tragic’ situation can lead to moral progress because it often takes the shock of pain to rightly appreciate the moral bearing of a situation or a choice. Sure, this idea is straightforwardly at odds with the Platonic tradition in which tragic situations are understood, if at all, as due to an irrational understanding of moral reality. Against the background of what can be dubbed the ‘tragic tradition’ in philosophy, I will (critically) explore the idea that allowing conceptual room for the possibility of tragic legal choices can spur moral progress within a legal order. The acknowledgment of the tragic character of legal choices and connected to this the ‘tragic responsive reactions’ that may follow can arguably help to morally 'refresh' a legal order. In case of a tragic legal choice the ‘drama’ will often be written ‘off court’, in the dialectical process between all legal and political institutions that are concerned with the realisation of values of political morality. In addition the paper will address the question whether this idea can be reconciled with the generally held requirement of the rule of law that the exercise of state-power should be bound by rules and in that sense be predictable. 30 A Working Definition of Moral Progress Jeremy Evans Boston College [email protected] One of the central obstacles to the study of moral progress is a persistent lack of consensus on a suitable definition of the relevant phenomenon. The stalemate appears unlikely to abate given fundamental disagreements in the way various normative traditions conceive the ‘moral’ in moral progress. For example, those in the consequentialist tradition will likely conceive of moral progress as a trajectory toward a world characterized by a greater distribution of intrinsic goods, whereas the Kantian tradition is more likely to characterize it as a trajectory toward a world where rational agents more reliably discharge their duties via the appropriate set of intentions. In the virtue ethics tradition, on the other hand, moral progress will instead describe a world populated with better human characters. These conceptions of moral progress are plainly in tension, since we can imagine a world with more intrinsic goods, but with worse characters, or a world with more duties discharged, but a decline in goods distributed. The aim of this essay is to propose a working definition of moral progress that can be endorsed by a wide variety of normative traditions. Rather than offering an analysis of moral progress, the goal is to identify a proxy property that reliably tracks, though is not coextensive with the philosophically relevant property. Drawing on an emerging empirical literature in social psychology, this paper proposes a working definition of moral progress as a sufficiently enduring increase in the indicators of aggregate subjective well-being (SWB) in a given population. I argue that this account should prove acceptable to a wide variety of normative traditions in light of growing evidence that the proxy property (SWB) is strongly correlated with the characteristics of moral progress associated with the various ethical programs. It is now widely recognized that individuals with high SWB have strong networks of authentic personal relationships, regularly engage in meaningful pursuits that transcend self-interest, achieve in domains that manifest personal strengths, are generally pro-social and altruistic, and have relatively high levels of positive affect and correspondingly low levels of negative affect (Diener & Seligman 2002). I argue that these characteristics are consistent with the indicators of moral progression in the various normative traditions, in spite of a common misconception about the role of well-being in Kantian ethics. 31 The Benefits of Population-level Thinking for Ethics Mark Fedyk Mount Allison University [email protected] Population-level thinking is common in both economics and evolutionary biology. The thesis of my proposed talk is we can understand both ethical inquiry and ethical progress at the level of populations, and that, moreover, adopting this level of description would be extremely fruitful. The benefits include systematic answers to many philosophical questions about ethical progress. What’s more, these answers are largely empirical in nature, and so while this means that they may not survive sustained philosophical or scientific scrutiny, the empirical content of the answers nevertheless provides a novel subject-matter for philosophical discussions of ethics. My talk begins from the assumption that knowledge of the causes of good and bad outcomes is ethical knowledge. After building a few additional concepts and definitions onto this assumption, I will then present some data indicating that, by adopting a population-level view of human social behaviour, there are many obvious examples of ethical knowledge, primarily in the form of knowledge about the effects of social institutions on the realization of goods and values in different populations. I would like to present three examples of these population-level analyses of the causes of good and bad outcomes, both to substantiate my talk’s thesis, but also to demonstrate that different types of empirical inquiry can produce the relevant relevant ethical insights. An interesting implication of this is that an empirically adequate account of the causes of good and bad outcomes at the population level of analysis can be produced only by a programme of interdisciplinary research, involving researchers from the social and behavioural sciences as well as the humanities. I said above that systematic answers to perennial philosophical questions about ethics are amongst the benefits of population-level thinking in ethics. My talk will conclude by reviewing some of these answers. For instance, figuring out the cause of a kind of bad outcome is, somewhat perversely, epistemic progress in ethics, inasmuch as this knowledge is new ethical knowledge. Metaphysical ethical progress can be made by producing new good outcomes, or by arresting bad outcomes; yet, knowledge of how to accomplish either of these kinds of metaphysical ethical progress will consist of more than just ethical knowledge. This leads to the suggestion that, insofar as we know a great deal about different kinds of bad outcomes and their causes, we have made a great deal of epistemic progress. However, because we lack further insight into how to reconfigure 32 the social world to produce better outcomes, we are unable to convert this epistemic progress into corresponding metaphysical progress. Additionally, evidence that social institutions are responsible for ethical outcomes supports the conclusion that ethical progress is (perhaps only) possible in populations that are sufficiently normativelyintegrated so as to allow for the formation of social institutions. And finally, populationlevel thinking about ethical progress allows us to conceptualize ethical truth in a way that is analogous to how scientific realists conceptualize the (approximate) truth of mature scientific theories. Specifically, the viability of population-level thinking in ethics provides the impetus for defining ethical truth as the increasingly better accommodation of our representations of the effects of social institutions on populations to the actual causal dynamics generated by interactions of social institutions and human populations. These successively better accommodations can, in turn, provide a posteriori evidence that vindicates the initial philosophical assumptions that are needed in order to explicitly conceptualize ethical progress and inquiry at the population level-of-analysis. 33 What can we do? Empirical Philosophy Annemie Halsema VU University [email protected] I will start with claiming that in the context of contemporary continental philosophy the question whether there is moral progress cannot be answered in a general sense, but only in a historically and culturally specific one. The idea of moral progress in the history of philosophy is related to the Enlightenment, with its trust in human reason and its critical relation to tradition and faith. It also is related to the notion of critique (Kant). In contemporary continental philosophy, most thinkers have given up the idea of progress. But what does that imply for philosophy as critique, and in what respects can we still think in terms of progress? I will first show that one of the main reasons for contemporary philosophers to leave the idea of progress behind, is the changed relation of philosophy to the human sciences. In the 20th century the knowledge privilege of philosophy is relativized because of the claim to objectivity of the sciences (Habermas), and the claim to knowledge of the modern subject is relativized because the subject becomes an object of the human sciences that is constituted in social structures (Foucault). That being the case, I will argue for a specific notion of philosophy as critique. With Jürgen Habermas I will claim that philosophy could form an important mediation between sciences and the Lebenswelt. In contrast to the human sciences that objectify the life-world and isolate themselves from it because of their expert-knowledge, philosophy can still relate to this background. Why? Because philosophy reminds us of the prescientific world in which we relate to things and others, and from which knowledge is derived. Yet often enough philosophers seem to abstract from the life world, rather than relate to it, and as such seem farther away from the life world than the sciences. I will end with arguing for empirical philosophy as a means of relating to the life world. Philosophy, in order to relate to the life world should explicitly relate to human experience, and take into account empirical data. I will illustrate this claim with examples from a current empirical philosophical project that I partake in. This project implies moral progress in a contextualized sense: it aims at bringing theories about embodiment closer to the experience of the women investigated, and therefore to improve medical care. 34 Evolution and Moral Progress Julia Hermann Utrecht University [email protected] Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have come up with possible evolutionary explanations of our moral capacities, evaluative tendencies and the content of our moral judgements. If we assume that at least some of these explanations are correct, what follows from this assumption for the possibility of moral progress? Does it make sense to talk about such a thing as moral progress at all, if we assume that our moral judgements depend on our evolutionary history? Does moral progress mean that we distance ourselves from our evolved tendencies and capacities and try to overcome (some of) them through autonomous moral reasoning? Or should we rather conceive of evolution itself as leading us towards moral progress? In order to be able to talk about moral progress, it seems necessary that moral judgements can in principle be justified. For instance, to be able to say that the abolition of (old forms of) slavery is an instance of (local or partial) moral progress, we must be able to distinguish between the unjustified judgement that slavery is morally right or permissible and the justified judgement that it is morally wrong. Yet some philosophers take evolutionary explanations of our moral sense to imply that moral judgements cannot be justified. In my talk, I shall reflect on different ways of understanding moral progress in the light of evolutionary explanations. Interestingly, it is possible to see a potential for moral progress in our capacity to critically reflect on our evolved evaluative tendencies and moral capacities and also in some of these tendencies and capacities themselves, for example altruistic tendencies. It shall be stressed throughout the talk that evolutionary hypotheses have no straightforward implications in relation to the possibility of moral progress. There are several ways of interpreting evolutionary findings, and we have to be extremely careful when drawing normative and meta-ethical conclusions from them. 35 Moral Progress in Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism Hyun Höchsmann East China Normal University [email protected] What constitutes moral progress? At first sight, the three major schools of philosophy in China, Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism do not appear to affirm moral progress since it might seem that they extol moral goals to be derived from past achievements. Confucius (551 - 479 BCE) upholds the legacy of Zhou dynasty. The Daoist philosophers, Laozi (ca. 604 - 531 BCE) and Zhuangzi (ca. 369 - 286 BCE) contrast the moral turpitude of the Warring States with the distant idyllic age of harmony. Buddhism invokes the teachings of the Buddha (560 - 480BCE) to be emulated. However, we find that there is a consensus on what constitutes moral progress in Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist ethics. The moral, aesthetic, and political goal of China is harmony: harmony of the individual, the family, the state, and ultimately with all of nature. What are the strategies for achieving moral progress? Love all men (Analects 12.22). This is Confucius’ reply when he is asked, ‘What does being moral consist in?’ Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism present distinct methodologies for achieving moral progress. Confucian ethics advocates the study of classics and expansion of love. The Great Learning affirms a continuum of endeavour towards moral progress, beginning with the personal ethical relations in the family to social relations in the community and culminating in harmony in the state and peace in the world. Daoism presents a critical re-examination of the established authorities of learning and conventional values. Setting aside the Confucian inculcation of the virtues of benevolence and righteousness, Daoist ethics urges developing the inherent propensity towards goodness. In advocating the life of spontaneity unconstrained by moral injunctions to achieve autonomy and defending individual freedom against the imposition of authority and tradition, Zhuangzi is unparalleled. Daoist ethics measures moral progress as expansion of equality and freedom to the wide sphere of nature. Moral 36 progress consists in overcoming distinctions and in affirming ‘the equality of things’ to arrive at unity of all of life. Buddhism teaches that enlightenment can be attained by transcending desire and attachment to the self. Moral progress towards enlightenment is possible when we recognise ‘the four noble truths’ (life is suffering, suffering is caused by craving, suffering can be eliminated by extinguishing craving and by following ‘the eight noble paths’). The eight noble paths are: right view, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Are all equally capable of moral progress? From the point of view moral capacity, equality prevails in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist ethics. They affirm that all are equally capable of moral progress and emphasise individual responsibility beyond the confines of individual life. Even Xunzi (fl. 298 - 238 BCE), who argued that human nature is prone to evil, uphold that moral progress can be attained by all through just laws and institutions. Laozi emphasises that the sage does not have a special moral intuition but shares the mind of the people. Buddhism upholds that all are endowed with ‘Buddha nature’ and are capable of realising it. Where is the empirical evidence for moral progress to be found? What evidence is there that Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism actually contributed to moral progress in the history of China? As the three ethical traditions became established as an integral part of life of all people in China, even as they failed to live up to the moral exhortation of the philosophers, all emperors knew that if they were viewed as trampling on the virtues extolled by the philosophers which lay the foundation of their society, they would forfeit the title by which they occupied the throne. The recourse to the teachings of the philosophers provided a tendency to check the violence of the oppression and maintain the self-respect of the people throughout the long history of China. While the three ethical traditions present distinct strategies for achieving moral progress, they are firmly grounded in the empirical domain. The conviction that all possess moral capacity is argued for in distinct ways and empirical evidence is sought to support the thesis of equal capacity of all to extend moral concern to alleviate suffering. In the celebrated example of a child falling into a well, Mencius (371 - 289 BCE) argues that all will feel compassion and that moral motivation stems from the sympathy and concern to alleviate distress. Zhuangzi affirms the way (dao) of moral progress in transcending the boundaries. 