Abstract If I were to ask you to name the most important concept in moral and political philosophy today, your answer might be ‘justice’, ‘equality’ or ‘freedom’. But for an intellectual in eighteenth-century Europe, the most likely answer would have been ‘progress’. Living in the Age of Enlightenment, marked by major scientific revolutions, rapid economic growth and the fall of absolute monarchy, ‘progress’ appeared to be an apt description of the arc of history, as well as a moral imperative for human action. But the climate of optimism did not last long. The world wars, colonial conquests and environmental devastation that followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries destroyed many things, including the faith in progress, both as a fact and an ideal. As Theodor Adorno remarked, ‘It could be said that progress occurs where it ends’ (Adorno 1998: 150). And so it did. Interestingly, over the past decade, the philosophical discourse on progress has been experiencing something of a revival. The book Moral Progress (2021) marks a significant contribution to that revival. Edited by Jan-Christoph Heilinger, the book records Philip Kitcher’s three-part Munich Lectures in Ethics from 2019 and includes commentaries from Rahel Jaeggi, Susan Neiman and Amia Srinivasan. Despite its short length and accessibility, the book is rich in philosophical perspectives and empirical insights. In this critical notice, my aim is to situate this work within the larger debate on moral progress and evaluate Kitcher’s pragmatist attempt to re-establish the concept’s relevance and validity. Specifically, I identify three challenges any such attempt faces, viz. metaphysical, epistemic and motivational. I argue that while Kitcher’s Deweyan attempt is successful in overcoming the first two, it is less so with respect to the last challenge. In the hope of sparking more discussion on the topic of moral progress, I end by suggesting possible ways to implement moral progress that are less democratic and less scientific but more communitarian and more artful than the Deweyan method.
Agnes Tam (Thu,) studied this question.