Moral Progress. Philip Kitcher, 2021. New York, Oxford University Press. 173 pp, $29.95 (hb)

Abstract

In Moral Progress, Philip Kitcher seeks to develop 'a twenty-first century version of Deweyan pragmatism' (p. xi) by which individuals and societies can make moral progress 'more surely and more systematically ' (p. xii). All of this occurs within a neatly formatted book, edited and eloquently introduced by Jan-Christoph Heilinger, with penetrating commentaries from Amia Srinivasan, Susan Neiman, and Rahel Jaeggi.Kitcher hopes to offer a viable alternative to what he terms the 'Discovery View' of moral progress, as the replacement of moral beliefs further from the truth with those closer to it. Such a view demands an account of what makes a (system of) moral belief(s) true before any account of moral progress can be developedand such an account of moral truth is notoriously elusive. For Kitcher, on the other hand, true moral beliefs are 'those that would endure as the stable elements in a progressive moral practice, no matter how long it might be extended' (p. 73). He anticipates the obvious worry that this view just replaces one unanswerable question for another: that of obtaining knowledge of objective moral reality with that of obtaining knowledge of the distant-future prospects of our current moral beliefs. What we need, he argues, are justification conditions for making assertions of truth in moral discourse, not a metaphysics of truth. We need 'a license to identify some judgements as true, and to rely on them in [our] subsequent actions until there are grounds for revoking the license' (p. 78). And the justification of any assertion of moral truth, he arguesany assertion that a moral belief will endure as a stable element in progressive moral practicecomes from the status of that belief as the conclusion of an (approximation of an) ideal conversation in response to a legitimate moral problem. The problem of moral knowledge then becomes that of developing a moral methodology: out of what conversations do progressive moral judgements spring?Kitcher attempts to extract the form of an ideal conversation from three paradigmatically progressive episodes of moral history: the abolition of the institution of slavery, the acceptance of same-sex love, and the emancipation of women. 'Compress the history, collapse the stereotypes, focus only on the heroes, and an approximation to the ideal conversation will emerge ' (p. 44). He derives an approach to doing ethics he terms 'democratic contractualism': a situation is perceived by some members of a community as problematic; the problem is identified and located; candidate solutions are proposed and discussed within an optimally informed, mutually engaged conversation between all stakeholders; promising solutions are implemented experimentally; and when the situation is no longer perceived as problematic, the matter can justifiably be regarded as resolved. The majority of the book is dedicated to working out the details of his methodology and how it overcomes the obstacles of 'exclusion' and 'false consciousness'.