37 The feet of man on the earth is but on a small space, but going on to where he has not trod before, he traverses a great distance easily; so his knowledge is but small, but going on to what he does not already know, he comes to know what is meant by Heaven (Zhuangzi 24). 38 A Liberal Theory of Institutional Moral Progress—The RightsProtection Theory Hsin-wen Lee City University of Hong Kong [email protected] In this paper, I propose a liberal theory of institutional moral progress—the rights- protection theory. It is intended to be used to measure the moral value of public institutions, including constitutions, civil laws, and criminal laws in international and domestic societies. This theory holds that the moral values of public institutions and policies are to be measured by the extent to which they protect the fundamental rights of citizens, including the rights to life, liberty, and property. This theory is a liberal theory because the moral values of public institutions and policies are determined by their tendency to preserve individual rights, especially fundamental ones. Other things being equal, an institutional reform brings moral progress if more fundamental rights of citizens are secured. On the other hand, if a reform would render fundamental rights more vulnerable to violation, such a change would be considered a moral regress, even if it brings about other moral values such as just desert. To show how the rights-protection theory can be implemented, I first distinguish between the moral values of different rights. One important principle that this theory adopts is that the basic rights are more valuable than non-basic ones (Shue, 1980). For instance, ceteris paribus, the right to life is more valuable than any other rights because it is the precondition of other rights a citizen can enjoy. Likewise, the right to physical security is also considered highly valuable. On the other hand, although the right to vote is valuable, it is not as valuable as the right to life or physical security. To help the readers see the practical implication of this new theory, I contrast this theory with other theories of institutional moral progress, including the desert-based theory. Consider, for instance, the issue of the death penalty. According to desert-based theories, e.g., retributivism, a society has a strong reason to sustain capital punishment because it would give deserving criminals their just desert. Retributivists would agree with abolishment only when the retributivist reason is outweighed by other stronger reasons. For instance, a desert-based theorist may believe that people deserve to enjoy the money they earn from their hard work. However, if the financial cost of the death penalty was too high, it would deprive people of the money they deserve. Only then would retributivist agree to abolish the death penalty. 39 On the other hand, the rights-protection theory does not take into consideration the moral desert of criminals. Instead, it considers the impacts of the abolishment on the fundamental rights of individual citizens. If abolishment would preserve more basic rights, for instance, if it would prevent the wrongful execution of innocent persons, then we should abolish the death penalty. There may be other reasons why the society would want to preserve it—for instance, to give criminals their just desert. This, however, is not an important concern for the rights-protection theory. On the other hand, if, after careful evaluation, we find that abolishing the death penalty would result in the violation of more rights to life, say, for instance, if the society is such that the death penalty is the only effective method to deter potential killers and thereby protecting more rights to life, then this theory would recommend that capital punishment be preserved. An implication of this theory is that political institutions that tend to preserve liberties are considered better, even when they might fail in other aspects. After explaining the theory and spelling out its implication, I consider objections raised by desert-based theories and try to respond to them. Desert-based theorists typically worry that liberal theories are too abstract and focus wrongly on formal rights, not substantive well-being. I show that the rights-protection is the best way any secular institution can adopt to protect individual well-being. 40 The Snafu that is Progress Abigail Klassen Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Social constructionism (herein SC) is the thesis that some categories and kinds, including “personhood”, “self”, “ill”, and so on, are socially rather than naturally constituted. In its emancipatory form, SC attempts to show that some categories and kinds are socially founded or contingent and can therefore be amended or even discarded. Within analytic philosophy, there has been some work done delineating kinds of SC projects. A large body of research has been devoted to the analysis and critique of particular kinds, especially gender and race. Far less work done examining the plausibility of SC’s “ameliorative” or “emancipatory” programs. Unlike descriptive SC projects, ameliorative versions shift the question from what X (some category or kind) is to what “we” want X to be. My paper attempts to provide a critical response to the new ameliorative SC movement. A worry about relativism in ameliorative programs goes thus: as parties declare their redefinition of some X to be the most just and so forth, there may exist no standard by which to judge the better from the worse other than by each party’s own lights. If relativism in ameliorative projects is unavoidable, I ask whether it must be pernicious (solipsistic and aporetic). The question of the possibility of non-pernicious relativism is particularly apt in light of recent and renewed philosophical interest in the possibility of emancipatory relativisms (cf., Alcoff (2005), Code (1995), and Longino (2003)). “Positive” relativism attempts to proffer a constructive rather than a negative and immobilizing program. I ask whether pernicious relativism is avoidable and also whether it is possible once the usual and descriptively and normatively bankrupt binaries of self/other, intrinsic/extrinsic, and so on are problematized by SC itself. Then, I ask how and if nonpernicious relativism can lend itself to emancipatory projects. Relational or social properties need not be seen as “external, accidental characteristic[s] overlaying... (allegedly) internal, essential... core of ourselves” (Sullivan 2000, 26). Relational properties need not be construed as simply and only negative, but also as “the means by which I take up and engage my world... [and] not merely obstacles to that process” (29). If kind-membership and identity are essentially relational essentially social – then the claim that some category or kind is socially constructed loses bite. On the other hand, SC ameliorative projects become all the more relevant, asking: “How can we collectively (socially) improve some X?” But how can problems that haunt 41 descriptive projects, namely disagreement within and between specialists, the folk, and between communities about who does or does not count as an X, what an X is, and so on avoid being re-routed to ameliorative projects? To settle the question of what some category or kind X is or should be, SC cannot appeal to correspondence with the world and nor can it appeal to truth, progress, ethics, or rationality either since its own tenets might problematize those very notions. I thus ask the following: (i) whether SC projects ever demonstrate that X is socially constructed or if they merely presuppose to do so by presupposing that X is not inevitable, (ii) with parties each declaring their redefinition of X to be the better, whether SC emancipatory projects will simply collapse into relativism, and (iii) if there exists no standard of what X is or what X should be other than what has most currency or what most people believe should have the most currency, whether SC projects can actually work to reinforce the status quo. The second objection suggests that SC may be selfundermining. The third objection argues that if SC is taken to be “the correct” metaphysics of the social world, then pernicious relativism is impossible. The third objection can be fleshed out thus: ethno/cultural-centrism characterizes our everyday situation, but our everyday situation is, in effect, exactly what SC (especially in its ameliorative capacity) sets out to disrupt. SC thus seems to bring us full circle. If kindmembership just is essentially relational and if renegotiating identities and kinds always already takes place just as positive relativism characterizes the process, then SC ameliorative projects do not have a substantive, prescriptive, or normative account to offer: they are descriptive, elucidating a process that is always already in full force. Thus, although ameliorative projects claim to proffer a substantive and critical program, I claim they merely articulate an analysis of the status quo. Bibliography: - Alcoff, L.M. (2005) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press, New York. - Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. - Sullivan, S. (2000) “Reconfiguring Gender with John Dewey: Habits, Bodies, and Cultural Change.” Hypatia. 15(1): 23-42. 42 Moral Progress without Moral Realism Charlie Kurth Washington University [email protected] My paper takes up two inter-related questions about moral progress: what is moral progress and how do we get it? Answering the first question is a project in moral metaphysics: to understand what moral progress is, we need an account of the moral reality that we purport to be progressing toward. Here I argue that looking to the critical practices that our moral discourse supports (i.e., the forms of error and improvement it involves) indicates that moral reality is mind-dependent. But if moral facts are mind-dependent, then in what sense does moral inquiry generate genuine moral progress— doesn’t a mind-dependent moral reality entails that moral progress is merely matter of making our moral beliefs more internally consistent (see, e.g., Brink 1989)? Thus, enters the second question— how do we make moral progress? To answer this question, we need a moral psychology and epistemology that explains how moral inquiry can generate progress that moves us beyond just increasing the internal consistency of our moral beliefs. I develop a novel account of moral inquiry and innovation that can do this. Part 1: What is Moral Progress? To address the first question, I build on earlier work 13. I employ a comparative analysis of the critical practices of our scientific, moral, and fashion discourses in order to argue that we should see our scientific and fashion discourses as marking the ends of a spectrum with moral discourse in between. Intuitively, science supports the robust critical practices tell for the mindindependence of the underlying scientific facts: deep error is possible (i.e., we could be wrong but never know it), scientific explanations are belief-independent in the sense that to explain X, we needn’t appeal to our beliefs about X. This indicates that scientific progress amounts to changes that bring existing beliefs more closely in line with the mind-independent facts. By contrast, our fashion discourse—our talk of what’s chic and stylish—supports a much weaker set of critical practices: though individuals can be wrong about what’s stylish, society as a whole cannot (i.e., no deep error); 13 C. Kurth, “What Do Our Critical Practices Say about the Nature of Morality?” Philosophical Studies 166 (2013): 45-64. 43 explanations of fashion phenomena necessarily involve appeal to actual beliefs about what’s fashionable. This picture corresponds with our intuition that fashion facts are mind-dependent and, thus, that progress in fashion amounts to having beliefs that better track existing conventions. Moral discourse lies between these two extremes: moral error across time and culture is possible, but deep error is not; moral explanations are neither beliefindependent nor reliant on claims about people’s actual beliefs and conventions (e.g., idealized beliefs can also contribute to moral explanations). Thus, moral progress is neither change toward a mind-independent moral reality, nor change that better conforms to existing moral consensus. Rather, it is change that while transcending the existing moral beliefs, accords with some idealized or vetted set of moral beliefs—e.g., those that survive cognitive psychotherapy (Brandt 1979) or those found at the end of inquiry (Kitcher 2011). Part 2: How can we make Moral Progress? If genuine moral progress is to be possible, there need to be psychological mechanisms that allow us to do more than just better track existing moral conventions; there need to be mechanisms that bring convention-transcendent moral innovation. Recently, Richmond Campbell and Victor Kumar (2012, 2013) have argued that the needed mechanism is a motivation grounded in our concern to be seen as morally credible in the eyes of our peers. We are uncomfortable when inconsistencies in our moral beliefs are made public. Because of this, we revise our beliefs not just in ways that make them more consistent, but also in ways that are responsive to other potential objections. It’s this tendency to recognize that our peers might find even our revised judgments objectionable that engages creative processes that can move us beyond mere conformity to existing moral conventions. But the proposal doesn’t work. Drawing on research in psychology regarding impression management and motivated reasoning, I argue that if the underlying mechanism of revision is a desire to be seen as morally credible vis-à-vis our peers, then we don’t get convention-transcendence— for our revisions are driven by a concern to change our moral judgments so that they better conform to our perception our peer’s moral beliefs. That is not a mechanism that moves us beyond existing conventions—it’s a mechanism that perpetuates them. Once we see this, we see that what’s needed is a psychological mechanism driven by a concern for accuracy, not peer acceptance. Drawing on earlier work, I argue that the psychological mechanism we need is a distinctive variety of anxiety—what I call 44 moral anxiety14. Moral anxiety, in brief, is the distinctive unease that we feel in the face of a difficult moral decision: we want to make the correct choice, but we’re uncertain what that is. Because moral anxiety is driven not by a concern for peer acceptance, but rather a concern to make the correct decision, it can prompt genuine moral innovation— innovation that moves us beyond existing moral beliefs and conventions. 14 C. Kurth, “Moral Anxiety and Moral Agency.” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, M. Timmons (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthco 45 Can we improve our emotional apprehension of moral values? Samuel Lepine University of Lyon [email protected] The idea that emotions are linked in a very particular way to moral values is now a widely shared idea among philosophers (Mulligan 2010; Tappolet 2011; Roberts 2013), and it seems to be a promising way to explain the possibility of moral progress. More specifically, it seems plausible to admit that our emotions could lead us to perceive the value of some actions or situations, independently of our beliefs or even our judgments (Döring, 2010). According to this line of thought, we can discover « emotionally » - so to say – the existence of moral values (Roeser, 2011). Thence, it could be possible to give an account of moral progress in terms of emotional education: to make moral progress would amount to be able to perceive emotionally certain values which we were not aware of in the past. But this view raises many issues. During my presentation, I will focus on two specific problems. First, this view assumes that moral progress is a true possibility and thence, that there exists moral facts, of which we could become aware. But, if there are indeed many accounts of this idea, it does not seem to be the case that there is a strong consensus on what are really those moral facts, and thence, on what we should have in mind when we talk about moral progress (Joyce, 2001). And it seems at least equally plausible to admit that moral codes, systems and values, are incommensurable (Prinz, 2007). This is what I will call the problem of moral relativism. Secondly, this view about moral progress lends to emotions some properties which need to be examined carefully. While it is true that we can empathize with the frailty of a stranger, independently of our beliefs about that person, it remains important to note that our emotions are generally linked to our concerns, sentiments, and motivations (like desires), and most of the time to our beliefs as well. I feel indignant about an action because I believe that it violates a norm of equity. I am ashamed of my behavior because I desire not to behave that way. To say it in a more specific way, our emotions track values which are relevant to our concerns (Roberts, 2003). If it so, then the idea that we can really discover moral values, through are emotional experiences, must be flawed in some sense. This is what I will call the problem of emotional motivation. Having exposed these two issues, I will try to show that there remains a lively possibility to give an account of moral progress which is able to handle those constraints. I will argue that moral progress can be only a local progress, that is a 46 progress which takes place inside a given moral culture, and not a global and transcultural progress. Moral progress, here, amounts to favor and make up rules which are consistent with our values, concerns, and motivations. I will suggest that this view has many advantages. The more important one is that it can make sense of the strongest skeptical critics which have been addressed to the idea of moral progress recently (e.g. Nichols 2004). But it also allows us to bypass the problem of relativism and the problem of emotional motivation, since it seems plausible to assume that there are certain common motivations and concerns, which most of the human beings share. If it is so, I will argue, then we have good reasons to think that emotional education amounts mostly to become aware of those concerns which are supposed to drive our emotional apprehensions of values. 