moral progress

Moral progress refers to the change in ethical and moral beliefs and their resultant behavior of both individuals and groups/societies, and observes that this change has been a positive one when the welfare of all living beings is taken into account.

The Expanding Circle

Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1981) observed that, over time, the boundaries of which beings “count” as morally relevant has been expanding. Hundreds of years ago in the West, only the interests of white, heterosexual, property-owning men were considered morally relevant; a man could beat his wife or kill someone he’d enslaved without repercussion. And it was only within the past century that Black women effectively gained the right to vote, and it stopped being legal for the state to chemically castrate gay men. The circle has expanded beyond just humans, with laws in most places forbidding the abuse of animals.

The most interesting consequence of this observation is that the circle will undoubtedly continue expanding: to believe otherwise would require not only hubris but historical ignorance. This means there are beings who today we do not consider worthy of moral consideration, about whom we’ll soon look back and find our lack of empathy barbaric. And, on a long-enough timeline, we’ll eventually consider all beings worthy of moral consideration. Indeed, followers of Jainism like my brother-in-law with its principle of ahimsa (not harming any living creature) seem to be ahead of the game. Moral progress seems incompatible with the ideology of Human supremacy.

Kohlberg and Gilligan’s Stages of Moral Development

The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg looked at the development of moral reasoning (not necessarily behavior) among children and proposed a multi-stage model of moral progress in individuals:

1. Pre-conventional morality believes morality to be absolute and originating outside the individual: someone else (e.g. an adult) makes the rules and it’s our job to follow them. This is typical of children up to age 9, though to me sounds a lot like the fundamentalist religious morality subscribed to by many adults.
2. Conventional morality believes moral standards to be pragmatic and internalized by the individual, e.g. I should choose to treat others well so that they’ll treat me the same, and that society’s rules exist to maintain an order from which everyone should benefit. Notably, while most adults end up at this stage, Kohlberg suggested that the vast majority (85-90%) never moved beyond it.
3. Post-conventional Morality believes morality to be ultimately about abstract principles, and feels free to question laws and moral standards that fail to uphold these principles.

Kohlberg’s work has been criticized for the narrowness of its Western male perspective (his only data comes from interviews with 72 school-aged boys in suburban Chicago). In response, the psychologist Carol Gilligan (who worked with Kohlberg) proposed a similarly staged model of moral development, but this time arising from research on women and girls, in her theory of the ethics of care. Gilligan didn’t seek to replace Kohlberg’s model, but saw his model focused on abstract notions of justice as merely one perspective on morality. Her work showed that people—typically but not exclusively women—examine moral questions in terms of relationships. For instance, while some of the boys Kohlberg interviewed said it would be justified to steal medicine to help a dying spouse if one couldn’t afford it because the right to life supersedes the right to property, some of the girls Gilligan interviewed pointed out that one shouldn’t steal the medicine because one could end up in jail, unable to care for the dying partner in their final days.

Gilligan’s model:

1. Pre-conventional morality women are focused on themselves and their own interests
2. Conventional morality women focus on the responsibilities to care for others placed on them by society
3. Post-conventional Morality women have learned to see themselves and others as interdependent and take responsibility for choosing whom to care for and how.

Like Kohlberg’s, Gilligan’s work has been criticized for looking at only one gender, though Gilligan has suggested that her Ethics of Care model can apply to the moral development of men as well.

Gilligan’s work—specifically her recognition of different moral perspectives, e.g justice vs. care—reminds me of the moral foundations theory I’ve encountered through the work of Jonathan Haidt, which proposes six different “moral axes” on all people (in different proportions) tend to judge moral acts.

And the way Kohlberg focused on abstract moral reasoning and Gilligan on relationships reminds me of an experiment detailed in Robert Sapolsky’s Behave in which people were asked of the trio “monkey, bear, banana” which two go together. People from European-descended cultures tended to answer with the monkey and the bear because both belong to the same abstract category “mammals”, while people from East-Asian-descended cultures tended to answer with the monkey and the banana because of the “one eats the other” relationship. Sapolsky’s takeaway from this is how culture can play a big part in shaping how we reason on the most fundamental level.

Moral Progress is Annoying

Philosopher Daniel Kelly explains the concept of “affective friction,” which explains why moral progress can feel uncomfortable, especially for those privileged to find the status quo already comfortable.

treat your feelings of irritation as a cue for further reflection. […] ‘Is this new thing actually bad, or does it just feel that way because it’s unfamiliar?’