How Can We Detect Moral Progress Without a Moral Compass?

On a cold February morning in 1865, the U.S. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. Across the Atlantic, in the same decade, European powers were carving up Africa, rationalizing their plunder as a civilizing mission. Two facts from the same moment in history pull in opposite directions. If you are convinced that humanity is morally progressing, you will seize the amendment and call the scramble for Africa an aberration. If you are a skeptic, you will see the civilizing mission as the true face of the nineteenth century and the amendment as a convenient political purchase. How, then, can we possibly know whether we are any better than our ancestors?

The naïvely confident answer is to point to a checklist. We could measure moral progress by the number of protected rights, the incidence of torture, or the legal status of women and minorities. This is the approach of applied moral scientists who compile indices of human freedom, human rights, and human development. The data shows remarkable improvements over the last two centuries: child mortality down, literacy up, democracy expanded. But the philosopher’s eye sees a problem. These indices are constructed by us, from within our own moral framework. We are using our own compass to judge our own path—and then patting ourselves on the back for having traveled it. This is called “presentism,” and it is the hidden vice of progress-talk.

To break the circle, some philosophers propose that moral progress is not empirical but normative. According to this view, we do not discover progress by looking at what happened; we decide what counts as progress by reasoning about what a better world would look like. The problem then becomes: how do we reason about that? Rawls offers the contract method—imagine what free and equal persons would choose behind a veil of ignorance. If a practice survives that test, it is a mark of progress. But even Rawls knew that the veil is a thought experiment, not a portal to the truth. A society of psychopaths might choose very different rules behind a veil. The method depends on the moral psychology of the choosers, which itself is a historical product.

The more we celebrate our abolition of old cruelties, the more we conceal the new ones that are right under our noses—conceal them from ourselves, which is the only concealment that matters.

The empirical evidence, when examined honestly, is ambiguous. Consider violence. Steven Pinker’s famous graphs show a dramatic decline in homicide rates from medieval Europe to the present. Yet those graphs count only direct physical violence. What about structural violence—the slow violence of poverty, pollution, and preventable disease? The philosopher Johann Galtung coined the term in 1969 to describe harms built into social structures, but if we add structural violence to the ledger, the story changes. The modern world may kill fewer people with swords and more with cardiovascular disease attributed to sedentary jobs. Are we morally better for having traded the battlefield for the office cubicle? Only if you believe that a death from obesity is less a moral scandal than a death from war.

Another indicator is the expansion of the moral circle. The idea that we should care for all humans—not just kin or tribe—is a genuinely recent achievement. Ancient texts are full of exhortations to love one’s neighbor, but the neighbor was usually defined in narrow terms. Today, global human rights discourse extends at least rhetorical concern to every person on the planet. Yet the expansion of moral concern often goes hand in hand with the expansion of administrative power. To care for everyone, we must classify everyone, track everyone, and intervene in everyone’s life. The same universalism that leads to humanitarian aid also leads to surveillance states. Are we feeling more compassion, or are we building a world where our compassion is outsourced to data systems? The German philosopher Theodor Adorno warned that “the administrative murder of millions” was not the antithesis of Enlightenment rationality but its dark flowering. What looks like moral progress can be the rationalization of cruelty.

Perhaps the most honest way to detect moral progress is not to look for a rising curve, but to look for the capacity for self-criticism. A society that can examine its own moral assumptions, that can acknowledge its historical crimes without becoming paralyzed by guilt, that can revise its practices in the face of new evidence—that society may be said to be morally progressing, even if it has not reached a fixed destination. This standard is not circular because it does not prescribe a particular moral content; it prescribes an epistemic disposition. It says: a morally progressive society is one that is open to the possibility that it is wrong. By that measure, we have made some progress: many nations have apologized for past injustices, and the academic world is obsessed with deconstruction and critique. But the obsession can become another form of moral vanity. If we congratulate ourselves for being able to criticize ourselves, we have found yet another way to feel superior to the past.

The question “Are we morally better than our ancestors?” may be unanswerable in the strong sense. But we can ask a more precise question: “Compared to what, by which criteria, and measured over what time span?” When the question is unpacked, the smugness evaporates. We have abolished chattel slavery but built wage-dependent systems that many call wage slavery. We have extended the franchise to all adults, but we have also given corporations the political power of persons. We have learned to say “never again” after Auschwitz, but we have watched genocidal violence repeat itself in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Burma with barely a pause. Believing in moral progress is not a rational conclusion from the evidence; it is a psychological coping mechanism. The evidence itself only shows that human cruelty is a shape-shifter, endlessly adapting to whatever moral vocabulary we invent.

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