47 Supervenient Moral Causation: How Moral Facts Cause Moral Progress Andres Luco Nanyang Technology University [email protected] This essay argues that moral progress is a type of social change that can be caused by mind-independent moral properties. Moral properties include the properties of justice, injustice, equality, autonomy, and oppression. Moral properties are “mindindependent” in the sense that they exist independently of the mental representations of any particular moral appraiser. I defend the thesis that moral properties supervene on constellations of nonmoral properties. To say that moral properties supervene on non-moral properties means that any change or difference in moral properties requires a change or difference in a “supervenience-base” of non-moral properties. Although moral properties supervene on the non-moral, they are not causally impotent. Rather, moral properties sometimes cause moral progress. As Keith Sawyer has argued, causal laws describe causal dependencies between types of events (Sawyer 2002). Moral properties, I contend, figure into causal laws that produce the sociohistorical changes associated with moral progress. This is because moral properties are event-types that are realized by intersubjective relationships of various kinds—i.e., interactions, norms, practices, and institutions. Moral properties depend for their existence upon the non-moral properties of intersubjective relationships. However, causal laws that cite moral properties do describe causal dependencies between event-types that could not be identified purely at the level of non-moral properties (cf. Railton 1998). Event-types that are the effects of moral properties include such developments as the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, the rise of gender equality, and the “rights revolutions” of the late 20th century up to the present. This essay presents a detailed account of moral properties and their causal efficacy. The moral properties are characterized as selection pressures that cause certain intersubjective relationships to be more resilient than others. Moreover, moral properties supervene upon properties of intersubjective relationships that permit all individuals to pursue their interests without impediment, that constrain the actions of all in consideration of the interests of each, and that impose similar constraints with respect to the similar interests of every person. 48 To cite one classic example of the causal powers of moral properties, the injustice of slavery is a cause of the abolition of slavery. The injustice of slavery is a moral property realized by the systematic failure of master-slave relationships to accord equal consideration to the interests of slaves and non-slaves. I discuss the abolition of the British slave trade, and argue that large swaths of the British public came to adopt anti-slavery attitudes because they recognized the fact that slavery is not an impartial institution, and is therefore unjust. British abolitionists managed to persuade the larger public that slavery was an evil. Their leading tactic was to underscore the brutalities wrought by the slave trade—the kidnappings, the disintegration of families, the death and disease on slave ships, etc. Abolitionists had success in turning public opinion against the slave trade by drawing people’s attention to the grievous ways in which slaves’ fundamental interests were discounted by this institution. Hence, moral opposition to the slave trade was a recognition of or response to the devastating effects that the trade had on fundamental slave interests. A salient objection to the causal process just outlined is that moral properties do not cause moral progress. Rather, moral beliefs do. So, for example, it was changing beliefs about the injustice of slavery that precipitated abolition, not the injustice of slavery itself (Leiter 2001). My reply to this objection is that moral properties such as injustice can cause morally progressive social changes, and they can do so independently of affecting people’s moral beliefs. As Joshua Cohen (1997) argues, the injustice of slavery made the institution less resilient. Compared with non-slave institutions, slave-holding institutions have greater difficulty maintaining people’s voluntary compliance with their norms. During the American Civil War, slavery put the Confederacy at a competitive disadvantage to the Union. President Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation gave the Union a military edge. Freed slaves were eager to contribute to the Union’s military efforts, and indeed, of the 180,000 African Americans who served in Union forces, close to half came from the Southern states. Even more took army jobs as civilian employees—fortification builders, draymen, pilots, nurses, cooks, etc. The South, on the other hand, excluded slaves from the ranks of the Confederate army until the war was all but lost. Regardless of the extent to which slavery was believed to be unjust, the fact that slavery was so damaging the fundamental interests of slaves created a crisis of allegiance for the slaveholding South. 49 Can There Be Moral Progress Without Moral Realism? Michael Lyons University of Bristol [email protected] On the matter of moral progress, moral realists have been treated as having the upper hand over moral anti-realists. Moral realists can explain moral progress in terms of the moral beliefs of the agents progressing to a fuller understanding of a moral reality, and the subsequent improving their moral behaviour. Moral anti-realists on the other hand seem to have a conceptual difficulty when trying to explain how there can be moral progress. If moral truths are in any sense relative or at least dependent upon the perspectives of moral agents, then since there is no independent moral reality to gain a better understanding of, it’s not clear how moral progress can take place on an objective basis, since any claims of improvement of moral beliefs or behaviours can only be based on, and hence be valid in virtue of, other moral beliefs or behaviours. In response to this conceptual difficulty, the moral anti-realist has three options: either she can reject the existence of any genuine moral progress, she can provide an account of objective moral progress on the moral realist term’s, or she can provide an anti-realist framework within which she can then explain moral progress. In her paper, ‘Moral Progress Without Moral Realism’, Catherine Wilson (2010) defends the third option; not only does she claim that moral anti-realists can provide an adequate account of both moral truth and moral progress, but also that the account provided is preferable to those available to the moral realist. In doing so she argues that in fact it is the moral anti-realist who has the upper hand over realists on the matter of moral progress. First of all, she defends the treatment of moral claims as “theoretical conjectures that face the tribunal of reason and experience and that may be accepted or rejected accordingly.” (Wilson (2010), p. 98) She then defends an analogy between moral beliefs and scientific beliefs, in order to explain moral truth as a postulated endpoint of the theoretical development of collective morals. Wilson then in turn explains moral progress in terms of the generating and dissipating of collective narratives that can ratify a change in collective moral beliefs as being a progression or deterioration. So moral truths are simply moral claims that will survive scrutiny, and moral progress is the change in moral beliefs that is regarded upon the scrutiny of collective theoretical narratives to be valid and irreversible. 50 Wilson (2010, pp. 110-112) then provides the following reasons for why this account of moral truth and progress is preferable to the one that a moral realist can provide: 1. Moral realists are committed to moral truths as being independent of any perspective (hypothetical or otherwise), when in fact Wilson (2010, p. 111) claims that they depend on the existence of beings that as a result of both their own capacities and their environment are capable of interaction that can lead to moral harm and/or injury. For on her account, there would otherwise be no moral conjectures to ratify, and hence no moral truths. 2. Moral realists are committed to the claim that there are moral truths that can never be known, due to the epistemic limitations of agents, when in fact Wilson (Ibid.) claims that since moral truths are ratified conjectures, there are no moral truths that will never be known. Once a moral conjecture is ratified, then it can be claimed that it was always true, even before ratification. It can even be claimed that it would have been true even if it were never ratified. Moreover, Wilson (Ibid.) claims that the commitment moral realists have to inaccessible moral truths are also arbitrary, since according to her there are no limitations to moral knowledge of the kind that might by analogy make a kind of complete scientific knowledge impossible. 3. Moral realists are committed to the claim that in every moral dispute, at least one participant must hold a false moral belief, whilst Wilson (2010, p. 112) claims that actually this is not the case, and her account can accommodate her claim: if neither of the disputed moral beliefs is ever ratified, then none of them will ever be elevated to the status of moral truths. In this paper, I will: 1) argue that Wilson’s account of moral progress can be accommodated within a moral realist framework, 2) attempt to repudiate these three reasons, and 3) subsequently point out why her account of moral truth is problematic. Reference - Wilson, C. (2010) ‘Moral Progress Without Moral Realism’, in Philosophical Papers, 39:1, 97-116. 51 Wellbeing and time: Are we happier than we were ten thousand years ago? Jason Marsh St. Olaf College [email protected] Debates about whether there is moral progress, all things considered, can seem almost intractable. But wellbeing is a crucial part of ethics and in light of recent empirical work on human flourishing, exploring whether there is progress in this domain may be more measurable. Unlike Derek Parfit, who asks at the end of On What Matters (Vol 2) whether human history has been worth it, I will be asking about our progress to date. The two questions I have in mind are as follows: (1) are we becoming happier over the centuries? (2) Are people lives are getting objectively better, all things considered, over the centuries? I explore both questions. Drawing on recent work in the science of happiness, I first explore some prima facie empirical threats to the idea that we are becoming happier. (These threats include the Easterlin Paradox, the hedonic treadmill, and the problem of affective forecasting). I then argue these threats, while they do raise a serious question about whether we are becoming happier, in the sense of emotional happiness, do not clearly challenge the idea that our objective wellbeing is improving. What’s more, I give some reason for thinking that our wellbeing may in fact be improving, given an objective list conception of wellbeing, even while acknowledging how complex the question. If my thesis is correct, and our wellbeing is increasing at a higher rate than our happiness, this gives us further reason to fund research aimed at improving human happiness and overcoming the hedonic treadmill. 52 Improving Moral Craftmanship by Moral Case Deliberation Suzanne Metselaar, Guy Widdershoven VU Medical Center [email protected] Empirical ethicists are often criticized with regard to the status they attribute to the moral knowledge of practitioners as opposed to that of theorists: the validity of priviliging the moral expertise of just any practitioner over that of the ethicist is doubted. In our paper, we present a response to this criticism. In doing so, we will take Albert Musschenga’s article ‘Empirical ethics and the special place of the practitioner’s moral judgements,’15 in which he articulates the aforementioned doubt, as our point of departure. Underlying Musschenga’s argument is the assumption that in empirical ethics, the ethicist is a detached observer of professionals in their practical context when studying their moral attitudes, judgements and behavior. We will argue that this is not necessarily the case: if empirical ethics is approached as an hermeneutic, dialogical endeavor, ethicist and professional are both immersed in an interactive process of deliberation. Although qua content, the outcomes of these deliberations primarily rest on the moral judgements of the professionals, it is the ethicist that guides them in establishing these judgements by facilitating the reflection. This guidance does not only have a strong normative dimension, it also fosters moral learning of practitioners. This, then, does not mean that the empirical ethicist should select ‘good professionals’ with moral expertise, such as Musschenga suggests, but rather, it means that (s)he should engage together with professionals in activities of moral learning. In this sense, the ethicist is not merely assessing moral intuitions, attitudes and judgments, he is involved in the process in which they are made explicit, analysed and transformed, a process in which practitioners can increase their moral expertise. This is actually in line with what Musschenga believes the role of the ethicist should be in providing ethics support. As a concrete example of ethics support that takes increasing moral expertise as its major objectives, we will discuss Moral Case Deliberation (MCD). MCD offers a platform for an ongoing learning process which improves normative professionalism, or ‘moral craftmanship’: the commitment to do the moral part of a job well by criticizing, reflecting upon, understanding and deliberating on the moral Empirical ethics and the special place of the practitioner’s moral judgements. In: Veerle Draulans et al;. (ed.) Ethics and Empirics. Strange and Fragile Bedfellows. Special issue of Ethical Perspectives 17(2010), no 2, pp. 231-258. 15 53 aspects of the job (Parker 2012). We will relate this characteristic of MCD to a prominent concept in Gadamer’s work Truth and Method is cultivation, or Bildung.16 The essence of Bildung, Gadamer holds, is a return to oneself that requires a transformation. Correspondingly, a successful dialogue establishes the transformation of the interlocutors involved, because ‘to reach an understanding with one’s partner in a dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what we were’ (Gadamer 2004 p. 341). Subsequently, we will seek to demonstrate the way in which the (empirical) ethicist can proceed from the moral attitudes, judgements and behavior of practitioners, yet at the same time be actively involved in dialogues on moral issues, through which practitioners can become better professionals. To illustrate our point, we will describe an empirical ethical research project in which we collected data from a large series of MCD’s held at a care institution, which we also facilitated. 16 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1992, p. 10. 