In this post I want to return to the question of moral progress. But before addressing that directly, I first want to set up two reference cases for comparison. My first comparison case is statistics. Statistics is useful, and credit for the value that statistics adds to our discussions goes to several sources: to the statisticians who develop stat tests and estimates, to the teachers who transmit those tools to others, and to the problem specialists who find useful places to apply stats.
Do different cultures tend to show moral progress in the same direction? I haven't seen any evidence for that, and some evidence to the contrary. Are there any studies that support that claim?
That's a good point. We use both (reusable) fabric towels and (disposable) paper towels. Using a store of rags seems like an intermediate case, with parts of the benefits and costs of both.
More generally about household arrangements: I think that a lot of convergence occurs quickly, and a lot of remaining potential convergence is close to neutral. Food storage and preparation appliances are largely kept in kitchens, but e.g. the exact relative location of stove, fridge, and sink within the kitchen seems relatively neutral. Attempts to find particularly efficient kitchen arrangements have been made, but they don't seem to have had large enough gains to catch on.
50 years from now I think many more people will look at animal meat consumption as immoral, but there will be no new moral arguments. We will simply be rich/advanced enough to afford not to slaughter animals to get tasty meat.
f=maConservation of energyConservation of momentum
These physical laws are just as simple as any moral ones. Christian equivalents might be
Love thy neighbour.Turn the other cheek.He who is without sin may cast the first stone.
The moral ones were "known" well before the physical ones.
Perhaps you think the Chistian ones were just fashionable for a couple of thousand years and are now dissplaced by newer ones. But then why are prohibitions of slavery and equality of women not also just fashionable for some period.
Just because something is simply stated it doesn't mean its application is clearly beneficial.
Take slavery for example. .Can you prove that it isn't better for bankruptcy to be followed by a period of ownership of the bankrupted person by creditors for say 7 years or until debts are repaid rather than have creditors go out of pocket?
I agree moral progress is likely most related to increasing wealth; however, why do different cultures tend to show moral progress in the same direction?
Perhaps this suggests some sort of moral intuitions about objective morality that we are afforded to discover (Dr. Michael Huemer's take in his book, Ethical Intuitionism)... all _despite_ the failed attempts by self-declared experts in morality (some of whom suggested things that may have negated progress).
I have made an advance in the art of home arrangement I would like to share: I maintain a large store of old rags in the kitchen and use them as a substitute for single-use paper towels. Adjacent is a small laundry basket for these, and I go through a load of them about twice a week. Relative to paper towels, this has reduced my paper waste (unclear if environment worse off overall due to extra laundry), and they feel more luxurious. Feel free to apply and cite me for this innovation.
Yeah there is not very good measures of morality. And it's not even clear that being more moral leads to better life outcomes for people, communities, countries or species. As far as home layout goes you could read "A Pattern Language" by Alexander, et al, some useful insights.
Given our dire straits, I'm not sure we have the luxury of doing moral or any other kind of politics at our leisure. It feels like some rather nasty chickens, e.g., climate change, are coming home to roost sooner than later.
My alleged constant is just meant to explain why sound moral arguments don't lead to change as quickly as, say, innovation in statistical methods. It's true I would then need to explain why moral progress nevertheless often eventually overcomes those resisting forces. I don't know the answer.
We can define moral truth as what we would conclude if we investigated moral matters at our leisure, as long as we wish, gathering whatever evidence and arguments we wish. This is similar to C.S. Peirce's Pragmatism, whereby the truth is what a community of inquirers would eventually arrive at.
From what I understand, the science of morality hasn't progressed much since Sam Harris published his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. He argued there is or could be at least some objectivity to morality and science ought to try to find and study it. He wrote:
I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain—but opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.
That bit about facts (and in my opinion, sound reasoning too) constraining opinions strikes me as (1) very important, and (2) true for people with the moral courage to at least acknowledge and reasonably deal with inconvenient fact and sound reasoning. Almost no people have problems with convenient fact and sound reasoning.
In modern times, cognitive dissonance does not seem to serve the human species very well. It's great for demagogues and tyrants, but not so much for the rest of us. Heck, cog. diss. may even rise to the level of an existential threat for modern civilization, maybe also for the human species. Maybe in pre-civilization days cog. diss. was generally more beneficial than detrimental.
S.M. Liao's 2016 book, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, indicated that the morality neuroscience was still in its infancy. The philosophers were making at least as much progress as the scientists. A review of moral neuroscience in chapter 88 of the 2020 textbook, The Cognitive Neurosciences (sixth edition), indicated that not much progress had been made since 2016.
Here's a lovely passage from Hobbes' "Leviathan" (Chpt. 11) that illustrates the point:
“...[The reason] that the doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword, whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, [is that] men care not, in that subject, what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit or lust. For I doubt not but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle, should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”
The moral arguments associated with moral progress--arguments against slavery, for women's equality, against torture, etc--tend to be very simple and straightforward. If true, this would explain why it's usually hard to locate with confidence the original proponent of the argument. These are arguments that must have occurred to many people at many different times throughout history.
If the arguments are so obvious, why do they not have immediate impact? I think the answer is that, in the case of moral progress, there are always going to be powerful interests that benefit from the status quo. It's not surprising, say, that men in male-dominated societies didn't just immediately see the force of the argument for women's equality and concede that it was right. Instead they fought against it for centuries. Similarly, most people really, really do not want to give up eating meat, and so it is very difficult for them to accept Singer's straightforward argument against the practice. I think this is the main reason why moral progress is always so slow and contentious.
