Moral Prosperity: Basic, Instrumental, and Vindicated Moral Progress

What do the steam engine, not marrying your cousin, and supporting gay rights have in common? The answer, according to this dissertation, is that they’re all part of the story of moral progress. Talking about moral progress can raise hackles. The term has often been used as a fig leaf for cultural chauvinism and worse. It invites the question: “Moral progress according to whom?” Even if this thorny normative question can be addressed, so that we can reasonably identify instances of moral progress according to plausible normative standards, we are still left with difficult social scientific questions about what causes moral progress. I tackle these normative and causal questions directly, and defend a theory of moral progress according to which there are three key kinds of moral progress: (1) Basic moral progress: moral progress claims that rely on widely agreed upon normative standards. I argue that widespread reductions in famine, reductions in absolute basic needs poverty, and improvements in lifespan and health all constitute basic moral progress. (2) Instrumental moral progress: forms of moral change which are causally related to bringing about basic moral progress, but for which their intrinsic progressiveness is subject to widespread disagreement, and which are thus only instrumentally morally progressive. I investigate three important forms of cultural and institutional change which predict the kind of economic prosperity associated with basic moral progress: increases in the rate of innovation, increases in the scale of cooperation, and demographic transitions within societies which lower the birth rate and thus make per capita increases in resources more likely. I explore the norms and institutions which make these social transformations possible, drawing on research from empirical economics, economic history, and cultural evolutionary theory to argue that loose kinship institutions (with low rates of cousin marriage, among other features), cultural individualism, and open-access institutions all play a role. I argue that these cultural norms and institutions are instrumentally (rather than intrinsically) morally progressive, because they are among the causes of basic moral progress. (3) Vindicated moral progress: forms of moral change which are normatively controversial, but for which a theory of error can be provided giving us reason to believe that one side of the disagreement is more likely to be correct than the other. I use the World Values Survey (a large, cross-cultural, and longitudinal dataset) to argue that economic development predicts increased support for the emancipative value of Choice: a value which predicts acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce. Drawing on Bernard Williams’ vindicatory genealogy of political liberty, I argue that increased support for Choice is plausibly driven by an epistemically virtuous process in which increased access to the products of truthful inquiry undermines certain forms of justification for constraining the exercise of personal choice. However, I maintain a cautionary note: absent detailed research on the precise causal mechanisms which link economic development and support for Choice, this vindicating argument must be viewed as a hypothesis which is consistent with the data, but which requires further testing.