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What might stimulate moral progress in the sense of there being at least some individuals
in a society who attain a high degree of sophisticated moral conceptions? Well what has
stimulated mathematical progress? One factor has been the appearance of new needs, e.g. the
need to use fractions in order to devise a better calendar, the need to invent trigonometry for the
sake of surveying. I suggest that something similar holds true for moral progress: The
appearance of new types of social questions forces people to apply recursion to innate moral
representations in new and more subtle ways, e.g. issues raised by cloning, the internet,
surveillance, means of tracking identity. This suggests that new technology and new social issues
will lead to new moral horizons. However, this does not mean that everyone in society will be
enlightened from this moral progress to the same degree, since not everyone will apply
themselves as seriously to the new moral questions raised.
Nor does “moral progress” here indicate much about how people will actually behave. In
a sense, given its philosophical and literary background, the Third Reich was heir to an
impressive degree of moral progress. But that says little about what the Nazis chose to do. One
could perhaps speak of “cognitive moral progress” to distinguish the intellectual achievement
from the actual improvement of behavior.
Cognitive moral progress is a growth in knowledge. Since it is plausible to assume that
ignorance excuses, then, given that there has been cognitive moral progress, one could perhaps
excuse someone from, say, owning slaves or eating meat from a factory farm, if they were
ignorant of these things’ being wrong. This is one way in which one’s culture, which clearly
plays a role in what one knows, can make a difference to one’s culpability. It could explain why
we are sometimes right in judging people in different epochs or different cultures differently.
This is a kind of relativity, a relativity of culpability. It is worth keeping this kind of relativity in
mind when judging people in relation to their influences and access to information, but it is not