See Huemer (2016); DOI 10.1007/s11098-015-0588-9
Do different cultures tend to show moral progress in the same direction? I haven't seen any evidence for that, and some evidence to the contrary. Are there any studies that support that claim?
That's a good point. We use both (reusable) fabric towels and (disposable) paper towels. Using a store of rags seems like an intermediate case, with parts of the benefits and costs of both.
More generally about household arrangements: I think that a lot of convergence occurs quickly, and a lot of remaining potential convergence is close to neutral. Food storage and preparation appliances are largely kept in kitchens, but e.g. the exact relative location of stove, fridge, and sink within the kitchen seems relatively neutral. Attempts to find particularly efficient kitchen arrangements have been made, but they don't seem to have had large enough gains to catch on.
50 years from now I think many more people will look at animal meat consumption as immoral, but there will be no new moral arguments. We will simply be rich/advanced enough to afford not to slaughter animals to get tasty meat.
f=maConservation of energyConservation of momentum
These physical laws are just as simple as any moral ones. Christian equivalents might be
Love thy neighbour.Turn the other cheek.He who is without sin may cast the first stone.
The moral ones were "known" well before the physical ones.
Perhaps you think the Chistian ones were just fashionable for a couple of thousand years and are now dissplaced by newer ones. But then why are prohibitions of slavery and equality of women not also just fashionable for some period.
Just because something is simply stated it doesn't mean its application is clearly beneficial.
Take slavery for example. .Can you prove that it isn't better for bankruptcy to be followed by a period of ownership of the bankrupted person by creditors for say 7 years or until debts are repaid rather than have creditors go out of pocket?
I agree moral progress is likely most related to increasing wealth; however, why do different cultures tend to show moral progress in the same direction?
Perhaps this suggests some sort of moral intuitions about objective morality that we are afforded to discover (Dr. Michael Huemer's take in his book, Ethical Intuitionism)... all _despite_ the failed attempts by self-declared experts in morality (some of whom suggested things that may have negated progress).
Hi, I would like to apply this innovation, where can I site you?
I have made an advance in the art of home arrangement I would like to share: I maintain a large store of old rags in the kitchen and use them as a substitute for single-use paper towels. Adjacent is a small laundry basket for these, and I go through a load of them about twice a week. Relative to paper towels, this has reduced my paper waste (unclear if environment worse off overall due to extra laundry), and they feel more luxurious. Feel free to apply and cite me for this innovation.
Yeah there is not very good measures of morality. And it's not even clear that being more moral leads to better life outcomes for people, communities, countries or species. As far as home layout goes you could read "A Pattern Language" by Alexander, et al, some useful insights.
That's interesting. I'm not familiar with Pierce.
Given our dire straits, I'm not sure we have the luxury of doing moral or any other kind of politics at our leisure. It feels like some rather nasty chickens, e.g., climate change, are coming home to roost sooner than later.
My alleged constant is just meant to explain why sound moral arguments don't lead to change as quickly as, say, innovation in statistical methods. It's true I would then need to explain why moral progress nevertheless often eventually overcomes those resisting forces. I don't know the answer.
We can define moral truth as what we would conclude if we investigated moral matters at our leisure, as long as we wish, gathering whatever evidence and arguments we wish. This is similar to C.S. Peirce's Pragmatism, whereby the truth is what a community of inquirers would eventually arrive at.
You can't explain a change with a constant, and those powerful interests haven't changed.
From what I understand, the science of morality hasn't progressed much since Sam Harris published his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. He argued there is or could be at least some objectivity to morality and science ought to try to find and study it. He wrote:
I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain—but opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.
That bit about facts (and in my opinion, sound reasoning too) constraining opinions strikes me as (1) very important, and (2) true for people with the moral courage to at least acknowledge and reasonably deal with inconvenient fact and sound reasoning. Almost no people have problems with convenient fact and sound reasoning.
In modern times, cognitive dissonance does not seem to serve the human species very well. It's great for demagogues and tyrants, but not so much for the rest of us. Heck, cog. diss. may even rise to the level of an existential threat for modern civilization, maybe also for the human species. Maybe in pre-civilization days cog. diss. was generally more beneficial than detrimental.
S.M. Liao's 2016 book, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, indicated that the morality neuroscience was still in its infancy. The philosophers were making at least as much progress as the scientists. A review of moral neuroscience in chapter 88 of the 2020 textbook, The Cognitive Neurosciences (sixth edition), indicated that not much progress had been made since 2016.
Here's a lovely passage from Hobbes' "Leviathan" (Chpt. 11) that illustrates the point:
“...[The reason] that the doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword, whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, [is that] men care not, in that subject, what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit or lust. For I doubt not but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle, should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”
The moral arguments associated with moral progress--arguments against slavery, for women's equality, against torture, etc--tend to be very simple and straightforward. If true, this would explain why it's usually hard to locate with confidence the original proponent of the argument. These are arguments that must have occurred to many people at many different times throughout history.
If the arguments are so obvious, why do they not have immediate impact? I think the answer is that, in the case of moral progress, there are always going to be powerful interests that benefit from the status quo. It's not surprising, say, that men in male-dominated societies didn't just immediately see the force of the argument for women's equality and concede that it was right. Instead they fought against it for centuries. Similarly, most people really, really do not want to give up eating meat, and so it is very difficult for them to accept Singer's straightforward argument against the practice. I think this is the main reason why moral progress is always so slow and contentious.