Moral Progress (Philosophical Definition)

Moral progress is the philosophical thesis that human societies or individuals can and sometimes do become morally better over time—not merely more powerful, more knowledgeable, or more sophisticated, but better in a robustly normative sense. The thesis is most often defended by pointing to the abolition of slavery, the expansion of political rights, the decline of violent punishment, and the growth of humanitarian concern. It is opposed by moral pessimism, which holds that apparent improvements are either illusory, reversible, or merely changes in the style of cruelty.

The problem with the idea is not whether we have witnessed changes—we obviously have—but whether those changes count as better by a standard that is not itself groundless. What grounds the claim that treating women as equal citizens is a moral advance over treating them as property? You might say it is evident to any rational person, but history is full of rational persons who defended the older arrangement with elaborate arguments. If you reject their reasons as rationalizations, you must have some criterion of moral truth—and that criterion must be defended. This is known as the “meta-ethical problem of moral progress.”

In the analytic tradition, philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer have argued that there are objective moral truths, and progress is converging on them. Singer’s ‘expanding circle’ is a metaphor for the growth of moral consideration beyond kin, nation, race, and species. Parfit, in On What Matters, suggests that different normative traditions (Kantianism, consequentialism, contractualism) may converge on the same core prescriptions, and that this convergence is itself evidence of progress. The issue, as with all realist ethics, is explaining why so many people throughout history have failed to grasp these objective truths. Is sincere ignorance a moral failing, or just a cognitive limitation?

“Progress is not an illusive deity for which we can set a course; it is a series of small, vulnerable victories that can be undone in one generation.” — paraphrased from a century of skeptical historiography

Non-meta-ethical definitions of moral progress sometimes draw on pragmatic criteria. A society that is more inclusive, more peaceful, and more capable of institutionalized justice is morally better if those ends are taken as givens. But they are not givens. Some communitarian thinkers question whether cosmopolitan inclusivity necessarily makes a society morally richer; it may make moral relations thinner and more abstract. A tribal culture that cares intensely for its members but hates outsiders is, in a certain sense, morally deep, even if narrow. Is it better to be broad and shallow? There is no calculus.

Historically, the idea of moral progress is tied to Enlightenment optimism. Kant wrote of humanity’s “unsocial sociability” driving us toward a cosmopolitan moral order. Condorcet sketched an unbroken arc of human perfectibility. The twentieth century’s wars and genocides fractured that arc, and with it the naïve confidence in automatic moral advance. Today, those who speak of moral progress usually mean something more cautious: not an inevitable law of history, but a fragile achievement to be defended against tribal instincts, authoritarian regimes, and the entropic forces of cruelty. To define moral progress in the twenty-first century is to walk a tightrope between absurd triumphalism and cynical despair.

For practical purposes, moral progress is best understood not as a factual claim but as a hope with a time horizon. It is the claim that our moral descendants will look back on us with the same tenderness with which we look back on abolitionists—and hopefully also with the same shame with which we look back at slave owners. If we can make that happen by our own choosing, then the concept of moral progress is not a description of the past but a promise for the future.

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