E-Book, Englisch, 255 Seiten
Reihe: ISSN
E-Book, Englisch, 255 Seiten
Reihe: ISSN
ISBN: 978-3-11-079901-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
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1 Methodological Preliminaries
When the concept of moral progress is under consideration, with what kind of subject matter are we concerned to begin with and how should it be approached? This first chapter2 will lay out the methodological rationale of the intended investigation into the concept of moral progress. Philosophy claims a special competence with the conceptual work that needs to be done before an attempt at an answer to a question such as “Has there been moral progress?” can even be made. But what is the object we are dealing with in working on the concept of moral progress and what is a philosophically viable way to engage with it? Is our primary aim the clarification or rather the revision of the concept, and how exactly ought such clarification or revision be achieved? When investigating the concept of moral progress, are we dealing with a mental representation, an ability or disposition, a set of socially embedded rules or rather an abstract object of some kind? If we seek to propose a novel concept of moral progress, are we thereby inevitably changing the topic—or might, alternatively, our concepts turn out to be immune to our efforts to transform them? The methodological approach laid out in this first chapter is not specific to explicating a moral concept. It does not take its starting point in moral semantics but, on the contrary, will focus on a method originally introduced to amend scientific terminology (i.?e., the terminology of natural science, not ethics). For the most part, the methodological remarks made here will be concerned with philosophical work on concepts generally, and moral progress will be regarded as just one such concept. 1.1 Moral Progress, Intuitions, and the Limits of Analysis
In work on the concept of moral progress, the provision of examples of moral progress is often more than a way to illustrate the range of applicability of some working definition of moral progress. It is common initially to invite assent to classifications of particular historical or contemporary developments as instances of moral progress. The single most commonly cited instance, of course, is the abolition of chattel slavery in Britain and the U.S. in the 1800s (though the abolition of slavery in other countries often goes unmentioned). It often seems that assent to such classifications is sought in order to make the case that engaging with the topic is worthwhile at all. Motivating one’s topic by pointing to specific instantiations is not unusual, but when cases rather than theoretical considerations are the object of appeal, this might indicate that there is (an anticipation of) skepticism toward the topic at hand. The appeal of the very concept of moral progress seems to be intuitive rather than theoretical. Often, engagement with the concept is based on the compelling impression that some things have changed for the (morally) better—not on the concept’s indispensability to theoretical ethical discourse. On the contrary, making the concept explicit in a way that is acceptable to different participants in the ethical discourse will prove difficult because of the complex theoretical ramifications of settling for any particular definition of moral progress. In principle, authors addressing the topic could also count on intuitive assent to a claim as general as “there has been moral progress.” The fact that they do not might be interpreted as evidence that the viability of the concept itself—its non-emptiness or usefulness—is in question, so that such general claims have little significance for the issue at hand. It seems that a general skepticism must be overcome concerning the concept’s applicability or coherence even for those who would agree that improving the world in some sense is a moral requirement. At least, the audience is assumed to be critical about the very concept of moral progress (cf. Buchanan and Powell 2018, 4?–?11). In such circumstances, what is sought are actual developments that apparently call for being classified as instances of moral progress by any reasonable observer. Intuitions about particular instances of improvements in our collective moral lives may also be evoked in order to illustrate specific characteristics of progressive developments. For instance, the assertion that “I cannot own you, and you cannot own me, period. Only yesterday, it was otherwise” (Godlovitch 1998, 272) not only points out the relative recency of some moral accomplishments, but also conveys what Godlovitch takes to be the essence of moral progress: that it establishes new moral certainties (see § 3.4.). The cases that are indicated by an appeal to intuition as well as typifications of such cases may also be relied on in a more extensive way, i.?e., by using them as test cases for the definition of moral progress that is put forward. Processes like the abolition of slavery are often viewed as benchmark cases—instances that will have to be covered by an acceptable definition of moral progress. For instance, Buchanan and Powell recommend a “bottom-up” approach to characterizing moral progress that “begins by identifying paradigmatic instances of moral progress” (cf. Buchanan and Powell 2018, 45) and builds a theory on the typification of these specific instances. When actual cases are relied on in this way, the approach to defining moral progress that is thus taken begins to resemble traditional conceptual analysis, a way of engaging with concepts that is now often seen as somewhat discredited. As it will be understood here, the term ‘conceptual analysis’ denotes both a process and its result. The desired result is a definition that decomposes a concept (the analysandum), e.?g., moral progress, into concepts specifying singly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for its application (the analysans) (Beaney 2018, § 6). The procedure by which this result is to be reached starts from a provisionally framed or hitherto accepted analysis (i.?e., a definition), which is then confronted with hypothetical cases in order to adjust the proposed analysis so that it will exclude counterexamples. From a (some would say overly) simplified perspective, an analysis of moral progress would be completed when a (narrow) reflective equilibrium is reached between the general characterization of moral progress and the specifics of the particular cases we want to classify as morally progressive (cf. Daly 2010, 49). We could, for instance, start with an idea about moral progress like the one captured in the first disjunct of what Dale Jamieson calls the “naïve conception” of moral progress, the idea that “[m]oral progress occurs when a subsequent state of affairs is better than a preceding one, or when right acts become increasingly prevalent” (Jamieson 2002, 318). The first part of this characterization construes moral progress as an improvement in states of affairs. Upon pondering instances in which the state of affairs has improved, we might find this analysis over-inclusive. For instance, we might want to exclude changes that are not in any way related to changes in the beliefs and behavior of any moral agents (or so I shall argue in the following). On the other hand, we might equally grow uncomfortable with a rather Kantian analysis of moral progress that excluded any changes not brought about by the adoption of a certain behavior that is based on a grasp of moral duty. Some changes that seem to be clear instances of moral progress, such as the abolition of slavery, might have been possible because some stakeholders changed their behavior out of a recognition of only a legal duty, based on self-interested economical reasoning, or, as has been argued, on a sense of “national honor” (Appiah 2010). In view of cases that are perceived as counterexamples to the proposed definition, the definition would have to be amended to fit the cases. If the way conceptual analysis has just been described marks a paradigmatic way of understanding the method (cf. Margolis and Laurence 2011), it closely aligns the standard account of conceptual analysis to the use that has been made of it in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy. A prime example of an explicit account of the method thus understood can be found in Grice’s description of his view of the nature of a conceptual analysis (cf. Nimtz 2012). To be looking for a conceptual analysis of a given expression E is to be in a position to apply or withhold E in particular cases, but to be looking for a general characterization of the types of cases in which one would apply E rather than withhold it. And we may notice that in reaching one’s conceptual analysis of E, one makes use of one’s ability to apply and withhold E, for the characteristic procedure is to think up a possible general characterization of one’s use of E and then to test it by trying to find or imagine a particular situation which fits the suggested characterization and yet would not be a situation in which one would apply E. If one fails, after careful consideration on these lines, to find any such situation, then one is more or less confident that the suggested characterization of the use of E is satisfactory. But one could not test a suggested characterization in this way, unless one relied on one’s ability to apply or withhold E in particular cases. (Grice 1989,...
