Moral progress
For the last couple of days I've been thinking a lot about moral progress and what that would mean and implications and so on.
In order to think about this it's necessary to have an idea of morality and because of the inclusion of 'progress' in these questions I think it would make the most sense for it to be a universal idea of morality. Without a universal idea it would be difficult to place entities anywhere on a scale or continuum of morality which would preclude any meaningful discussion of progress. First proving rigorously that a universal morality is truly necessary and second determining the components of that morality is more than I'm ready to tackle today. Let's just assume there is a universal morality and I know what it is so that we can talk about the more trivial things I'm interested in talking about today. There, that was easy enough.
I'll take our country as my subject so that I can avoid using the word 'society.' On the one hand it's clear that moral progress has been made in the US. We no longer allow slavery and all people are allowed to vote are two examples. Measures of such a circumstances and their development could be labeled practical morality because they would be measures of the morality actually practiced. Pure morality, in contrast to practical morality, would be what actually is morally right. Under such a scheme practical morality is nothing more than the extent to which morality is accurately applied. For example, pure morality would say that slavery is wrong and practical morality would say the same thing once it had developed to that point concerning the question of slavery, but not before.
The interesting thing about this is that practical morality is nothing more than common practices which is deadeningly vague but would include such things as laws and public opinion about what is right and wrong. At any point in time there would be people who would be morally less developed or more developed on particular moral questions than these common practices.
Pure morality would be something completely eternal and universal. That sounds nice and simple, but it means there is no such thing as progress in pure morality. We're still turning over the same moral philosophy over centuries because moral enlightenment is inherently limited.
In order to think about this it's necessary to have an idea of morality and because of the inclusion of 'progress' in these questions I think it would make the most sense for it to be a universal idea of morality. Without a universal idea it would be difficult to place entities anywhere on a scale or continuum of morality which would preclude any meaningful discussion of progress. First proving rigorously that a universal morality is truly necessary and second determining the components of that morality is more than I'm ready to tackle today. Let's just assume there is a universal morality and I know what it is so that we can talk about the more trivial things I'm interested in talking about today. There, that was easy enough.
I'll take our country as my subject so that I can avoid using the word 'society.' On the one hand it's clear that moral progress has been made in the US. We no longer allow slavery and all people are allowed to vote are two examples. Measures of such a circumstances and their development could be labeled practical morality because they would be measures of the morality actually practiced. Pure morality, in contrast to practical morality, would be what actually is morally right. Under such a scheme practical morality is nothing more than the extent to which morality is accurately applied. For example, pure morality would say that slavery is wrong and practical morality would say the same thing once it had developed to that point concerning the question of slavery, but not before.
The interesting thing about this is that practical morality is nothing more than common practices which is deadeningly vague but would include such things as laws and public opinion about what is right and wrong. At any point in time there would be people who would be morally less developed or more developed on particular moral questions than these common practices.
Pure morality would be something completely eternal and universal. That sounds nice and simple, but it means there is no such thing as progress in pure morality. We're still turning over the same moral philosophy over centuries because moral enlightenment is inherently limited.
posted by joe at
3:54 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home