Philip Kitcher: Moral Progress (ed. Heilinger) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Democratic contractualism. Philip Kitcher’s pragmatic account of moral progress
Philip Kitcher: Moral Progress, 2021
The present small volume contains a large project: Based on the assumption that a better understanding of past instances of progressive moral change is crucial for making urgently needed current and future advances in morality "more systematic and more sure-footed" (p. 11/internal reference/) 1 , Philip Kitcher develops a novel understanding of moral progress as change in belief and conduct, change that solves problems and overcomes limitations in living together. He analyses the dynamics of progressive change, including its main impediments, and proposes a complex methodology of moral inquiry, guiding how individuals and communities should go about realising more such progress. Challenged by constructive criticism from Amia Srinivasan, Rahel Jaeggi and Susan Neiman, also included in the present volume, Kitcher concludes with a spirited defense of his vision of a society shaped by institutions that invite and promote progressive change. The discussions on moral progress are part of Kitcher's ambitious project of a "reconstruction of philosophy" in a pragmatist spirit that he has initiated in a number of articles, several of which can be found in the collection Preludes to Pragmatism. 2 Furthermore, his important book, The Ethical Project, has further set the scene with a first 1 Page numbers in paranthesis refer to the current book.
Moral progress: Recent developments
Philosophy Compass, 2021
Societies change over time. Chattel slavery and foot-binding have been abolished, democracy has become increasingly widespread, gay rights have become established in some countries, and the animal rights movement continues to gain momentum. Do these changes count as moral progress? Is there such a thing? If so, how should we understand it? These questions have been receiving increasing attention from philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and sociologists in recent decades. This survey provides a systematic account of recent developments in the understanding of moral progress. We outline the concept of moral progress and describe the different types of moral progress identified in the literature. We review the normative criteria that have been used in judging whether various developments count as morally progressive or not. We discuss the prospects of moral progress in the face of challenges that claim that moral progress is not psychologically possible for human beings, and we explore the metaethical implications of moral progress.
Metaphilosophy, 1999
This paper shows that moral progress is a substantive and plausible idea. Moral progress in belief involves deepening our grasp of existing moral concepts, while moral progress in practices involves realizing deepened moral understandings in behavior or social institutions. Moral insights could not be assimilated or widely disseminated if they involved devising and applying totally new moral concepts. Thus, it is argued, moral failures of past societies cannot be explained by appeal to ignorance of new moral ideas, but must be understood as resulting from refusals to subject social practices to critical scrutiny. Moral philosophy is not the main vehicle for disseminating morally progressive insights, though it has an important role in processes that lead to moral progress. Yet we have grounds for cautious optimism, since progressive moral insights can be disseminated and can, sometimes, have constructive social effects.
Moral Progress in the History of Moral Norms
In his recent book The Moral Arc (2015), Michael Shermer makes an admirable case for the occurrence of moral progress at the social level. Society-level moral progress occurs when a change in the norms, practices, and institutions of a society constitutes a moral improvement, relative to the way that the norms, practices, and institutions were before. Shermer argues compellingly that society-level moral progress has taken place with the decline of witch executions, the pacification of international affairs, the rise of democracy, the abolition of slavery, the extension of equal rights to women and homosexuals, and increasing support for animal rights. However, the huge body of historical and sociological information that Shermer draws on will likely fail to convince a proponent of what Philip Kitcher calls the mere-change view (Kitcher 2011: 138 – 140, 210). This is the view that changes in norms, practices, and institutions can never be moral progress, because there is no objective standard by which such changes may be evaluated as resulting in a state of affairs that is morally better than a previous state (Kitcher 2011: 210). As Kitcher aptly quips, the mere change view amounts to the thought that social changes are “simply one damned thing after another” (Kitcher 2011: 7). Against the mere-change view, I shall argue that moral progress does indeed occur, and moreover that it can be understood as increased success in achieving the end of a moral enterprise. The end of a moral enterprise is a state of affairs favored by selection pressures which govern the historical evolution of moral norms. Such an end can be identified through sociological inquiry of the kind that Shermer and others pursue.
