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This chapter argues that there are reasons to try to codify the moral landscape, and that these reasons are recognizably moral. A proper understanding of the nature of historical moral progress bolsters this argument. The task of codifying morality is best understood as a collective one. Like many collective tasks, it is most efficiently pursued with a suitable division of labor. The chapter defends some of the traditional notions of moral theory as aiming for deeper and more unifying explanations where they can plausibly be found.

Friedrich Nietzsche is sometimes called a moral nihilist, and not without warrant. He wanted to undermine Christian morality, but he did not want to eliminate morality altogether. He wanted to replace existing values with better values. If every moral system is a cultural construction, and none has greater claim to absolute truth, what grounds do we have for saying any one system is better than any other? There are two kinds of moral nihilism. According to the first, all moral systems are empty: the claims they make are false. Error theories of morality are nihilistic in this sense. Morality is an illusion, but moral claims can be true. Our current values seem to be an improvement over the values of the past, and moral humility leads us to hope for continued improvement. If moral truth is shallow, then moral change is not a move forward, but a lateral repositioning in a space of equally acceptable options. This is a nihilism of directionless abundance.

The “radical evil” of human nature is, in Kant's view, our enduring predisposition to deviate from the moral law. It comes in three degrees: frailty (moral weakness), impurity, and depravity (wickedness). We are evil in these ways by an act of free choice antecedent to moral experience, in the intelligible world. In this world we can make progress in combating radical evil by strengthening our moral resolve. Our being evil by nature does not preclude our having a good will, however. In Kant's view a good will is universal. It is our common “predisposition to personality”, our tendency to feel respect for the moral law, and the basis of our human dignity. Acting on that incentive gives an action “moral worth”.

When Hosea Ballou died in 1852, belief in the supernatural rule of God apparently held sway among most American Protestants, but the idea of universal salvation remained highly suspect. Twenty years later, supernatural rule had fallen under serious question, but except among outspoken theologians and conservative evangelicals, few appear to have considered universal salvation a particularly threatening or controversial issue. Such major shifts in outlook naturally had deep and complex cultural roots that resist generalization. Yet one general point seems inescapable: the traditional focus of religious attention on the hope of eternal redemption was becoming culturally irrelevant.

In this chapter, Talbott responds to four main objections: (1) Rorty’s defense of Humean moral antirealism, the view that the development of human rights norms is a progress of sentiment, not reason; (2) Skyrms’s defense of evolutionary anti-realism, according to which the development of norms of fairness can be explained without supposing there are any truths about fairness; (3) Lee Kwan Yew’s "Asian values" objection to the concept of human rights as a Western invention that is not appropriate for Asian societies; (4) Cranston’s objection to the inclusion of economic and social rights as human rights. Talbott suggests that the characteristic that grounds basic human rights is autonomy in the non-metaphysical sense (understood as good judgment combined with self-determination). Talbott notes that moral progress itself is a collective action problem, so that moral progress depends on the capacity to adopt the moral standpoint and to cooperate rather than take a free ride, at least when the costs of cooperating are not too great.

This chapter examines what moral obligations, if any, remain or are incurred when one promises under duress. In general, duress holds that unjustified or wrongfully exerted coercion entirely exonerates the party subjected to undue pressure from responsibility for whatever actions the duress produces. This is the dominant view, one that is powerful and attractive. The chapter explains whether and why it should matter that one's promisee is a moral criminal, the proverbial highway robber. It first draws a connection between honoring initiated promises under duress and the conditions of moral progress, taking into account issues such as those relating to third parties and contracts. It then proposes an alternative to the dominant view about promises made under duress, an alternative inspired by some remarks of Immanuel Kant and of Adam Smith. It concludes by considering some objections to the moral appropriateness of honoring promises made under duress.

This chapter turns to the genealogy of “harm norms,” norms against causing pain and suffering to others. The chapter sets out a range of historical and anthropological facts that need to be captured by a genealogy of harm norms. In particular, an adequate genealogy needs to explain the broad similarities and differences in harm norms across cultures and the characteristic evolution of harm norms. One prominent explanation for these facts appeals to moral progress. This chapter proposes an alternative account of the genealogy of norms that draws on the central thesis of chapter 6, that norms which resonate with our emotions will be more likely to survive.

This chapter lays out the broadest implications of a conception of constitutional law as a shared enterprise conducted within a federal system. It explores the wider, systemic significance of subnational constitutional law by examining the large-scale movements of the mechanism by which dual constitutionalism, and state-led, rights-based constitutionalism in particular, generates and enfolds moral norms. One of the benefits of a federal system is its capacity to accommodate and even to encourage moral progress. The chapter envisions this as a continual process in which moral experimentation occurs in a small number of vanguard states, propagates itself within the system through the accumulation of experience and the gradual alteration of public opinion, and finally consolidates itself by migrating to the national level, where formerly cutting-edge moral norms are incorporated, constitutionalized, and then imposed on straggler states to create a new—but only temporary—uniformity.

This chapter looks at three different ways that evolutionary science developed from the 1880s onwards to give rise to some quite different visions of altruism—including those which featured in two of the best-selling non-fiction works of the 1890s. Henry Drummond’s The Ascent of Man (1894) provided a theistic version of human evolution dominated by motherhood and altruism. Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894) endorsed August Weismann’s rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and consequently argued that increased altruism could only be guaranteed by the cultural impact of religion rather than by heritable moral improvements in the race. Nonetheless, advocates of eugenics continued to put forward proposals for how to achieve moral progress through selective human breeding. Despite their scientific and political differences, these writers all agreed about the desirability of altruism and shared the hope that it might somehow be increased.

