One thing that your account might miss is the impact of ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line. E.g. it’s a very common argument that Christan ideas about the golden rule motivated anti-slavery sentiment, so if the Roman empire hadn’t spread Christianity across Europe then we’d have ended up with very different values.
Similarly, even if the content of ancient Greek moral philosophy wasn’t directly useful to improve wellbeing, they inspired the Western philosphical tradition that led to Enlignment ideals that led to the abolition of slavery.
I’ve told two stories about why the Greeks and Romans might have been necessary for future moral progress—are you skeptical of these appeals to historical contingency or are the long run causes of these events just outside the scope of this way of looking at history?
If I tried to start noting not just manifestly important changes in empowerment and well-being, but also earlier developments that might have been causally important for them, I think the project would get a lot more unwieldy and more packed with judgment calls, and I chose to mostly just refrain from doing that.
I am in fact skeptical by default of claims along the lines of: “Idea X was important for development Y, despite the observation idea X was around for centuries with little-to-no movement on Y, and then Y changed rapidly a very long time later.”
One thing that your account might miss is the impact of ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line. E.g. it’s a very common argument that Christan ideas about the golden rule motivated anti-slavery sentiment, so if the Roman empire hadn’t spread Christianity across Europe then we’d have ended up with very different values.
Similarly, even if the content of ancient Greek moral philosophy wasn’t directly useful to improve wellbeing, they inspired the Western philosphical tradition that led to Enlignment ideals that led to the abolition of slavery.
I’ve told two stories about why the Greeks and Romans might have been necessary for future moral progress—are you skeptical of these appeals to historical contingency or are the long run causes of these events just outside the scope of this way of looking at history?
I’d say some of both.
If I tried to start noting not just manifestly important changes in empowerment and well-being, but also earlier developments that might have been causally important for them, I think the project would get a lot more unwieldy and more packed with judgment calls, and I chose to mostly just refrain from doing that.
I am in fact skeptical by default of claims along the lines of: “Idea X was important for development Y, despite the observation idea X was around for centuries with little-to-no movement on Y, and then Y changed rapidly a very long time later.”