54 Moral Progress and the Divine Command Theory: Can the Good become Better? Annette Mosher VU University [email protected] When considering the Divine Command Theory and moral progress, one has to ask if moral progress is possible. Can the Good become better, or is moral progress simply humans complying with the will of God more perfectly? Particularly in religions with authoritative, canonized scriptures this appears to be the only answer since scripture (at least in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions) is usually leading in discussions about morality. However, what occurs when the Divine revokes and changes his/her will and therefore the command? Is this even possible? And if so, does this make the Good able to morally progress? Or are there other issues surrounding changes to the Divine Command? In this paper I plan to unpack these questions using the current “hot” topic of homosexuality. This is a particular problem between the European member states such as Hungary and Romania—with their large Orthodox citizenship which sees homosexuality and teaching homosexuality as a violation of religious ethics—and states such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium—which normally see homosexuality as a human rights issue rather than a religious issue. In particular I plan to discuss the role of authoritative scripture for those opposed to homosexuality. In contrast, most countries using the human rights model miss the fact that their arguments do not reach the religious communities with strong opposition to homosexuality because they do not address the scriptural context and remain with “humanistic” philosophical arguments. This dichotomy in approach means that the two talk alongside each other with Orthodoxy dismissing philosophical arguments as worldly and anti-religious. To do this I will look at the current situation and ethical rhetoric around homosexuality from an Abrahamic perspective. I will follow this with an exegesis of Genesis 8 and 9, showing that at least once the Divine has changed his/her mind about commands and that there has, in fact, been Divine moral progress during human history. Using these findings I will argue application for current ethical situations and propose a scriptural perspective that adds to the historic human rights argument. Added to this will be the historically accepted theological and philosophically accepted 55 arguments of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason with the hopes that the deep divide can be bridged and further progress can be made in discussing sensitive topics. 56 Levels of Moral Enhancement Norbert Paulo University of Salzburg [email protected] Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared that the task of political philosophy is “to consider if … there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.” The fiercely debated problem whether or not the enhancement of moral dispositions through biomedical means is desirable has strong implications for our very understanding of political philosophy and of democracy in particular. Proponents of moral bioenhancement (MBE)—above all Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson—are about to reverse Rousseau’s feasibility claim. They argue that, if we want to fight global injustice, to stop climate change, or to minimize general aggression, we already have a sufficiently settled system of shared moral laws; what we lack is the right men. That is to say that we take laws as they are and men as they might be. Proponents of MBE argue that there can be nothing wrong with making people morally better, e.g. through increased levels of empathy and decreased tendencies for aggression. Given the current human traits and dispositions there is not even an alternative to the use of MBE if we want to make the world a better place, or so they argue. In this paper I outline the different levels on which MBE is currently discussed. Most arguments for MBE start from the assumption that every change that helps people conforming to widely accepted moral rules—and, thus, to show good behavior—is desirable. Since moral insight and moral motivation tend to contribute to such conformity, changes in moral insight and moral motivation are desirable. Even on this simplistic picture, there are at least three levels that deserve attention separately, insight (or beliefs), motivation, and behavior. Critics of MBE usually do not argue that MBE could not yield better behavior. They rather claim that this focus on behavior misses the point of morality since moral behavior implies autonomy and “freedom to fall.” There are at least two further levels of MBE that are currently not sufficiently separated, namely (1) MBE of a consenting individual and (2) MBE as a policy (i.e. suggested or compulsory MBE). Many proponents of MBE start their arguments by discussing enhancements of consenting individuals that help them to overcome dispositions they themselves regard as obstacles to what they really want; the conclusions, however, often play on the policy level. 57 I exemplify the relevance of the distinction between the various levels with a brief discussion of some implications of MBE on the policy level that have been neglected so far. Most views in the liberal tradition of political philosophy rely heavily on the individual, its participation, its decisions, its interests, its views. They not only emphasize respect for persons, they are built on it. I focus on one representative debate within the liberal tradition, namely on the debate between political liberalism and perfectionist liberalism and examine if and how different forms of MBE would be compatible with one or the other liberalism. I argue that only perfectionist versions of liberalism are compatible with the imposition of MBE, although even the perfectionist liberalism rests on a very strong notion of individual autonomy that might be undermined by some forms of MBE. The flip side of this is that, due to the grounding notion of respect for persons, proponents of political liberalism will have an easier time justifying the individual use of MBE, even if imposed (for example on criminal offenders). I conclude that, once the levels of MBE are better understood and discussed separately, the currently harsh opposition between proponents and critics of MBE will disappear. 58 The concept of moral progress : a Kantian outlook Elena Parthene Sorbonne University [email protected] Moral progress, evident and universal though it may seem, is nevertheless an idea that has a precise moment of historic emergence : XVIIIth century, the Aufklärung century, this moment of enthusiasm and faith in technical, intellectual and political progress, to the point that from these different kinds of progress, assessed by statistics and concrete results, it has been concluded that there was an overall moral progress. But, from ones to the other, is the consequence right? Is this passage legitimate? In this paper, I would like to reconsider the conceptual foundations of this idea, as it has been thematised by its first designers, and especially by Kant, in order to test its resistance to facts and history. More precisely, I would like to study the two means that allow an implementation of moral progress, according to the thinkers of this concept: education, on the individual level; Law, on the collective level. How does a civilization progress morally? What should we improve for moral progess to happen on individual or social scale? Education, first, that is, the process by which a human being is raised (in every sense of the word) to his real destination, freedom. Indeed, Kant distinguishes three moments of education (physical, intellectual and moral) and it is important to understand how in the last moment, through an access to autonomy, the temporality is no longer that of the phenomena, for which present follows past: the educational present is not determined by the past, but by the future, thus including the idea of progress. The establishment of Law, secondly, constitutes the historic mediation aiming at morality. If history has a rational meaning, it is because it establishes the norms of Law, which further produce in individuals a habitus, i.e., a familiarisation with law, and allow them to interiorize it. By forcing me to repress my sensibility (even if through exterior coercion), Law represents the mediation between nature and freedom. The profound purpose of Law is to educate people so that they become free and moral beings. But, how does one move from discipline and training to moral progress ? How does one move from Law to morality, in spite of the strong distinction all philosophers, and especially Kant, made between these two fields? Moreover, are these answers satisfactory -in the light of the last centuries and in the light of the structural dysfunctions revealed in these fields? My paper propose to address these issues in order to determine the consistence and the limits of moral progress. 59 We should also note that if Kant is such an important reference here, it is also because he warns us against two symmetrical pitfalls when analyzing moral development : what he calls in The Contest of the Faculties moral terrorism on the one hand and eudemonism on the other. Indeed, the conviction that everything goes from bad to worse is shared by several leaders who, on the pretext of this alleged decadence, impose their ‘’protection’’ and thus satisfy their appetite of domination. On the contrary, believing that everything is getting better reflects an eudemonist conception claiming that happiness is the criterion of a moral upgrading, which is equally difficult to endorse. Finally, I cannot elude the central question underlying all these concerns, that is, what would be the empirical proof of this moral progress of humanity ? While technical progress finds confirmation in inventing technologies always more innovating, while intellectual progress can be testified by figures like a decreasing illiteracy rate, how can we establish the very existence of a moral progress? What criterion should we use to measure it? According to Kant, it is not possible to answer this question with facts or figures, it can only be answered using a ‘’sign’’. Moral progress does not come forward explicitly, nor does it show itself directly, through images : as a sign, it always expresses itself indirectly and requires interpretation. Looking for moral progress is looking for little signs, not for positive facts: it belongs to hermeneutics, not descriptive history. And Kant gives us a very precise example of such a sign, a defining event in the first conceptualization of moral progress: the French Revolution. 60 Moral Progress and the Reliability of Moral Intuitions Johnnie Pedersen Roskilde University [email protected] In this paper I’m going to propose an argument for the claim that the fact that S intuits that p is (under favorable circumstances) evidence of what the moral facts are (assuming that there are such facts). I call this argument the argument from progress. This argument is premised on the assumption that moral progress is relevant to the evidential status of moral intuitions. The argument from progress can be summarized as follows: 1. There has been moral progress. 2. If there has been moral progress, then there has been progress among ethicists. 3. Progress among ethicists is achieved through reflective equilibrium. 4. Moral intuitions are used in the deployment of reflective equilibrium. 5. Theoretical progress is more likely to occur if the beliefs that are used in the deployment of a method are evidence of the facts. 6. Therefore, the best explanation of progress among ethicists is (in part) that intuitions are evidential. 7. Therefore, intuitions are evidential. There are those who deny premise (1), that there has been moral progress. In order to defend this claim, I will have to commit myself to what would count as evidence for moral progress since otherwise it wouldn’t be clear what to look for in setting out to defend the claim. Thus, I’m going to take it to be evidence for moral progress if the world is more peaceful and if there is less injustice today than earlier. This builds on the auxiliary claim that people’s moral beliefs are manifested in their conduct and in the structure of their societies (laws, institutions, etc.). If there wasn’t this kind of connection between moral belief and behavior, then there may well be practical moral progress (progress in behavior), without a corresponding theoretical moral progress (progress in the sense of beliefs and knowledge). But I regard it as plausible that practical progress corresponds with theoretical progress since people tend to be motivated to act on their moral beliefs. Thus, I provide evidence that, according to my criteria, there has indeed been practical progress. Premise (2) holds that if there has been this sort of decrease in violence and injustice and, accordingly, an increased likelihood that people’s moral beliefs represent the moral facts, then there has also been an increased likelihood that the moral beliefs 61 of ethicists do so. The argument from progress holds that this increased insight into the moral facts on the part of ethicists is best explained by the claim that intuitions are evidential. For I am assuming that ethicists, in part, arrive at their moral beliefs by using intuitions through a deployment of the method of reflective equilibrium (premises (3) and (4)). Since, as I argue, any progress is more likely to occur if the beliefs one starts from in deploying the methodology are evidence of what the facts are (premise (5)), the best explanation of the fact that there has been progress is that the moral beliefs of ethicists, including their intuitions, are evidential. 62 Hume's 'General Sense of Common Interest' and Conditions for Moral Progress Björn Petersson University of Lund [email protected] David Hume famously claimed that ”a general sense of common interest” explains why humans are capable of restricting their own pursuit of individual selfinterest for the benefit of their community, beyond the sacrifices that may be explained by their natural affections for kins and friends, and without explicit contracts or sanction systems. He illustrates this claim briefly with co-ordination problems and prisoner’s dilemma type examples. More recently, Susan Hurley, Raimo Tuomela and others have in different ways argued that our capacity to act or reason in a distinctively collective manner may explain successful coordination and cooperation in social choice dilemmas like Hi-Lo or the Prisoner’s dilemma. I compare these claims and focus some features that our “sense of common interest” would need to have in order to explain cooperation and co-ordination in cases traditionally considered problematic. These features may affect the prospects of achieving certain types of moral progress in a group or community. 63 Scientific Progress as Moral Progress Simone Pollo Sapienza Università di Roma [email protected] The relation between facts and values is a controversial and highly debated topic in metaethics. Most of such debates are focused either on the plausibility of some kind of metaphysical identity between facts and values or on the possibility of a logical deduction of the latter from the former. Nonetheless other kinds of relation between facts and values are conceivable. In my paper I will argue in favor of the idea that facts - that is descriptions of reality - are deeply linked with the “normative” sphere (broadly conceived) since they constitute the factual framework in which moral life takes place. Even if not identical with facts (or deduced from them) moral norms, values and feelings are profoundly shaped by descriptions of the world. More precisely, ordinary experience testifies that moral reflexivity aims at being “tuned” with the factual framework to gain precision and objectivity of moral statements, feelings and responses. From this view about the role of facts in moral life I will claim that scientific understanding of the world should have a central role in building the factual framework of moral experience. Although the factual framework ought to be conceived in a pluralistic way (that is built upon different sources of knowledge), science should have a privileged role in it. Therefore, I will support the idea that progress in the scientific understanding of the world can lead to moral progress both in personal life and in social institutions. To support my claim I will show how the Darwinian account of life can interact with morality in shaping our understanding of human nature, of the human place in the world and of the purpose (or absence of purpose) of human life. 64 Progress through Reason? Liberalism’s Contributions to the Idea of Moral Progress Dr Vanessa Rampton Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) [email protected] Today the idea of overall moral progress, with its roots in Enlightenment optimism and respect for reason, is highly contested within academic circles. Partly because of liberalism’s historical commitment to universalism and ‘progressive’ thinking, the belief in moral progress has been portrayed as the prime fallacy of that tradition in particular, associated with unrealistic expectations about human beings becoming more rational through time. The question becomes more complicated, however, once we take into account the varied nature of the liberal philosophical and political tradition. While some liberal politicians pay lip service to the idea of moral progress, and seek to position the successes of contemporary liberal democracies within an overarching narrative of progress, liberal theory provides a multitude of answers to the question of how and whether moral progress might occur. This paper seeks to shed additional light on the relationship between liberalism and progress by focusing on several examples within the liberal tradition that nuance the claim that it can be associated with a single view of moral progress. The liberal tradition, I hope to show, has in fact been the arena of a genuine debate between those who follow some version of Immanuel Kant’s view that humans beings are undergoing a ‘civilizing process’ and becoming less violent, less cruel, and more peaceful, and others who argue that our incipient potential for violence and brutality is increasing alongside developments in science and technology. A number of strands of liberalism, I argue, have the philosophical resources that allow them to identify the gains of moral progress in some domains with costs in others. In turn, this is the source of both important strengths and deep tensions within the liberal tradition itself. 