Consider two claims. First: the abolition of slavery was moral progress. Second: our descendants will look back at us with the same horror we reserve for slaveholders. Most people accept the first claim readily. The second makes them uncomfortable.

This discomfort reveals a deep tension in how we think about morality. If we believe moral progress is real—that societies can genuinely improve their ethical practices—then we must accept that we are almost certainly failing by standards that don't yet exist. But if moral progress isn't real, and ethical norms simply change rather than improve, then we lose the grounds for condemning slavery in the first place.

The concept of moral progress sits at the intersection of meta-ethics, philosophy of history, and practical moral reasoning. It forces us to ask whether morality has a direction, whether we can identify it from within our own historical moment, and what intellectual posture we should adopt toward both our ancestors and our descendants. These are not abstract puzzles. How we answer them shapes how we teach history, how we design institutions, and how seriously we take moral criticism of the present.

Not every shift in moral norms counts as progress. Fashion changes; hemlines rise and fall without anyone claiming improvement. The question is whether moral norms are more like fashion—arbitrary, culturally contingent, and directionless—or more like scientific understanding, where later views can be demonstrably superior to earlier ones.

One promising framework comes from the expansion of moral consideration. Across many cultures and centuries, the circle of beings granted moral standing has tended to widen: from tribe to nation, from one race to all races, from men to include women, from humans to at least some animals. This isn't a smooth or inevitable trajectory—there are reversals, collapses, and stagnations—but the general pattern is striking. The philosopher Peter Singer has called this the expanding circle, and it provides one candidate criterion for progress: a society that extends moral consideration more broadly is, in at least one measurable respect, more advanced than one that does not.

But expansion alone is insufficient. A second criterion involves coherence—the degree to which a society's moral practices align with its own stated principles. Antebellum America professed that all men were created equal while enslaving millions. The moral failure wasn't merely in holding the wrong values; it was in the spectacular gap between professed values and actual practice. Progress, on this account, involves closing that gap—making our institutions better reflect our deepest commitments.

A third criterion is reduced suffering. This is the most empirically tractable standard. Steven Pinker and others have documented long-term declines in violence, torture, and cruelty across many societies. If we accept that unnecessary suffering is bad—a premise shared by virtually every moral tradition—then a measurable reduction in suffering counts as progress regardless of which ethical framework we employ. Together, these three criteria—expanded moral consideration, greater coherence, and reduced suffering—give us a provisional but defensible standard for distinguishing genuine improvement from mere change.

Takeaway

Moral progress isn't just about changing values—it's about expanding who counts, closing the gap between principles and practice, and reducing unnecessary suffering. These criteria let us evaluate change without imposing a single moral framework.

If moral progress is real, it seems to follow that earlier societies were morally worse in specific respects. But is it fair to judge historical figures by standards they could not have known? This question generates fierce debate, and both extreme positions are untenable.

On one side, strict presentism holds that we should evaluate past actors only by the norms of their own time. This view has a certain humility to it, but it collapses under scrutiny. In virtually every era where moral atrocities were practiced, there were contemporaries who recognized and opposed them. Abolitionists existed alongside slaveholders. Critics of colonialism were present during colonialism. The claim that "everyone thought that way" is almost always historically false. What varied was not the availability of moral insight but the power and willingness to act on it.

On the other side, naïve moralism judges every historical figure against today's full moral vocabulary, condemning anyone who falls short. This approach ignores the genuine cognitive and social constraints people faced. Access to information, exposure to different cultures, and the sheer difficulty of resisting dominant social norms all shape what it is reasonable to expect of individuals. The philosopher Miranda Fricker's concept of hermeneutical injustice—lacking the conceptual resources to understand one's own experience—applies here. Some moral insights require concepts that had not yet been articulated.

The most defensible position lies between these extremes. We can appropriately criticize historical practices while maintaining nuance about individual culpability. The key distinction is between evaluating practices and blaming persons. We can say that slavery was wrong—full stop, in every era—without claiming that every person who participated bore equal moral responsibility. Structural evil and individual guilt are different categories, and confusing them leads to either moral paralysis or self-righteous condemnation.

Takeaway

Judging the past requires separating the evaluation of practices from the blame of individuals. Slavery was always wrong, but individual culpability depends on what alternatives were genuinely available and conceivable. The practice deserves condemnation; the people deserve contextual assessment.

If past societies had moral blindspots that seem obvious to us now, intellectual honesty demands we ask: what are ours? The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has proposed a useful heuristic for identifying them. Look for practices where the arguments against them are already well known, but society persists in the behavior anyway, often with a combination of willful ignorance and weak rationalization.

Several candidates emerge. Industrial animal agriculture involves suffering on a staggering scale, and the philosophical arguments against it—from Singer's utilitarian case to rights-based approaches—are well-established. Most people, when confronted with the details, express discomfort but continue participating. The prison system in many countries inflicts conditions that would be recognized as cruel if applied to any other context. Climate inaction involves knowingly imposing catastrophic harm on future generations for present convenience. In each case, the moral critique already exists; what's lacking is the collective will to act on it.

But here is the genuinely unsettling implication: we almost certainly cannot identify all of our own blindspots. By definition, a blindspot is something you cannot see. Some of our deepest moral failings may involve practices so thoroughly normalized that no significant critical tradition has yet emerged to challenge them. Just as pre-modern societies lacked the concept of "human rights" as we understand it, we may lack moral concepts that future generations will consider elementary.

This realization should cultivate what we might call epistemic moral humility—not the paralyzing kind that prevents moral judgment altogether, but the productive kind that keeps us open to radical revision. The pattern of moral progress suggests that comfortable certainty about one's own moral completeness is itself a reliable indicator of blindness. The societies that improved were not the ones that believed they had already arrived, but the ones that remained restless, self-critical, and willing to take seriously the claims of those they had previously ignored.

Takeaway

The most important moral blindspots are the ones we cannot yet name. If history is any guide, our descendants will condemn practices we currently consider normal—and the best defense against future shame is not certainty but cultivated moral restlessness.

The concept of moral progress is paradoxical. Affirming it requires admitting our own inevitable failure. Denying it means surrendering the language we use to celebrate genuine moral achievements—the end of legal slavery, the expansion of suffrage, the recognition of universal rights.

The most intellectually honest position is to hold both truths simultaneously: we have made real moral gains, and we are almost certainly committing moral wrongs that we cannot fully perceive. This is uncomfortable, but discomfort is precisely what moral progress feels like from the inside.

The question is not whether we are morally complete. We aren't. The question is whether we are the kind of society that remains open to hearing that—and willing to change when the evidence demands it.