I think this is well-taken, but we should be cautious about the conclusions we draw from it.
It helps to look at a historical analogy. Most people today (I think) consider the 1960s-era civil rights movement to be on the right side of history. We see the racial apartheid system of Jim Crow America as morally repugnant. We see segregated schools and restaurants and buses as morally repugnant. We see flagrant voter suppression as morally repugnant (google “white primaries” if you want to see what flagrant means). And so we see the people who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement as courageous and noble people who took great personal risks to advance a morally righteous cause. Because many of them were.
If you dig deeply into the history of the civil rights movement, though, you will also find a lot of normal human stuff. Infighting. Ideological excess. Extremism. Personal rivalry. Some civil rights organizations of the time were organizationally paralyzed by a very 1960s streak of countercultural anti-authoritarianism that has not aged well. They were often heavily inflected with Marxist revolutionary politics that has not aged well. Many in the movement regarded now revered icons like MLK Jr. as overly cautious establishmentarian sellouts more concerned with their place in history than with social change.
My point is not that the civil rights movement was actually terrible. Nor is it that because the movement was right about school integration, it was also right about the virtues of Maoism. My point is that if you look closely enough, history is always a total goddamned mess. And yet, I still feel pretty comfortable saying that we have made progress on slavery.
So yes, I absolutely agree that many contemporary arguments about moral progress and politics will age terribly, and I doubt it will even take very long. Probably in ten years times, many of the debates of today will look quaint and misguided. But this doesn’t mean we should lapse into a total relativism. It means we need to look at the right scale and also that we should increase our ethical and epistemic humility in direct proportion to the specificity of the moral question we are asking.
I think this is well-taken, but we should be cautious about the conclusions we draw from it.
It helps to look at a historical analogy. Most people today (I think) consider the 1960s-era civil rights movement to be on the right side of history. We see the racial apartheid system of Jim Crow America as morally repugnant. We see segregated schools and restaurants and buses as morally repugnant. We see flagrant voter suppression as morally repugnant (google “white primaries” if you want to see what flagrant means). And so we see the people who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement as courageous and noble people who took great personal risks to advance a morally righteous cause. Because many of them were.
If you dig deeply into the history of the civil rights movement, though, you will also find a lot of normal human stuff. Infighting. Ideological excess. Extremism. Personal rivalry. Some civil rights organizations of the time were organizationally paralyzed by a very 1960s streak of countercultural anti-authoritarianism that has not aged well. They were often heavily inflected with Marxist revolutionary politics that has not aged well. Many in the movement regarded now revered icons like MLK Jr. as overly cautious establishmentarian sellouts more concerned with their place in history than with social change.
My point is not that the civil rights movement was actually terrible. Nor is it that because the movement was right about school integration, it was also right about the virtues of Maoism. My point is that if you look closely enough, history is always a total goddamned mess. And yet, I still feel pretty comfortable saying that we have made progress on slavery.
So yes, I absolutely agree that many contemporary arguments about moral progress and politics will age terribly, and I doubt it will even take very long. Probably in ten years times, many of the debates of today will look quaint and misguided. But this doesn’t mean we should lapse into a total relativism. It means we need to look at the right scale and also that we should increase our ethical and epistemic humility in direct proportion to the specificity of the moral question we are asking.