Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PROGRESS (The Enemy of the Good: Towards a Theory of Moral Progress)
Período documentado: 2022-11-01 hasta 2024-04-30
What is moral progress? What does it mean for societies to improve? Do they ever undergo moral improvement, and if so, what does it consist in? The main objective of the project has been to develop an empirically informed and normatively satisfying theory of moral progress. It has made major advances in understanding the criteria necessary for assessing episodes of moral change as progressive, the role of education in transmitting moral improvements, the intimate connection between moral progress and economic growth, the social-epistemological foundations of philosophical progress and the institutional requirements needed to stabilize progressive sociomoral developments in the future.
Modern societies change rapidly. But we do not want them to change randomly, to end upm in stagnation, or to deteriorate. Rather, the hope is that societies will change in a positive direction. Such changes have happened in the past, and it would be desirable for further improvements to happen in the future. In order to make this possible, we need to know what the mechanisms are that drive moral progress, what the institutional infrastructure is required to sustain it, and whether there are threats to progress that can be identified and neutralized.
Modern societies change rapidly. But we do not want them to change randomly, to end upm in stagnation, or to deteriorate. Rather, the hope is that societies will change in a positive direction. Such changes have happened in the past, and it would be desirable for further improvements to happen in the future. In order to make this possible, we need to know what the mechanisms are that drive moral progress, what the institutional infrastructure is required to sustain it, and whether there are threats to progress that can be identified and neutralized.
The project has established itself as one of the main centers of research on the topic of moral progress. It has brought together researchers from all over the world, thus significantly promoting and consolidating existing efforts to understand the nature of moral change, the criteria enabling the normative evaluation of such changes, and the institutional conditions required to sustain them. The project has already resulted in numerous publications by all its members, there are numerous scientific papers currently under review, incl. two book manuscripts (one scholarly monograph and one popular trade book that both address the nature of moral change).
The main novel methodology developed by the project has been to connect philosophical debates around the nature of moral progress to an empirically grounded account of the social and institutional conditions underlying moral change. In particular, the main task has been to move away from an overly individualistic understanding of the prerequisites of moral progress towards a focus on the structural processes that characterize moral progress as a form of cultural evolution. Moral progress doesn't happen primarily via the moral improvement of individual people, but through larger-scale processes of social change that are often difficult to engineer directly.