Reviving the Project of Moral Progress: A Pragmatist Attempt and Its Limits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract If I were to ask you to name the most important concept in moral and political philosophy today, your answer might be ‘justice’, ‘equality’ or ‘freedom’. But for an intellectual in eighteenth-century Europe, the most likely answer would have been ‘progress’. Living in the Age of Enlightenment, marked by major scientific revolutions, rapid economic growth and the fall of absolute monarchy, ‘progress’ appeared to be an apt description of the arc of history, as well as a moral imperative for human action. But the climate of optimism did not last long. The world wars, colonial conquests and environmental devastation that followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries destroyed many things, including the faith in progress, both as a fact and an ideal. As Theodor Adorno remarked, ‘It could be said that progress occurs where it ends’ (Adorno 1998: 150). And so it did. Interestingly, over the past decade, the philosophical discourse on progress has been experiencing something of a revival. The book Moral Progress (2021) marks a significant contribution to that revival. Edited by Jan-Christoph Heilinger, the book records Philip Kitcher’s three-part Munich Lectures in Ethics from 2019 and includes commentaries from Rahel Jaeggi, Susan Neiman and Amia Srinivasan. Despite its short length and accessibility, the book is rich in philosophical perspectives and empirical insights. In this critical notice, my aim is to situate this work within the larger debate on moral progress and evaluate Kitcher’s pragmatist attempt to re-establish the concept’s relevance and validity. Specifically, I identify three challenges any such attempt faces, viz. metaphysical, epistemic and motivational. I argue that while Kitcher’s Deweyan attempt is successful in overcoming the first two, it is less so with respect to the last challenge. In the hope of sparking more discussion on the topic of moral progress, I end by suggesting possible ways to implement moral progress that are less democratic and less scientific but more communitarian and more artful than the Deweyan method.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.144 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.039 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".