What Is the Problem of Moral Progress? The Unbearable Uncertainty of Being 'Better'

The abolitionist who risks his life to free an enslaved stranger shares a continent with the colonial administrator who writes memos about native welfare while extracting rubber from mutilated bodies. Both exist in the nineteenth century. The twentieth gives us both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the logistics of Auschwitz. We do not need to look far for this contradiction: the smartphone that lets us witness distant suffering also harvests our attention to sell us products we do not need. If moral progress means being able to look back at your ancestors and say, “We are better than you,” the evidence is embarrassingly mixed. But the problem of moral progress is not merely about how much cruelty remains. It is about the very concept of a moral yardstick.

Begin with a simple thought. Suppose we want to compare a medieval serf’s life with a modern middle-class citizen’s life. We might point to sanitation, longevity, literacy, legal protections. Yet the serf lived in a world thick with saints, festivals, and a cosmic order that made suffering meaningful. The modern citizen has antibiotics but also an ambient anxiety about insurance premiums and algorithmic rejection. Which life is morally superior? To say “ours” is to assume that the categories we care about—autonomy, equality, bodily integrity—are the correct categories. But that assumption is itself a moral position, not a neutral metric. As Nietzsche argued in On the Genealogy of Morality, what we call “moral progress” often turns out to be a shift in the direction of resentment, a reinterpretation of weakness as virtue and strength as sin. The slave morality of the powerless can masquerade as universal compassion.

We are not better; we are merely more complicated. The same moral sensitivity that makes us recoil from public executions also lets us outsource our cruelties to supply chains and software, so that we never have to witness the flesh and bone of what we consume.

The philosophical problem sharpens when we try to define the term. Classical utilitarians like Bentham might say progress is the net increase of happiness over suffering. But happiness is notoriously resistant to measurement, and the very attempt to quantify it has produced institutions—schools, hospitals, prisons—that discipline us in the name of our own good. Kantians might invoke the dignity of rational beings: progress means treating persons as ends, never merely as means. Yet every society, including ours, treats countless people as means in economic systems that they did not choose. John Stuart Mill thought that liberty and the cultivation of individuality were the marks of a civilized age, but he also spent his life working for the British East India Company. Progress, seen up close, always has complicities.

Modern champions of moral progress often point to empirical trends. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature documents the long-term decline of violence—fewer wars, fewer homicides, fewer cruel punishments. It is an impressive assembly of data. But as philosopher John Gray observes in Gray’s Anatomy (not the medical text), the decline of one form of violence does not mean the disappearance of violence; it means its transformation. We no longer burn heretics at the stake because we have built carceral systems that quietly destroy lives without a dramatic spectacle. We would never dream of publicly flogging a thief, but we will happily deploy algorithms that deny housing, credit, and work opportunities to millions, with no appeal and no face to confront. Was that progress or just a change in aesthetic preferences?

There is also the problem of the moral circle. Peter Singer famously argues that moral progress consists in expanding the circle of who counts as a member of the moral community—from tribe to nation to all humans, and eventually to non-human animals. Yet as the circle expands, its duties thin out. We care about global hunger, but our care is mediated by charity platforms that reduce systemic injustice to a one-click donation. The expansiveness of moral concern may be less a sign of progress than a symptom of helplessness. We talk about “saving the planet” while our daily habits quietly accelerate its degradation. The language of moral progress becomes a compensatory fiction.

So what would genuine moral progress look like? Perhaps it would be a society that is more critical of its own values, more aware that its certainties will look like barbarism to its descendants. That is a humbling thought. It means we cannot claim the high ground of history; we can only try to be better ancestors in the modest sense of not being the last ones. The problem of moral progress is not that we fail to live up to a clear standard. It is that any standard we trust today will be judged by our successors with the same condescension we reserve for the Inquisition. To ask “Are we really better than our ancestors?” is to step into a mirror hall. The honest answer is not yes or no, but a question: better according to whom—and at what price?

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