A Shared Moral Quest: Wittgensteinian Perspectives on Moral Progress

Abstract

This thesis sets out to do three things: 1) confront several problems with the potential to shake our confidence in the idea of moral progress; 2) uncover the problematic expectations of and assumptions about the idea of moral progress that give rise to such worries; and 3) adjust our expectations and challenge our assumptions about moral progress accordingly. After surveying the existing moral progress literature in chapter 1, a picture of moral progress gradually develops that is capable of: a) making sense of the pivotal but largely invisible role played by rule-following in constituting moral progress (chapter 2); b) vindicating our confidence in the suitability of our contemporary methodology for achieving moral progress, despite its historical novelty and contingency (chapter 3); c) accommodating the phenomenon of moral revolutions without undermining or relativising our moral progress judgements (chapter 4); and d) accounting for our categorical obligation to make moral progress within a naturalistic worldview (chapters 5 and 6). This picture – which I call the “language-game picture” of moral progress – is Wittgensteinian in spirit and aims to situate judgements of moral progress within the practices of assertion and expression in which they occur, analysing both the form of these practices and their point in our lives. In contrast to prevalent understandings of moral progress, the language-game picture of moral progress is: i) non-reductionist, i.e., it embraces the plurality of forms and functions moral progress can take; ii) both naturalistic and non-relativistic, i.e., it presents the arc of moral progress as constrained by facts about the material world and ourselves within it; iii) non- sceptical, i.e., it neither debunks our justifications for pursuing moral progress nor resorts to grounding such justifications in our subjective interests.