This book explores the relationship between discursive communication and moral agency, with the goal of unifying a variety of issues about communicative ethics, including issues about lying, promissory fidelity, and freedom of speech. It argues that keener attention to the moral significance of communication would illuminate both the justificatory foundations of the prohibition against lying as well as the moral and legal prohibition against curtailing freedom of speech. Both prohibitions serve as moral protections of the reliability of communication and thereby preserve the conditions for moral agency, moral connection, and moral progress. The book defends a qualified absolutism about lying that distinguishes the wrong of the lie from the wrong involved in deception. It also examines whether, how, and why it should matter that one's interlocutor is a moral criminal, the infamous Murderer at the Door. Finally, it tackles the question of whether promises made under duress have moral force.

The concluding chapter summarizes the two readings of the Judaism that have been offered in this study. It also summarizes the reasons recurring throughout the study that explain why Jewish texts are ambiguous as they are. Two widely different readings of Jewish texts are possible because of the ambiguities of meanings of specific words, phrases, or entire narratives; different texts presenting opposing viewpoints; uncertainties regarding the importance assigned to specific texts; differing approaches to the use of historical context in understanding a text; and differing assumptions on whether one should emphasize the moral progress of a text over earlier sources or its moral deficiencies compared with modern sources.

The book concludes with an examination of Kant’s critique of Mendelssohn’s view of the possibility of moral progress in Part III of his 1793 essay on “theory and practice.” In Jerusalem, Mendelssohn had argued against Lessing’s view of the moral education of humankind that individuals can make moral progress but that the human race as a whole does not morally progress. Kant rejected Mendelssohn’s view in favor of rational belief that the human species as a whole will eventually achieve its moral objective. But Kant’s commitment to the radical freedom of each individual implies that change of heart not only from evil to good but also from good to evil is always possible, so that moral progress of the whole species may be possible but can never be guaranteed. On this issue too, Mendelssohn seems more realistic than Kant.

This chapter identifies a number of developments that are candidates for moral progress: abolition of the Atlantic chattel slavery, improvements in civil rights for minorities, equal rights for women, better treatment of (some) non-human animals, and abolition of the cruellest punishments in most parts of the world. This bottom-up approach is then used to construct a typology of moral progress, including improvements in moral reasoning, recognition of the moral standing or equal basic moral status of beings formerly thought to lack them, improvements in understandings of the domain of justice, the recognition that some behaviors formerly thought to be morally impermissible (such as premarital sex, masturbation, lending money at interest, and refusal to die “for king and country”) can be morally permissible, and improvements in understandings of morality itself. Finally, a distinction is made between improvements from a moral point of view and moral progress in the fullest sense.

This chapter defends a new conception of moral progress that is both pluralistic, in that it does not attempt to reduce all cases of moral progress to one type (e.g., to norm compliance or functional performance), and dynamic, in that it is explicitly open-ended and provisional and thus allows for improvements in our understanding of what morality requires and in how moral progress itself is conceived. This chapter also articulates a concept of “meta-moral progress,” which refers to moral progress in the means by which moral progress is achieved. For example, if moral progress is achieved with lesser costs in terms of violence to humans or other moral costs, that is a morally progressive development.

This chapter provides an account of variation in constitutional values and choices within a federation, grounding it in a conception of federalism as a pragmatic alternative to competing conceptions of the nature of constitutional choice. In what the chapter calls the moral-realist tradition, constitutional similarity ought to be the norm because the purpose of a constitution is to operationalize principles of justice that are at bottom universal. In contrast, in the democratic-positivist tradition, constitutional divergence is unremarkable because constitutions embody little more than the contingent choices of one political association or another. Federalism charts a middle course. By granting some autonomy to subnational units, federalism permits contingent choice and preference satisfaction, yet by subordinating subnational choices to national ones, it sets collectively determined limits on the permissible range of those choices—a kind of “localized universalism”, one might say, that results in a so-called “bounded variation”. It is argued that the benefits of such an arrangement include experimentation without instability, diversity without alienation, and the institutionalization of feasible change—although this need not always imply “progress” of a moral or any other kind.

This chapter reveals that moral progress does not need any “new” philosophy or ethical theorizing. It determines three basic logical skills for rationally evaluating moral arguments. It reviews a cumulative, pluralistic case against animal research that draws on every major moral perspective that plausibly explains the moral relations among human beings. It also reports the moral issues regarding the treatment of animals, specifically in experimentation, research, product testing, and education. This chapter suggests that there is no moral justification for harmful animal experimentation. It provides some “logical-skill”-based recommendations for making moral progress, and acknowledges financial, social, and gustatory barriers to fair, impartial critical thinking about animal use.

The conclusion summarizes the main lines of thought in each of the three parts of the book: Part I: What Is Moral Progress?, Part II: Evolution and the Possibility of Moral Progress, and Part III: The Path Traveled and the Way Forward. It recapitulates the explanation of why the book’s main focus has been on moral improvement in the form of greater inclusiveness. Next, the Conclusion revisits the distinction between global and local moral progress assessments in light of the preceding chapters, and it argues that it is implausible that the current state of affairs is overall morally worse than that of preceding eras. Finally, the authors sketch the kind of meta-ethical view that is not only consistent with the theory of moral progress presented in this book but actually suggested by it.

The conclusion emphasizes the overall philosophical goal of the book: to develop and defend a two level view of moral responsibility with an eye to accounting for moral responsibility in collective contexts. According to this view, moral responsibility occurs at the collective level and the individual level. The conclusion summarizes the significant conclusions of each chapter and ends with a call to action. The author expresses the hope that readers will be encouraged by her account to see themselves more clearly in relation to the collectives of which they are parts.