We moderns congratulate ourselves on our ethical superiority. We abolished slavery, extended suffrage, criminalized torture, and expanded rights to previously excluded groups. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature charts declining violence across centuries. The moral arc of history, we tell ourselves, bends toward justice.

But this narrative deserves philosophical scrutiny. What if our apparent moral progress reflects not genuine improvement in human character or ethical reasoning, but merely changed circumstances, technological constraints, and the historical victory of particular moral traditions? What if we've simply become better at hiding our cruelties, or displaced them onto populations we don't count?

The question isn't merely academic. If moral progress is real, we might reasonably expect it to continue—and can perhaps relax about humanity's future. If it's illusory, we're navigating technological and existential challenges with far less ethical wisdom than we assume. The distinction matters enormously for how we approach emerging powers over life, death, and consciousness itself.

The case for moral progress appears substantial. Per-capita violence has declined dramatically from prehistoric times. Judicial torture, once routine across civilizations, became unacceptable. Chattel slavery, practiced for millennia, was abolished within centuries. Women gained voting rights. Sexual minorities achieved legal recognition. The circle of moral concern expanded from tribe to nation to species to sentient beings generally.

Yet each claim warrants skepticism. Violence statistics depend heavily on what we count and how. Deaths from war declined as a percentage of population, but the twentieth century's absolute death toll from conflict and democide exceeded any previous era. We abolished judicial torture but invented total war, concentration camps, and nuclear weapons capable of ending civilization.

The expansion of rights correlates suspiciously with economic and technological developments that made previous arrangements inefficient. Slavery declined as industrial production outcompeted slave labor. Women's suffrage followed women's mass entry into workforces during wartime. Rights expanded when exclusion became economically costly, not necessarily when moral insight deepened.

Moreover, apparent moral progress may reflect geographical displacement rather than genuine improvement. Western nations reduced domestic violence and exploitation while outsourcing it—to factory workers in Bangladesh, cobalt miners in Congo, animals in industrial farms. Our moral circle expanded in some directions while contracting in others we prefer not to examine.

The philosopher John Gray argues that humanism itself represents not progress but a Christian heresy—the belief in salvation through history secularized. We've retained the progressive teleology while abandoning the theological foundations that made it coherent. Perhaps history has no direction, and our perception of moral improvement reflects nothing more than our position within a particular tradition that valorizes its own trajectory.

Takeaway

Apparent moral progress may reflect changed circumstances and economic incentives more than genuine improvement in ethical reasoning or human character.

Any claim about moral progress requires comparing moral quality across different historical periods. This faces profound methodological difficulties. By what standard do we judge that contemporary moral frameworks exceed those of ancient Athens, medieval Christendom, or Confucian China?

If we use our own standards, we've begged the question. Of course contemporary morality appears superior when evaluated by contemporary criteria—that's a tautology. Medieval Christendom would judge us morally catastrophic: we murder millions of unborn children, worship material success, deny God's sovereignty, and lack any coherent account of human purpose. By their standards, we've regressed spectacularly.

The utilitarian might propose suffering reduction as a neutral standard. But this presupposes that suffering reduction is the relevant metric—itself a distinctively modern, post-Bentham assumption. Ancient Stoics would argue that suffering avoidance reflects weakness; medieval Christians would note that suffering can purify the soul; Nietzsche would condemn our obsession with comfort as life-denying. The suffering-reduction standard isn't neutral—it's our standard.

Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue argues that we've inherited fragments of incompatible moral traditions without any coherent framework for adjudicating between them. Our moral vocabulary—rights, utility, virtue, duty—derives from different and ultimately inconsistent systems. What we call moral progress might be the arbitrary triumph of certain fragments over others.

Even if some moral claims are objectively true—that torturing children for entertainment is wrong, for instance—demonstrating that we've moved closer to these truths requires access to them independent of our moral framework. But moral realists disagree about which truths are self-evident, and anti-realists deny the question is coherent. We lack an Archimedean point from which to assess our trajectory.

Takeaway

Judging moral progress requires a standard for comparison that doesn't presuppose the superiority of the framework doing the judging—a standard we may not possess.

History is written by the victors, and moral history is no exception. We perceive progress because we evaluate history through the moral framework that won—liberalism, human rights, individual dignity. Alternative traditions that competed and lost don't get to write the textbooks.

Consider how different the narrative would look from a defeated perspective. A Confucian analysis might see the West's last five centuries as catastrophic moral regression: the destruction of communal bonds, the elevation of individual desire over social harmony, the abandonment of filial piety, the worship of novelty over tradition. The apparent progress toward autonomy appears as dissolution of the structures that gave human life meaning.

Islamic jurisprudence might similarly judge the West's trajectory as descent into moral chaos: sexual license, family breakdown, spiritual emptiness masked by material abundance. The rights we celebrate appear as loss of the duties that connected humans to their Creator and community.

These aren't merely different opinions to be tolerated in liberal fashion. They represent coherent moral systems with internal logics and centuries of philosophical development. That liberalism defeated them—through economic, military, and cultural power—doesn't demonstrate its moral superiority. It demonstrates its power.

The evolutionary parallel is instructive. Species that exist today aren't better than extinct species—they're merely adapted to current conditions. Similarly, moral frameworks that dominate today may simply be better adapted to industrial capitalism, nation-state governance, and technological modernity. When conditions change, they may prove catastrophically maladapted. The Darwinian selection of moral frameworks tracks fitness, not truth.

Takeaway

The moral frameworks we inherit aren't necessarily truer than alternatives—they may simply have won historical competitions whose outcomes depended on power rather than ethical insight.

None of this proves moral progress is illusory. Perhaps we really have gained genuine ethical insight, and our expanded moral circles represent authentic improvement in perceiving moral truths that were always there. The burden of proof, however, lies with those making the progress claim.

What's clear is that uncritical confidence in our moral superiority is unwarranted. We face technological powers unprecedented in human history—over genetics, artificial intelligence, climate, and consciousness itself. Assuming we possess the ethical wisdom to wield these powers responsibly may be the most dangerous illusion of all.

Intellectual humility about our moral position doesn't mean ethical paralysis. We can act on our best moral judgments while acknowledging their contingency and limitations. But we should approach our civilizational challenges with considerably less confidence that history guarantees our success—and considerably more attention to the moral blind spots our particular tradition may have produced.