MORAL PROGRESS: CONVERSATION OR CONFLICT? On Philip Kitcher, Kenneth Arrow, and John Dewey
PRAGMATISM TODAY, 2023
The economist Kenneth Arrow, in Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), famously proved that a society of diverse preferences can only be ordered by dictatorship. Unless diverse preferences can adjust, electoral democracy cannot govern. Philip Kitcher, in Moral Progress (2021), emphasizes the importance for moral progress of sympathetic understanding of others through "ideal" conversation. This paper contends that conversation alone is inadequate for resolution of conflicts in a democracy. Conflict is accompanied by discourse, but preferences are grounded in habits. Social habits, and shared patterns of conduct, resist adjustment in response to discourse alone. Yet habits and preferences demonstrably adjust in the process of conflict resolution, potentially resolving Arrow's impossibility problem. The paper advances a pragmatic theory of preference conflict distinct from the Marxist model of power-oriented class or group conflict. Pragmatic conflict is not strictly constituted of group power struggles, but of aggregated preferences, a more common, indeed endemic, formation and interaction of opposing opinions and beliefs in response to multiple shared problems. Preference conflict theory illuminates the boundary between inquiry and violence in the polarization of aggregated opposing interests. It is open to a fluid Deweyan transformation, in the continuum of inquiry, through which specific problems can be democratically recognized, defined, and resolved by incremental group preference adjustment, as discrete problems are identified and remedial practices are adopted through stakeholder input, enforceable through law.
Analyse & Kritik, 2012
Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project trios to vindicates ethics through an analysis of its evolutionary and cultural history, a history which in turn, he thinks, supports a particular conception of the role of moral thinking and normative practices in human social life. As Kitcher sees it, that role could hardly be more central: most of what makes human life human, and preferable to the fraught and impoverished societies of the great apes, depends on moral cognition. Prom this view of the role of the ethical project as a social technology, Kitcher derives an account of moral progress and even moral truth: a normative analogue of the idea that truth is the convergence of rational enquiry. To Kitcher’s history, I present an anti-history. Most of what is good about human social life depends on the expansion of our social emotions, not on our capacities to articulate and internalise explicit norms. Indeed, since the Holocene and the origins of complex society, normative thought and norm...
PHILIP KITCHER'S PRAGMATIC NATURALISM: HUMAN CONVERSATION AS THE ONLY ETHICAL AUTHORITY
Philip Kitcher, by considering ethics to be a human invention, situate the objectivity and universality of ethical norms on humans (as subject), not on some extraneous factors to man (a divine being or some moral authorities).In his book,The Ethical Project, Kitcher systematical present 'ethics' as a social technology that liberates us from the difficulties of human predicaments.He gave a naturalistic account of how we came to have ethical project.In this article, we shall give a critical exposition of his discourse in ethics, and examine various suggestions made by scholars like Connor, towards the possibility of situating the origin, truth and progress of ethical claims on human activities over the ages.
A Philosophical Reflection on the Disparity Between Advancement in History and Progress in Morality
2018
It is common knowledge that we live in an era of “advanced civilization” with respect to scientific and technical progress, however, the phenomenon of barbaric violence and corruption that promote human misery makes one raise questions on the relationship between progress in history and morality. Experience shows that progress in history does not correspond to progress in morality. But what is the reason for the disparity and how can a harmony between the two be established? The paper sees in Kant’s theory of history and moral progress plausible answer to these questions, showing that advances in civilization do not coincide with progress in morality because history has only a moral aim but not a moral end. It is therefore by developing a civil society as the proper environment for the full development of man’s rational capacities that man’s natural world could be transformed into a moral world. Where, however, the establishment of a civil society is hindered, it is the courage...