Summary: One theory for the pattern of moral shifts over the last few hundred years from a perspective of social science and history is the apparent moral shifts have followed a transition from more traditionalist and religious worldviews to more liberal ones, as largely driven by economic and political changes produced by industrialization and modernization. While this narrative model has limitations, it definitely seems significant enough to change how EA thinks about moral circle expansion.
One possibility is the pattern of moral shifts observed in the last couple hundred years in the Western world, and other parts of the world to a lesser extent, is driven by modernization. With the modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization (i.e., integration of society with advanced science and technology) of societies, popular consideration of different populations of moral patients has shifted along common lines. The upshot for this is EA should consider the possibility moral shifts are driven more by the influence of a changing material and technological environment, and less to do with whole societies intentionally shifting the exercise of their moral agency.
Modernization has given rise to the modern nation-state and greater political centralization, giving the rise to various forms of liberal political ideologies. While liberalism started with the Enlightenment, its popular spread followed the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and greater urbanization. The increased contact between different groups, such as differing ethnic groups and the sexes in the workplace, accentuated societal prejudices by making apparent how superficial and arbitrary the material deprivation between different groups of people was, at a historically unprecedented growth in global material wealth. This has a lot of power to explain civil rights and more moral consideration being extended to ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and women and children.
At the same time, the decline of more agrarian and religious society alienated more people from traditional communities and religion. This is consistent with the analysis why moral consideration of elders, ancestors, deities, and other groups traditional local communities and religion gave people more moral exposure to.
On one hand, a single convenient narrative explaining how apparent moral progress across societies is actually a natural political and social progression driven almost exclusively by technological and economic changes seems too convenient in the absence of overwhelming evidence. It definitely seems to me intuitively unlikely apparent moral circle expansions would necessarily have happened in the course of history. On the other hand, the idea that the moral circle expansion is an apt evidence-based theory for explaining historical moral progress could be recognized by EA as a largely confused notion, and we could spend less time trying to frame moral shifts through a flawed lens. From there, we could view the theory of moral circle expansion as more of a prospective model for thinking about how various societies’ moral circles may likely expand in the present and near future.
Summary: One theory for the pattern of moral shifts over the last few hundred years from a perspective of social science and history is the apparent moral shifts have followed a transition from more traditionalist and religious worldviews to more liberal ones, as largely driven by economic and political changes produced by industrialization and modernization. While this narrative model has limitations, it definitely seems significant enough to change how EA thinks about moral circle expansion.
One possibility is the pattern of moral shifts observed in the last couple hundred years in the Western world, and other parts of the world to a lesser extent, is driven by modernization. With the modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization (i.e., integration of society with advanced science and technology) of societies, popular consideration of different populations of moral patients has shifted along common lines. The upshot for this is EA should consider the possibility moral shifts are driven more by the influence of a changing material and technological environment, and less to do with whole societies intentionally shifting the exercise of their moral agency.
Modernization has given rise to the modern nation-state and greater political centralization, giving the rise to various forms of liberal political ideologies. While liberalism started with the Enlightenment, its popular spread followed the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and greater urbanization. The increased contact between different groups, such as differing ethnic groups and the sexes in the workplace, accentuated societal prejudices by making apparent how superficial and arbitrary the material deprivation between different groups of people was, at a historically unprecedented growth in global material wealth. This has a lot of power to explain civil rights and more moral consideration being extended to ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and women and children.
At the same time, the decline of more agrarian and religious society alienated more people from traditional communities and religion. This is consistent with the analysis why moral consideration of elders, ancestors, deities, and other groups traditional local communities and religion gave people more moral exposure to.
On one hand, a single convenient narrative explaining how apparent moral progress across societies is actually a natural political and social progression driven almost exclusively by technological and economic changes seems too convenient in the absence of overwhelming evidence. It definitely seems to me intuitively unlikely apparent moral circle expansions would necessarily have happened in the course of history. On the other hand, the idea that the moral circle expansion is an apt evidence-based theory for explaining historical moral progress could be recognized by EA as a largely confused notion, and we could spend less time trying to frame moral shifts through a flawed lens. From there, we could view the theory of moral circle expansion as more of a prospective model for thinking about how various societies’ moral circles may likely expand in the present and near future.