“Toward a Naturalistic Theory of Moral Progress”, 2016-07 ():
Early liberal theories about the feasibility of moral progress were premised on empirically ungrounded assumptions about human psychology and society.
In this article, we develop a richer naturalistic account of the conditions under which one important form of moral progress—the emergence of more “inclusive” moralities—is likely to arise and be sustained.
Drawing upon work in evolutionary psychology and social moral epistemology, we argue that “exclusivist” morality is the result of an adaptively plastic response that is sensitive to cues of out-group threat that are detected during development. We conclude with a blueprint for reinforcing and extending inclusivist progress.
…Peter Singer [The Expanding Circle] can be read as holding that moral progress consists in such expansions of the moral circle.8 However, this equation is mistaken, for several reasons. First, increasing moral inclusiveness is often but not always an indicator of moral progress. In certain circumstances, moral progress can plausibly take the form of exclusion, or contractions of the moral circle. This is true, for example, in relation to the moral reclassification of objects or entities that have no morally protectable interests, such as sacred artifacts, non-sentient organisms, or abiotic features of the environment like rivers or mountains—at least when according them moral status imposes unacceptable costs on morally protectable beings.9 Furthermore, greater inclusiveness is not always good. Increases in the strength of inclusivist moral commitments could under some circumstances dilute commitments to fellow group members to the point that the latter commitments were unacceptably weak from a normative point of view. Indeed, the contemporary debate in political philosophy between cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists is a dispute not about whether all people are of equal moral worth, but about what is proper inclusiveness and what is not. In what follows we focus on examples of inclusiveness that are morally uncontroversial within a broadly liberal perspective and which will be regarded as progressive by cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists alike. We will use “inclusivist morality” only to signal moral attitudes and behaviors that extend moral regard or equal moral worth beyond the narrowest confines of the group, without prejudicing the question that divides cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists.
Another reason that Singer is mistaken if he holds that moral progress simply is the development of increasingly inclusivist moralities is that, as we noted above, there are several other types of changes in human morality—quite apart from expansions and contractions of the moral circle—that constitute prima facie cases of moral progress. Expansions of the moral circle may involve improved moral concepts (such as moral standing), improved moral reasoning (such as the logical extension of valid moral norms to cover individuals who had been arbitrarily excluded from their application), and improved compliance with valid moral norms (such as behavior that is in accordance with the equal basic moral worth of persons). However, there are many types of moral progress that do not involve expansions of the moral circle.
For example, one putative type of moral progress is “proper demoralization”, which occurs when behavior that has wrongly been regarded as immoral comes to be seen as inherently morally neutral (examples include, eg. premarital sex, masturbation, interracial marriage, homosexuality, profit seeking, and lending money at interest). Conversely, “proper moralization” occurs when some types of acts, such as torture and other forms of physical cruelty, are no longer viewed as generally permissible forms of punishment or coercion—or when behaviors once regarded as morally neutral, such as sexual harassment in the workplace, come to be regarded as morally impermissible. These types of moral progress do not implicate expansions of the moral circle. Neither do improvements in how moral virtues are understood, such as when a conception of honor that focuses almost exclusively on taking violent action against supposed insults gives way to one that stresses integrity and honesty and a reluctance to resort to violence.10 Likewise, there are many important moral concepts apart from our notions of moral standing and moral statuses, and improvements in these concepts are also putative examples of moral progress. One such example relates to improvements in our conception of the domain of justice, which has expanded to include the amelioration of social-structural inequalities out of the recognition that institutions are human creations subject (under certain conditions) to modification. Such an expanded conception of justice has the implication that some forms of harm and inequality that were formerly thought to be natural and inevitable—and hence not subject to the constraints of social justice—are in fact within human control and thus potentially subject to moral evaluation.
While there are many types of moral progress that do not consist in expansions of the moral circle, our primary focus in this article is on the inclusivist dimension of moral progress—in part because we agree with Singer that it is a crucial and relatively uncontroversial type of moral progress, and in part because of the apparent tension between moral inclusivity and prevailing evolutionary theories of morality.