65 The moral progress of an individual Amber Riaz Lahore University of Management Sciences [email protected] This paper looks at the idea of the moral progress of an individual. In particular, it looks at the progress of an individual as a judger of particular, contingent moral propositions. On the current proposal, a person’s moral judgement develops over time, and as a result a greater proportion of her or his judgements will turn out to be correct. So the measure of whether an individual has made progress as a moral judge is something we measure by ascertaining her moral success. But how do we measure moral success? In the recent literature on moral testimony, the idea of moral expertise has come under serious attack on the grounds that even if there are moral experts, there is no way to identify them since their success can’t be measured. These critiques compare moral expertise to the expertise of a weatherman: to verify whether someone is really a weather expert, there is concrete feedback from the environment that we may rely on to determine how successful a weatherman has been at making correct judgements about the weather; but we have nothing analogous to rely on with respect to moral expertise. The current paper rejects this criticism of moral success and explores the kinds of feedback that we do in fact use in at least some parts of the world to assess the moral success of an individuals. Such feedback includes, though is not limited to, the relief of anxiety and stress, certain desirable changes in behaviour, and so on resulting from following the moral advice of the putative expert. The suggestion is that the best explanation of these changes is that the relevant moral advice/judgement was true. An individual shows moral progress if there is an increase in the proportion of her true to false moral judgements so assessed. In the end, the paper explores how some of these ideas may be used to assess the moral progress of a society or community. 66 Dynamism in Legality: International Law The Significance of Human Dignity in Stephen Riley Utrecht University [email protected] ‘Human dignity’ is central to a conception of post-Westphalian international law with humanity, not sovereignty, as its core normative principle. International society has, on this conception, moved from a state of nature attenuated by contractual selflimitation to a state of normative self-consciousness with a grundnorm or a regulative idea. Human dignity is, in other words, symbolic of progress in international society’s self-understanding, even if it is not necessarily symptomatic of an emerging cosmopolitan legal order. The intention of the present paper is to argue that even this modest progressive narrative should be disaggregated into conceptual questions concerning human dignity and the legality of action, the legality of norm-creation, and the legality of authority. Legality of action concerns the scope and content of primary and regulative norms; for instance, human dignity has been used to extend the scope and content of international criminal regulation despite the danger of ex post facto criminalisation and punishment. Legality of norm-creation concerns the secondary and constitutive rules that govern primary rules; for instance, human dignity functions in international legal fora to make creative, but also unpredictable, decision-making possible. And legality of authority concerns the recognition of legal personality; for instance, human dignity has been used to expand the range of rights-bearers and duty-holders beyond those envisaged by the drafters of the UN Charter. Thus human dignity is certainly associated with dynamism in legality, but a dynamism that is, from the point of view of justice, problematic. What, then, is the significance of human dignity in international law? At best, it might represent a new concern with policy in the international arena, enriching normative discourse but displacing legality per se. At worst, it might represent the absence of an international society capable of projecting itself constructively into the future: human dignity fills the normative void of international law with the promise of basic, but transient, obligations. Nonetheless, an antinomy between human dignity and justice could also be a productive one in challenging the assumption that progress can be gauged through the creation of new regulative norms. Justice and human dignity both imply that genuinely constitutional norms are needed in international law. 67 Moral Progress: enhancing justice? Alexander Rosas Universidad Nacional de Colombia [email protected] A classic view in moral philosophy distinguishes perfect from imperfect duties (Kant) or duties of justice from duties of beneficence (Smith). This distinction has a direct bearing on the issue of moral progress. It supports the view that moral progress concerning justice is more urgent than concerning beneficence. The distinction drawn above is based on a distinction between two types of morally relevant actions: those that positively hurt someone and those that positively help someone. Justice prohibits actions of the first type; beneficence prescribes actions of the second type. This distinction correlates with two additional ones to be drawn, one in the psychological and one in the legal sphere. Psychologically, justice feels different than beneficence. As Smith puts it: …we feel ourselves to be under a stricter obligation to act according to justice, than agreeably to friendship, charity, or generosity…” (Smith TMS, Pt. II, Sect. ii, Chap I, parag. 5) Correspondingly, we feel that violations of justice are more serious, and that preventing them is more urgent, than violations of beneficence. This psychological difference is externalized in a difference in our legal practices. Humanity everywhere feels entitled to use violence to prevent or punish violations of justice, to enforce justice by means of legal sanctions. In contrast, we do not feel entitled to legally enforce beneficence, or punish violations against it. We feel that this is congruent with the fact that the latter do not positively hurt anybody, as the former do. Smith speculates that we are so designed because the two types of violations have very different consequences: Society could exist without beneficence, but not without justice. So, Smith argues, the psychologically felt, imperative force behind justice seems to have been given to us by “Nature”, in order to buttress a stable society, indispensable for human survival and flourishing. It is evidence for Smith’s view that wars – the breakdown of stable social relationships – are usually triggered by the generalized feeling that duties of justice, not of beneficence, have been violated. This view seems correct, even if we allow for some measure of cultural relativity regarding what counts as a violation of justice. 68 Cultural relativity is not the problem I want to address. Rather, it is the tension between the stronger moral force that “Nature” has placed behind justice and the fact that we view progress regarding justice as needed and urgent. For, if “Nature” has put more force behind the duties of justice, why can’t this force guarantee an acceptable level of compliance? One explanation is that “Nature” has put more force behind justice, but not nearly enough. In a sentimentalist view, this force comes ultimately from Sympathy. Sympathy internally enforces moral behavior in a battle with selfishness, which is also a natural force. Moral progress depends ultimately on this battle. Moral progress can also come from new moral insights based on the discovery of new factual truths about how our actions can help or – more importantly – avoid harming others. But this source of progress is not nearly as momentous as the obstacle that results from the moral distortions originating in self-deceit, the process by which the selfish passions manage to paint our immoral actions as if they were congruent with justice (Smith TMS, Pt. III, Chap. IV). Self-deceit arises when the strength of the selfish passions suppresses the impartial perspective motivated by Sympathy. Injustice persists, therefore, because of a weakness in Sympathy. Sympathy moves us not to harm more than it moves us to help, but it often yields under the promptings of selfishness. This picture might well be a realistic view of our natural design. Is this weakness equally distributed in the human population? Current research into the proximate and ultimate (evolutionary) causes of moral behavior suggests that there is considerable genetic variation at the population level regarding the strength of the emotions behind moral behavior. And a few immoral people can suffice to cause considerable moral distress. One of the consequences of taking this variation seriously is that moral progress cannot be achieved solely with educational programs. Instead, we should seriously explore the possibility of enhancing the biological capacities underlying morality. 69 Two premisses for assessing moral progress C. A. Santander University of Valencia [email protected] When we are studying History, the fact that we consider a concrete connection of past events as progressive or regressive depends on the theory we are using to read those events and on what we consider to be the goals of humanity. Trivially, if we have a change between two different states, the change is progressive if the result is better than the previous state. We need a criterion to judge whether the result is better than the previous state, having into account that depending of the nature of the change the important aspects involved can vary. In this paper we will deal with the changes related to the inclusion of an excluded group in the community of moral consideration. The concrete characteristics of each inclusion are slightly different depending on the group we are including (black people, women, animals, etc.), and we will need more values involved in assessing the change for some of these groups, and less for others, depending on their situation. But there is a common core in all these changes: first, we need the premise “causing non consensual harm to others is bad”, even when depending on the case “harm” will be understood in different ways, and second, we need to assess the changes from an impartial point of view, because our interests can distort our judgements. The point of view of the impartial spectator will not be a dispassionate one, but a point of view without personal interests of any kind. Of course, these two premises are related to the goal of reducing the suffering (which is considered bad). There is a biological reason to consider suffering bad. Assuming these two premisses, it is easy to see what changes are progressive: those which produce less non consensual harm, all things considered, will be progressive. Of course, the problem is to understand what is the meaning of them. Our aim in this paper is to clarify and to defend those two premises. Regarding the first one, we will try to defend a consequentialist way of deciding what is “less harm”. We will understand “harm” as the non satisfaction of the basic needs of a being. Besides, it is important to note that depending on the group that we are referring to, the notion of harm should be understood as meaning more or less things. That depends on the needs of the different groups. For example, a group of animals will have less needs than a group of humans, and the consequence of this is that in the case of animals probably is quite correct to consider mainly pain and 70 pleasure, whereas in the case of humans we will need to have into account more values (life, freedom, knowledge, perspectives of the future...), which are in a complex relation between them. In any case, the satisfaction of the basic needs will be our guide to decide what are the relevant aspects of the situation, and to decide if the situation is better or worse. Maybe a consequentialist approach can be problematic as a criterion for deciding how to act, but it is not so problematic if we use it as a criterion for deciding what constitutes progress. We will explain how we can uso such a conception to assess for big changes in society and we will deal with criticisms to this kind of view. The second premiss has to do with the possibility of the existence of an impartial point of view. This idea has received some criticism, being Bernard Williams one of the critics. We will explain those criticism and we will try to answer to them. It is worth noting that the point of view of the historian who judges a past change as progressive or regressive can be much more free of interests and personal bondings than that of the agent who is ready to act, so some of the objections against consequentalism disappear in this context. Furthermore, considering just the basic needs of people and other beings makes it easier to consider things from an impartial point of view, because we reduce the quantity of calculus that we need. Moreover, focusing on basic needs give us a hierarchy of satisfactions that can be useful to avoid some abuses that could occur without this hierarchy, as for example that the fun of a lot of people counted more that the humiliation of just one. Accepting these two premises can help us to explain what we intuitively consider the main cases of moral progress regarding the exclusion of moral groups that we can see in History. Bibliography - Singer, P. Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999 - Singer, P. The Expanding Circle, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2011 - Williams, B. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005 - Williams, B. Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J.J.C. Smart, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1973 71 Moral Progress and Moral Meddling Nina Scherrer University of Bern [email protected] Moral progress or improvement, understood as the process in virtue of which individuals or collectives, such as nations or societies, become morally better – better that is, with regards to their capacity and competence as (collective) moral agents – is undeniably desirable: Since morally improved individuals and collectives will be prone to act in a morally preferable or at least permissible way more frequently, it is reasonable to assume that they thereby tend to generate morally preferable social, political, economic, etc. conditions. Thus, moral progress is at least instrumentally desirable or good. However, even if morally improved individuals or collectives would not necessarily, or not under any circumstances, tend to produce a morally better environment – suppose, for example, that the citizens of a nation advance morally for some reason, but a devious dictator systematically corrupts or compromises their attempts at instantiating better social, political, etc. conditions –, moral progress could still be said to occur and to be of value in terms of the morally desirable ideals and motives that people embrace. Given the both conditional and unconditional desirability of moral progress as an individual and collective goal, one question that arises is: are there any restrictions on initiating and assimilating moral progress in individuals or collectives? And if yes, what exactly justifies these limits? Note that the question is one of limits on possible ways of pursuing moral progress, not of limits on the spectrum of moral improvement itself. In this paper, I argue that a whole type or mode of attempts at moral progress constitutes a misguided and problematic way of seeking moral progress. My arguments turn on a minimally normative understanding of what moral improvement can reasonably comprise, which is nonetheless inclusive of a variety of moral outlooks and justifications. I contend that what I refer to as “moral meddling” or simply “moralism”, defined as any attempt of interfering with the affairs of others for the purpose of their moral improvement, is wrong for at least two reasons. On the one hand, to interfere with others’ life in pursuit of their moral betterment is instrumentally irrational, in that it systematically fails to achieve what it sets out to accomplish: People and collectives improve morally, when they do, in terms of their increasing competence to identify the morally right or good by themselves in a variety of changing situations, and by virtue 72 of their growing ability to direct their own behavior accordingly. However, (better) guidance of one’s own behavior in light of one’s own (improved) insight into what is morally right or good – whatever the content of morality –, is a fundamentally autonomous activity in the proper, “self-legislative” sense of the term, involving a series of self-referential and self-driven capacities and skills such as self-knowledge, selfcontrol, self-integrity, self-love, self-trust, etc., all of which are exclusive or confined to being determined, initiated and conducted through the first-person perspective. Thus, to try to move or guide someone else to recognize the morally right or good better or to act accordingly more often, proves futile. On the other hand, moral meddling is wrong for a moral reason: It is an instance of disrespecting and devaluing both the essence of the capacity as well as the right to be a moral agent and to improve as such, both in those whom one attempts to improve and, thereby, in oneself. A pertinent objection to this assessment of moral meddling is that it sounds deeply revisionist about some of our most cherished social practices – such as our giving authority to legal laws or our efforts to raise decent and responsible children, or simply to have a word with a good friend who is crossing the line –, the purpose of which seems, in part, to be to achieve and guard a certain vision of what we deem as morally acceptable and desirable behavior in others, worthy of promotion. The critique of moral meddling, however, does not hold that every incident of interfering with others’ affairs is wrong, but that any such attempt cannot and should not be motivated or guided by a certain type of goal, viz. moral progress. Thus, we may still punish under the authority of law, interfere with other countries’ policies, or implement educational programs; but whatever good comes directly out of this, it will not be an instance of moral progress, and something else, if anything, must ground these practices. According to the account, there is only one type or mode of moral progress, and that is self-improvement. 73 Individual moral development and moral progress Anders Schinkel VU University Amsterdam [email protected] Doret de Ruyter VU University Amsterdam [email protected] 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 seems to be 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? Is the kind of progress we might make as adults of the same kind as that we might make in our growth to adulthood, or is a different notion of progress at play here? And if we can settle on (an) adequate definition(s) of individual moral progress, how much progress do we typically make from childhood to adulthood, and as adults? In this paper we approach these questions through analyses of 1) the concept of moral progress and 2) the psychology of moral development. Thus, while moral progress is also conceivable at a collective level (different collective levels in fact), our focus will be on the individual level. We will, however, take a brief look at the connections between the two levels. With respect to the concept of progress we distinguish between a weak and a strong conception. Whereas according to the former progress is simply positively evaluated change, the latter adds the criterion of irreversibility. These conceptions are to be conceived of as the extremes of a spectrum. We take complete irreversibility to be impossible in the case of moral progress; but we only speak of progress where the positively evaluated change cannot be made undone without difficulty – in other words, where development rather than mere change has taken place. Progress can be conceived in terms of movement towards an end-state or as improvement according to a certain standard or criterion. On logical as well as psychological grounds we argue that the notion of individual moral progress does not presuppose development towards a predetermined end-state; different types of moral 74 maturity and even moral exemplariness are conceivable. Moreover, even at the individual level progress may be local rather than global (e.g. pertaining to some areas of moral life but not to others, or concerning affect, but not cognition). The most significant moral progress, however, occurs where integration of different aspects of the moral domain and of cognition, affect, motivation, and action take place; i.e. where a moral identity is developed. But pace Blasi and Colby and Damon we should not confuse robustness of moral identity with centrality of the moral to a person’s identity. Beyond a certain threshold it is the former that matters. Moral development need not culminate in moral sainthood, but hopefully it does culminate in moral solidity. A question that might unsettle all of this is whether there are any stable criteria for moral progress; for if all such criteria (including meta-criteria by which we evaluate changes in the criteria we use) are changeable and in fact do change over time, ‘progress’ becomes a relative notion – all so-called ‘progress’ would then be progress relative to the criteria we happen to use at the time. In our view this problem is best addressed by taking a hermeneutical approach according to which moral progress is assessed through continuously renewed interpretations of moral experience and moral concepts. Some aspects of human moral experience must be seen as inescapable, and need to be done justice to; the conversation about this is ongoing and has been for centuries, even millennia – but it can be seen as a conversation, rather than a cacophony of voices, and this is a ground for cautious optimism about the possibility of justifying our notion of individual moral progress. 75 No moral progress without an objective moral ontology Jaron Schoone Berlage Lyceum [email protected] One of the definitions of philosophy is: the study of presuppositions. While many philosophers and scholars agree that human history exhibits moral progress, there seems to be confusion about the presupposed moral ontology that such a view entails. Moral ontology is of course the sub discipline of ethics which discusses whether such things as moral facts, values and duties exist objectively, where ‘objective’ means that such facts, values and duties would exist independently from anyone’s personal beliefs. Thus, for example, the Holocaust would be morally wrong in the objective sense if it were wrong even in a world where the Nazi’s would have succeeded in killing or brainwashing everyone who disagreed with their politics, therefore leaving no human beings alive who would know that the Holocaust was wrong. Many scholars have a negative view of objective moral ontology, claiming that there are no such things as objective moral facts, values and duties. Some of these scholars would also reject the notion of moral progress. But many scholars affirm the existence of moral progress although their ethical theory lacks objective moral facts, values and duties. The goals of this paper are twofold. First, this paper will argue that moral progress presupposes the existence of objective moral facts, values and duties. Therefore, denying the existence of objective moral facts, values and duties while affirming the existence of moral progress will inevitably lead to a contradiction. To reach this goal, the term “moral progress” must be carefully examined. Moral progress is not simply the temporal statement that there have been changes in moral reasoning over time, but it is the belief that one can see some kind of improvement in the history of morality. For instance: slavery used to be widespread but most nations currently agree that slavery is wrong, and have abolished slavery. This is seen as moral progress. But why does abolishing slavery constitute moral progress and not simply moral change? The existence of some objective moral facts seems to be implicit in the statement that “abolishing slavery constitutes moral progress”, namely the fact that slavery is morally wrong. These facts act as a measuring instrument for moral progress and without such a measuring instrument there is no way to identify moral progress. Take the example of slavery once more. How would one react if someone would argue that the abolishment of slavery was an example of moral regress because slavery is morally right or perhaps part of the natural order of things? Either one would have to 76 take a relativist position and withhold judgment, or one would have to argue that there is an objective fact, namely the fact that slavery is wrong, and that those who disagree with that fact are simply mistaken. However, if this is true then belief in moral progress does not simply presuppose any kind of moral ontology, but it presupposes a very specific kind of moral ontology; one that includes the existence of objective moral facts. But there are very few ethical theories that actually acknowledge the existence of such objective moral facts, values and duties, although some appear to refer to them. This leads to the second goal of this paper, which is to show that there are in fact ethical theories which fall victim to the aforementioned contradiction: affirming moral progress while denying the existence of objective moral facts, values and duties. One ethical theory in particular, utilitarianism as advocated by dr. Peter Singer, will be examined. Several arguments will be provided to show that Singer’s utilitarianism cannot include the notion of moral progress. The paper will conclude with a short remark on ethical theories that do have the necessary moral ontology that is required to affirm the existence of moral progress. 77 Moral progress by increased empirical knowledge and real life experience Thomas Schramme University of Hamburg [email protected] Morality is a system of normative practices. As such it is similar to other such practices, e.g. applying laws or playing games. Quite generally, moral progress might be understood as a change in the circumstances of a practice so that at least one important aim of the practice is achieved to a higher degree. For the system of morality this would arguably call for a perspective on moral improvement in terms of avoidance of unnecessary harm. Circumstances that prevent more harm imply moral progress. If we think of the circumstances that might allow such progress, we might realise that the way we pursue a practice can be improved when we know more. For instance, for a long time people were wrong about capacities of animals to experience pain or to have complex states of consciousness. This was one faulty reason not to treat them adequately, i.e. to make moral errors. To learn empirically about the real capacities of animals hence led to improved moral practice, i.e. moral progress. Another cause for progress can be experience: In one sense it is of course necessary to actually experience harm in order to appreciate it as relevant for normative considerations. In addition, to make experiences can involve an experience to come to see something as harmful. Many ways we treat each other were not regarded as harmful for a long time, for instance looking down at women or patronizing adolescents. But this might change, hence the circumstances of morality might change. More harm will be prevented when appreciating the harmfulness of certain practices, so moral progress can be due to experience. In general my claim is that moral progress has very little to do with an improvement in moral outlook or an improvement in moral capacities of people, but with the circumstances in which we act morally. These circumstances are mainly determined by empirical findings and experiences. 78 Moral Progress, Moral Plurality, and Mill’s Paradox Christian Seidel Friedrich-Alexander Universität [email protected] The evaluation of states of affairs is a pivotal task for many moral theories. A neglected question, however, is how processes leading from one state of affairs to another are to be evaluated. One category (amongst others) specifically geared towards the – gradable – evaluation of processes is the idea of ‘moral progress’. But what constitutes moral progress, and how does it relate to the moral evaluation of states of affairs? A straightforward answer is that moral progress is nothing but a matter of attaining a morally better state of affairs. More precisely, according to the Simple Reductive View of Moral Progress, the extent to which a process from a state of affairs s1 at t1 to a state of affairs s2 at t2 (with t1 < t2) shows moral progress is a (monotonically increasing) function of how much s2 is morally better than s1. This view reduces moral progress to a comparison of two states of affairs and induces a very liberal understanding of moral progress: Suppose that the amount of human well-being is one property relevant to the moral assessment of states of affairs; then the Simple Reductive View holds that a process of population growth from 100 happy people to 1.000 equally happy people where everything else is kept constant is a moral progress – even if these 1.0000 people act exactly the same (possibly nasty) way and hold exactly the same (possibly outrageous) moral beliefs as the 100 people did. This overstretches the common-sense understanding of moral progress as an improvement related to people’s behaviour and mind-set. So according to SubjectCentred Reductive Views of Moral Progress, the extent to which a process from a state of affairs s1 at t1 to a state of affairs s2 at t2 (with t1 < t2) shows moral progress is a (monotonically increasing) function of (1) the extent to which the moral subjects in s 2 ‘act better’ than the moral subjects in s1, and of (2) the extent to which the moral subjects in s2 hold ‘better moral beliefs’ than the moral subjects in s1. This family of views does not compare states of affairs as a whole with respect to a common scale of moral evaluation, but only compares some features of these states (viz. those related to the actions and mind-set of moral subjects). The present paper discusses one complication and one more fundamental problem of the Subject-Centred View (which is introduced in Section 1). The complication arises from the two-dimensionality of this view: What if people act better, but hold worse moral beliefs, or vice versa? To induce a total order of the set of possible processes 79 (which may plausibly seen to be a theoretical condition of adequacy for a theory of moral evaluation of processes), the Subject-Centred View obviously requires some trade-off between the two dimensions (1) and (2). As I will show (in Section 2), this trade-off is a difficult one to make, complicated even further by the fact that the two dimensions are not wholly independent: On one ‘practical’ reading of the dimension (2), a moral belief is better than another if (under realistic assumptions about human motivation and practical rationality) it induces people to act better. Thus, dimension (2) would itself be a function of dimension (1), and the Subject-Centred Reductive View reduces to a one-dimensional assessment of states of affairs according to the goodness of the actions within these states. But insofar as acting better is (even on nonconsequentialist accounts) at least partially a matter of bringing about better state of affairs, the Subject-Centred Reductive View threatens to ultimately collapse into the Simple Reductive View. The collapse can be resisted, though, by noting an alternative reading of dimension (2): Holding better moral beliefs may just be a matter of holding more true moral beliefs; and as long as the truth of a moral belief is not a matter of its practical effects, dimensions (1) and (2) will be independent of each other. However, I show (in Section 3) that under this reading, the Subject-Centred Reductive View is subject to a Paradox which traces back to John Stuart Mill’s discussion of freedom of expression in On Liberty: Given that the two dimensions are independent (such that maximising along one dimension has no counterbalancing effects on the other dimension), the View implies that for any given status quo state of affairs s0, there is an end point (a supremum) of moral progress – namely the state of affairs s∗ among all states attainable from s0 such that the number of morally right actions among people in s* and the number of true beliefs people hold in s* are both maximised. But clearly, both the number of morally right actions and of true moral beliefs are maximised only if each person acts the same way and holds the same beliefs (since if people acted and thought differently, one could always increase the number of right actions and true beliefs by letting each person do the union of all morally right actions done by other people and letting her think the union of all true moral beliefs held by other people). In other words, the ideal of moral progress which the Subject-Centred Reductive View is committed to is that people live and think in conformity – moral plurality in the sense of multiple morally different lifestyles and multiple moral views is wiped out. But as Mill pointed out in On Liberty, moral plurality in this sense is itself essential to moral progress. So the Subject-Centred Reductive View ends up in Mill’s Paradox: Boosting moral progress will increase conformity, which itself curbs moral progress. 80 After briefly discussing Mill’s own (unsuccessful) attempt at solving the Paradox by introducing moral dummy views (in Section 4), the paper concludes with a methodological outlook (in Section 5): If Mill is right in holding that moral plurality is essential to moral progress, then the Subject-Centred Reductive View fails. Indeed this failure points out that there are strong reasons to reject any reductive view, because the kind of moral plurality required to stimulate moral progress is essentially a “pathrelated property”, i.e. a property which has to be sustained above a certain threshold all along the path or process which leads from one state of affairs to another. This is why attempts to reduce evaluation of processes to evaluation of states of affairs are bound to fail. The upshot of this discussion is that thinking about moral progress might have surprising implications for theoretical normative ethics since it suggests that the moral evaluation of processes is not straightforwardly reducible to the moral evaluation of states of affairs. Given that in everyday life and politics, moral evaluations of processes are ubiquitous, perhaps ethicists should think more and harder about this intricate issue. 81 How do we measure people’s Moral Progress? Sean Sinclair Leeds University [email protected] How do we measure an individual's moral progress? Or the progress of a group of students in an ethics class? Before we can answer that, we must say how to characterise moral progress. Many philosophers would characterise moral progress in terms of the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg, and then measure it via James Rest's Defining Issues Test, which operationalises Kohlberg's constructs. I argue that this is a mistake. I contend it would be better to rely on an alternative test developed In the Habermasian "discourse ethics" tradition, based on Joseph Cappella's measure of argument repertoire. I argue that although Kohlberg can justly claim to describe the moral development attributable to rather ordinary processes such as ageing and education, his account does not appear to capture the changes wrought by improvements in moral reasoning skills of the kind which produce the very best kind of moral thinking (at least, as far as philosophers are concerned). This is most easily seen in the place where philosophers try to produce the very improvements in question: ethics classes. Here, in some respects, Kohlberg's theory seems too stringent; in other respects, too inclusive. On its stringency, I argue that ethics class students may use reasoning from stages below Kohlberg's stage 5 without this detracting at all from the quality of their contributions. For example, medical students or business students may be asked to consider dilemmas involving contexts in which they will have moral obligations deriving from their professional role or their contractual obligations to their employer. When students appeal to these role-related obligations without offering any broader justification eg in terms of social contract theory, they count as using stage 4 thinking rather than stage 5 thinking. Yet this does not detract at all from the quality of their contribution. An appeal to social contract theory would distract from the main point. Also on stringency, Gilligan's criticisms of Kohlberg's theory highlight that the theory would not count any action motivated simply by care as the best kind of action, morally. Kohlberg's test is also sometimes too inclusive. A dogmatic Kantian who pays no attention to alternative considerations or perspectives could thereby count as relying on the highest stage of thinking, while someone who is sensitive to a range of conflicting considerations and tries to balance them in the best traditions of moral 82 thinking does not. I conclude that even if Kohlberg successfully characterises the normal development of moral thinking, earlier stage thinking is not always inferior to later stage thinking. There are additional problems with the Defining Issues Test, the test which is most commonly used to operationalise Kohlberg's ideas. This asks respondents to say what they would do about certain dilemmas. Respondents are then offered various reasons they might have for doing it, corresponding to different Kohlbergian levels, and asked to say which reasons they prefer. The test finds a lot more respondents scoring at stage 5 than Kohlberg's original test, in which respondents were asked to state their reasons for themselves. Narvaez has argued that this is because many subjects are capable of thinking intuitively at stage 5, and they can recognise their stage 5 motivations when presented with them in the DIT, but they are not capable of articulating those reasons for themselves as Kohlberg's test demanded. But this analysis plays into the hands of "debunking" style comments from psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, to the effect that intuitive moral judgments do not have the objectively constrained character that philosophers have traditionally held moral thought to have. Moral intuitions have been shown to be driven by all sorts of disreputable biases. So philosophers need moral thought to be more explicitly reasoned than the intuitive judgments which Narvaez defends, both the sake of truthconduciveness and for the sake of Habermasian discourse ethics. In fact, ethics classes are directed at producing exactly such explicitly reasoned judgments. But unsurprisingly, the evidence that they produce progress on the DIT is patchy. Lawrence reviewed 14 studies of interventions based on DIT evaluations and found that only half produced significant developmental change. Schlaefli reviewed 55 studies and found that "the overall power of moral education programs ... is in the small range". Self ran an ethical reasoning skills course lasting 16 weeks for two hours a week which produced no change on the DIT. Rather than concluding that most ethics courses are poor, I conclude that the DIT is not a good measure of the kind of progress that moral philosophers aim to produce. I therefore defend an alternative test based on Capella's concept of argument repertoire. Cappella measures the quality of an opinion by asking the opinion holder to state the reasons they have for holding the opinion, and then the reasons other people might have for holding the opposite opinion. Subjects are scored on how many reasons they give. As a test of opinion quality, this has been shown to be reliable and valid. A strength of Cappella's test is its coding for and directly eliciting counterarguments. I offer theoretical and empirical reasons for thinking that awareness 83 of counterarguments is a key measure of the quality of an opinion, and therefore of moral progress. The theoretical rationale is that, paradoxically, to confirm an moral opinion one must look for the reasons against. At the limit, if you know all the reasons against your opinion, but nevertheless the reasons you know of which favour your opinion outweigh the known reasons against, then your opinion can be held to be reliable or fully rational, even if you don't know all the reasons in favour. The empirical evidence I cite is that becoming aware of opposing arguments is more likely to produce opinion change than other supposed epistemically desirable changes such as becoming aware of relevant information. The best explanation of this observation is that awareness of opposing arguments is better at revealing weaknesses in people's original thinking, which makes it more likely that their subsequent opinions are fully justifiable. Based on this, my proposed test of moral progress involves asking participants to consider a randomised set of dilemmas before a course of ethics classes, stating and defending their views regarding each dilemma. The same participants are then asked to repeat the exercise for a different set of dilemmas after the course. Pre-test and post-test Argument Repertoire scores are totalled across all participants. I contend that as a general rule, an ethics course can be held to have been effective if and only if the post-test total of argument repertoire scores is significantly greater than the pre-test total. 84 Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Some Benefits of Rationalization Jesse Summers Duke University [email protected] Does moral progress occur in response to reasoning? One challenge to this claim comes from recent psychological work that suggests that our explicit reasoning may not move us as well or in the ways we think it does. Although we often think we know our reasons for acting, evidence suggests we’re moved by, among other things, our emotions, instincts, inclinations, implicit stereotypes, our neurobiology, habits, reactions, evolutionary pressures, unexamined principles, or just justifications other than the ones we cite.17 I both fail to notice what motivates me, and cite as reasons considerations that are motivationally inert. If that is true, then whatever moral progress happens must not happen by our reasoning with ourselves about what is best to do. But reasoning with ourselves is the chief way in which most of us attempt to improve ourselves and others. If the evidence suggests that all reasoning is rationalization, what hope is there for rational moral progress? Some have responded to this evidence by concluding that explicit reasoning is largely or entirely irrelevant to understanding our actions, and what matters are those (largely non-rational) features that move us. This response usually overestimates the significance of the psychological evidence and prematurely denies that explicit reasoning can cause actions. 17 Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.,” Psychological review 108, no. 4 (2001). Benjamin Libet, “Do We Have Free Will?,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 8-9 (1999). Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley, “Apparent Mental Causation: Sources of the Experience of Will.,” American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999). Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(1977).Fiery Cushman and Joshua Greene, “The Philosopher in the Theater,” in The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and Evil, ed. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver (Washington, DC: APA Press, 2011).Joshua D. Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, ed. Walter SinnottArmstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). 85 An alternative response to the evidence distinguishes explanatory (causal) from justificatory reasons, and then concludes that only justificatory reasons matter to any moral discussion. Morality, according to this response, concerns itself only with justifications we offer sincerely, regardless of any (other) empirical causes of our actions. This second response, however, underestimates the range and power of the existing psychological evidence and risks simply conceding that we are systematically mistaken about our motivation. Rationalization should be taken seriously, both in itself and as a threat to rational moral progress. It is both philosophically and practically worrying if we are systematically mistaken about our motivation, even if our justifications are good. For example, rationalization interferes with moral assessments like praise and blame, it impedes self-understanding, and it hinders self-improvement. What has been overlooked, however, is that there are potential benefits to rationalization, to offering sincere justifications of my actions even when those justifications misrepresent my motivation. And these benefits of rationalization also explain how rational moral progress is possible, even if the psychological evidence is correct. I offer an account of rationalization that builds on Robert Audi’s account,18 and I show that such an account makes clear at least two significant benefits of rationalization. The first benefit is that rationalization applies practical pressure to make my reasoning consistent. I needn’t endorse a justification in order to believe that it could apply. But when I rationalize that I handed the homeless man $1 because “I wanted to feed him” rather than “to redistribute wealth”—both of which I think are good reasons—I have now prima facie endorsed one of these justifications. Endorsing that justification then puts me under practical pressure to be consistent with my own reasoning in future cases, even if I misrepresented my motivation in this case. I can become a better person by rationalizing, even though the rationalization is misunderstanding my motivation. Therefore, rationalization leads me to understand my present reasons for action in a way that shapes my future ones. Rationalization also helps establish meaningful patterns of action that come to change our motivation over time. If and when we consider why we act in this or that way, there is never sufficient evidence. We nevertheless assemble some evidence to identify patterns of action. As psychotherapists realize, though, assembling evidence and identifying patterns both actively shape our self-understanding, which then shapes future decisions. Our rationalizations can therefore make true, over time, that we act 18 Robert Audi, “Rationalization and Rationality,” Synthese 65, no. 2 (1985). 86 on motives that we currently misrepresent ourselves as having. Therefore, by misunderstanding ourselves in precisely the way psychologists suggest we do, we set ourselves up for rational moral progress. 87 On Harm as unifying ethical principle Tanja de Villiers-Botha Stellenbosch University [email protected] The putative disunity of morality has become a hot topic in moral psychology in recent years. This is especially prevalent in the work of Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators (Haidt, Joseph 2004, Iyer, Koleva et al. 2012, Graham, Haidt et al. 2013), who have been advocating for a “broadened” understanding of what morality entails. Such an understanding supposedly shows that “There’s more to morality than harm and fairness” (Haidt, Graham 2007). In reaction, philosophers have been quick to draw philosophical conclusions. Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatly (2012), for example, use Haidt and his colleagues’ research to substantiate their claim that morality is “disunified”; they argue that not all judgements that are intended to be about morality are judgements about harms being committed. This leads them to conclude that there is nothing about the content of moral judgements that unifies them in any relevant way. Elsewhere (Sinnott-Armstrong, Wheatley 2013) they argue that their findings should encourage “moral scientists” to develop a more taxonomic approach to morality and to stop approaching it in a monolithic way, since morality has no unifying feature about which distinctive generalisations can be made (4). The crux of the argument by philosophers and psychologists like Haidt et al., Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatly, and Jesse Prinz (Prinz 2007b, Prinz 2007a)is that research in moral psychology shows that some people tend to moralise behaviours above and beyond those that pertain to harm, thus they include prohibitions based on social position and purity considerations in their moral judgements, for example. From this they draw a normative conclusion: there are behaviours over and above those pertaining to harm that should be moralised. What all of these theorists have in common is the assumption that our normative theories should reflect ordinary people’s habitual moral intuitions. In this paper, I want to question this assumption, which underlies much of the work done in moral psychology and moral philosophy. My argument will be that moral philosophy, as normative theory, is not in the business of explaining and/or shoring up people’s ordinary moral intuitions. On the contrary, I would argue that it is the business of moral philosophy to determine which moral judgements are justified. In order to do this, a normative theory needs to identify and justify (a) legitimate moral principle(s). I will argue, contra Haidt et al., that “minimising non-consensual harm” is just such a principle. In essence, my argument will be that 88 there shouldn’t be more to morality than harm, where “harm” is understood as “injurious to happiness” or “damage to an interest to which a person has a right” to borrow two phrases from Mill (1999). Having a principle that unifies morality also provides us with a standard against which we can evaluate moral practice, which in turn allows us to develop a conception of what moral progress would entail. References - GRAHAM, J., HAIDT, J., KOLEVA, S., MOTYL, M., IYER, R., WOJCIK, S. and DITTO, P.H., 2013. Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in experimental social psychology, 47, pp. 55-130. - HAIDT, J. and GRAHAM, J., 2007. When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), pp. 98-116. - HAIDT, J. and JOSEPH, C., 2004. Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), pp. 55-66. - IYER, R., KOLEVA, S., GRAHAM, J., DITTO, P. and HAIDT, J., 2012. Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. - PloS one, 7(8), pp. e42366. MILL, J.S., 1999. On liberty. Broadview Press. PRINZ, J.J., 2007a. The emotional construction of morals. Oxford: Oxford : Oxford University Press. - PRINZ, J.J., 2007b. Can moral obligations be empirically discovered? Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31(1), pp. 271-291. - SINNOTT-ARMSTRONG, W. and WHEATLEY, T., 2013. Are moral judgments unified? Philosophical Psychology, (ahead-of-print), pp. 1-24. 89 Moral Progress and Motivation Amna Whiston University of Reading [email protected] The motivational force of a sense of obligation is intrinsically connected to ought judgements. Given that the empirical evidence suggests that different kinds of judgements correspond to different emotions, and that emotions have motivational effects, we have reason to think that the sense of obligation, whilst corresponding directly to ought judgements, embodies a sui generis moral emotion which grounds the motive of duty. I argue in this paper that the motive of duty as an appropriate emotional response to value is a necessary condition for moral progress. Other kinds of judgements, and subsequently emotions, some of which disguised as ‘moral’, may be necessary for other kinds of progress, and not necessarily for moral progress. Thus we need a clear conception of ought judgements and their relation to the moral motive in order to raise the question about the possibility of moral progress. I do two things in this paper. First, I present the thesis that the sense of obligation, as a moral motive, provides an emotional basis for the motivational structure of an agent who is motivated to do what he believes he ought to do19. I argue that acting from the motive of duty or obligation is acting from a special kind of emotion which can be constitutionally distinguished not only from the belief that фing in morally obligatory20 but also from desires21, and that the so conceived ‘emotional’ account of the sense of obligation enunciates a worthy alternative to the traditional belief-desire model of moral motivation and action explanation. One distinct disadvantage of a common tendency to subsume the sense of obligation under either the relevant belief or under the classification of typically Humean passions is that such attempts undermine the practical role of the moral motive understood as a moral emotion and a complex cognitive-motivational state which allows the possibility of moral progress by allowing the possibility of appropriately motivational moral knowledge. 19 I take meta-ethical cognitivism to be true; that moral judgements have cognitive content and that the state of mind of accepting an ought judgement is one of belief that ф-ing is morally obligatory. 20 So that although the belief that some action is morally obligatory is constitutive of the motivationally efficacious emotional experience based on the sense of duty, the former does not entail the later. 21 So that the motive of duty can be disentangled not only from the strictly Kantian conception of it, but also from a standing desire to do what is right, understood de dicto. 90 Second, I try to say more about the relevance of a meta-ethical insight into the nature of moral motivation and more specifically of my account of the moral motive for the idea of moral progress. Whilst neutral with respect to any substantive views about moral progress, an ‘emotional’ account of the moral motive I present here makes sense of the idea that the foundational aspect of moral progress is the moral agent’s direct, intuitive recognition of and the subsequent emotional response to value. Ultimately, I argue that an understanding of the moral motive as a moral emotion explains the intuition that moral progress can be hindered by the rational critical scrutiny of or submissions to social institutions and practices and by consequentialist and cost-benefit attitudes and motives. 91 Moral Progress and Moral Ignorance Jan Willem Wieland VU University Amsterdam [email protected] We might know more about the moral facts than before. We didn’t know slavery was wrong; now we do. And things might really get better, morally speaking. Slavery existed; now it no longer does (if only). So things may progress both in theory as well as in practice. This paper will concern the former, and in particular the issue of what it entails. Does progress in moral theory entail that we are responsible for more things? Are we now responsible for slavery (would it occur) just because we discovered the moral facts? According to a growing number of philosophers, this picture is highly misguided: moral ignorance doesn’t excuse, never (cf. Moody-Adams 1994, 1997; Harman 2011, 2014; Arpaly & Schroeder 2014; among others). Surely, they will add, ignorance about non-moral facts (factual ignorance) can excuse. If you do not know your neighbour is keeping slaves, you might be excused for not informing the relevant authorities (that is, depending on whether your factual ignorance is blameworthy). But if you do know your neighbour is keeping slaves, but just not that slavery is wrong, you might not be excused. Proponents of this view typically appeal to one or both of the following considerations. First consideration: as opposed to factual ignorance, moral ignorance never excuses because moral ignorance always implies lack of good will. Slavery just testifies of lack of good will. Witness: “Enjoying other people’s suffering … speaks ill of the agent’s will even if the enjoyment in question is encouraged by a corrupt and corrupting society, and even if there is no moral theory available that disagrees.” (Arpaly & Schroeder 2014) Second consideration: as opposed to factual ignorance, moral ignorance never excuses because the moral truth is always easily accessible. Everyone can figure out that slavery is wrong. Witness: “It seems implausible to say that it would take a moral genius to see through the wrongness of chattel slavery.” (Guerrero 2007) In this paper, I’ll clearly distinguish both considerations, and present challenges to both. This will undercut the idea that moral ignorance never excuses. 92 The Order of Humanity as the Fulcrum of Moral Progress Anosike Wilson [email protected] Without the concept of humanity, the moral world is nothing but a limbo. However, humanity does not dwell in the abstract but exists in relationships thereby forming a community or society. Morality, strictly speaking, concerns the behaviours of individuals in community or society with respect to the upholding of the dignity of humanity. What this means is that behind the concept of humanity lies an order—that unifying condition—which ensures or dictates the position or dignity of humanity. Any talk of moral progress then must first of all identify such an order by and through which activities and behaviours are measured. This means that progress (and conversely retrogress) is not a neutral term. It moves towards specific ends and these ends must be defined by the possibilities of ensuring the adequate position or dignity of the human entities. Our belief that human beings can identify and advance towards the prescription of such an order is the bedrock of morals. This belief, excludes both ethical determinism and, a warranty that such movement will actually be undertaken or what is expected at the end if the movement is made. To paraphrase this in the words of Patrick Devlin, “a band of travellers can go forward together without knowing what they will find at the end of the journey but they cannot keep in company if they do not journey in the same direction.” In other words, we cannot talk of moral progress without (1) a direction-giving principle (order) (2) community or unification (humanity). It is on the nexus of these principles of order and commonality that moral statements take their roots. Actions that are termed virtuous or vicious, right or wrong, just or unjust, benevolent or inhuman have their distinction, condemnation and exaltation from the sense of these two principles. In short, progressive actions— virtuous—are ones that enable us reach or achieve the demands of the order without losing or mutilating our commonality. Diversity either in the directive-giving principle or practice of the demands of such principle cannot yield the idea of progress. This said, there is what maybe conceived as minor infringements or unwanted behaviours that can result in a slow-pace movement towards the direction being shown or taking of positions required. Actions whose outright condemnation or harsh treatment will in the end hamper or undermine the movement rather than slowing it. These actions call or elicit an attitude that can best be described as tolerance, pity or 93 mercy. Tolerance becomes a virtue or right action in the sense that it encourages a movement in the direction required by the order rather than undermining it. Toleration in the context of moral progress is then not a neutral term. The basic question that remains is this. “where do we locate this direction-giving principle?” or put in another way, “ “what projects this order that determines or measures progress?” In answering this question, we can distinguish three broad strands or positions namely the metaphysical, the existential and the traditional. When we say that the determinant of moral progress is metaphysical, we simply mean that there is a zone of reference or inference that is beyond the activities of human beings but at the same time extracts allegiance from the human community. It is from this metaphysical sphere that the ideas of God, Religion, Worship etc emanates. Moral action, then, is cooperation with carrying out the dictates of the metaphysical entities. Thus the rationale of moral action, including adherence to moral absolutes, is the hope of friendship with the metaphysical which can be translated into running away from consequences of disobedience or gaining the dignity of humanity. The inherent implication is that the status quo that warrants metaphysical commands or exhortation cannot be seen as progressive or best state of affairs. Conversely, to turn away from moral norms which the metaphysical instituted on the plea that they do not make sense, is to take the reverse of progress. To say that the order that ensures moral progress is existential is to assent to what Pollock called “practical morality.” Its basis is “in the mass of continuous experience half-consciously or unconsciously accumulated and embodied in the morality of common sense.” The first inference of commonsense with regard to moral progress is compassion. It is the recognition that fellow human beings feel the same or has the same need as one and thus have to be given the same attention as one craves. On the end of the compassion spectrum is equality. Traditionalism as order-giving principle can simply be put as “the counsel of ancestors.” In traditionalism, the dignity of humanity is assured by the demands of the ancestors and to deviate from such is retrogression. The presentation thus aims at elucidating these order giving principles of humanity and how they engender moral progress. 94 Progress in History – Hegel Reviewed Bart Zandvoort University College Dublin [email protected] Hegel's philosophy of history has often been criticized for its supposedly naïve belief in social and moral progress. "World history," Hegel claims, "is the progress of the consciousness of freedom."22 His portrayal of historical development as a succession of increasingly free and rational forms of social organization has led to a number of well-known, more or less caricatured criticisms. Amongst these are, most notably, the claim that Hegel thinks history follows a pre-set, teleological path of development, and therefore nothing truly new or surprising can happen; the notion, famously updated by Fukuyama, that there is an 'end' to history; and the claim that for Hegel this end consists in the Prussian state of his day as it is portrayed in his Philosophy of Right. As the literature on Hegel over the last few decades has shown, these interpretations are, for the most part, overly simplified or simply mistaken. Instead of returning to these issues, therefore, I will approach Hegel's philosophy of history in a novel way – focusing more on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right and a number of early texts rather than on the Philosophy of History – in order to reconstruct Hegel's theory of historical development and moral progress in a way which is relevant to contemporary interests. I will begin by outlining the idea that we can distinguish in Hegel between two levels or 'orders' of historical development: the development of reasons, ideas and norms; and the development of actually existing social practices and institutions. The possibility of moral judgment has to do with the coincidence or discrepancy between these two levels. The development of practices and institutions can 'lag behind' the development of ideas: for example, a society may have ideas about gender equality or social justice which are more advanced than actually existing practices, laws and institutions. Conversely, it is also possible for ideas and norms to fall behind actual practice: experiences of freedom and equality can emerge from within institutions, and show prevailing laws, norms or ideas to be false or obsolete. For Hegel the morality of social institutions is not measured against an eternal standard of reason, but against ideas and norms which emerge historically in a process G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 22 95 of social development. The problem is that a discrepancy or asynchrony can arise between norms and practices, between the 'rational' and the 'actual'. According to Hegel, on my account, this discrepancy is a result of a tendency to 'inertia' in society: social hierarchies, laws, institutions and economic privileges tend to entrench themselves and resist change. In the Philosophy of Right, for example, Hegel shows how civil society, the sphere of private interest, tends to dominate and undermine the political sphere of rational, free decisions. One of the main problems for the possibility of moral progress, on Hegel's account, is therefore this inertia inherent in society: both institutions and ideas can become obsolete and resist change when they have already been shown to be unjust, inadequate or irrational. While Hegel describes history as a succession of increasingly free and rational states, he indicates that with more advanced level of social organization the capacity of society to reproduce itself and the capacity of private interests to resist change also increases. Moral and social progress is therefore always potentially counteracted by an ever greater danger of social stagnation, and by increasingly violent revolutionary upheavals which are needed to break this social inertia. In the end, therefore, I argue that Hegel's view of progress in history is much more ambiguous than is commonly assumed. 96