Jacob Levy doesn’t like progressives

Hmm. My initial reaction was just the opposite: sure, progressivism as grand philosophy may tend toward a certain triumphalism or sense of inevitable progress, but actual contemporary soi-disant “progressives” are well aware “that freedom might be precarious, and the humane and human accomplishments of liberal politics might be precarious.” But I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

I don’t know that much about the Progressives as a historical movement in US politics, but I agree with Jacob that “progressive” considered as a political label is meaningless triumphalism.

It was the very first in my long-abandoned Word for Wednesday series for that reason. To save the trouble of clicking on a link, I said

If no clear direction can be discerned in history, or if reversals lasting for decades are possible, the whole idea of ‘progressive’ politics becomes incoherent. Unfortunately, the idea is deeply embedded in political rhetoric and is therefore hard to get rid of. As long as the term ‘progress’ is taken to imply ‘progress towards something better’, people will try to attach its positive connotations to their political programs. Even the connotation of ‘something not necessarily good, but irresistible’, has a lot of rhetorical power, as in ‘you can’t stop progress’ – Marxist historicism is the extreme example of this. Former social democrats like Paul Keating justified adopting the political program of their opponents by appeals to progressive rhetoric, treating current trends as both irresistible and desirable simply by virtue of their currency. At this level, though, ‘progressive’ politics is little more than adherence to prevailing fashion.

John’s comment hadn’t shown up yet when I wrote mine. I think we’re on the same page here.

When Jacob talks about progressivism, he talks about it as a political movement; when he talks about liberalism, he talks about it as a tradition within political theory.

This seems right enough. The difficulty, however, is that it is not clear that progressivism has much coherence as tradition within political philosophy, or even as an ideology. As John points out to be simply in favor of “progress” doesn’t have much content, other than (perhaps) assuming that the arrow of time just necessarily points towards goodness.

My (doomed) proposal would be to reclaim “progressive” as a label for a general pro-orientation towards change, a kind of antonym for Oakeshott’s “conservative temperament.”

Part of the reason ‘progressive’ is a murky and not entirely useful self-description is that we don’t really have conservatives in the conventional sense in America. There isn’t this big constituency for custom and tradition, at least not among the political intelligentsia; nor for that matter can the Moral Majority movement be accurately characterized in Burkean terms. Mostly everyone is for progress, opinions merely differ on what constitutes progress.

Also, ‘progressive’ connotes strength more than ‘liberal’ does (regarding the surprisingly sane Peretz post that Levy cites). To be a progressive is to advocate marshalling the power of the state, not against foreign enemies so much as against the supposed failures of the market. Whereas to be a liberal mostly means (especially to non-liberals) letting people do whatever they want, not using corporal punishment on your kids, not believing in eternal damnation, believing in rehabilitating criminal offenders rather than punishing them, etc.

The comments are running slow today – I hadn’t seen Henry’s when I posted mine.

From Hirshman, to Levy and Yglesias, to several of the posters here, there seem to be a lot people confused about what “progressive” actually denotes in the American political context today.

“Progressive” wasn’t invented to describe some historico-political systematic philosophy — there never was one. It wasn’t invented to distinguish Clinton’s policies from those advocated by other Democrats — Clinton was a practical fellow who didn’t waste time giving names to ideas. It wasn’t invented to recall the progressive era — whether one regards that era as a triumph or a tragedy, the voting public has no memory of it. It was invented for one simple reason: “liberal,” the adjective previously applied to Democrats, had become an epithet, so Democrats needed a new one.

I for one am quite glad Democrats have abandoned “liberal” because it was really a mis-appropriation of a long-standing term for a real, coherent world view that deserves more visibility in America. Americans have no idea what “classical liberal” means, “libertarian” conjures of pictures of gun-nuts, and “the ideas advocated by the editors of ‘The Economist’ magazine” is too much of a mouthfull. I’ll be happy when we can have “liberal” back.

Btw I wouldn’t call myself a “progressive”. It seems like one of those funny pieces of American politesse, like calling the toilet the “rest room”. But I thought it was harmless enough.

“Conservative” is nearly as problematic as progressive. As an example, how many US conservatives are keen to conserve unions, the legislative heritage of the New Deal or even the US Constitution (except for one amendment)?

Of course, the Canadians had the problem fixed in the old days with the Progressive-Conservative party which seemed to cover all bases.

It’s always struck me as one of those names, you know, for things you can’t define but you know them when you see them.

There’s a difficulty with “progressive” that doesn’t really arise with “conservative”. Scepticism about change makes sense. Support for change per se, regardless of direction, no doubt describes a sort of temperament, but not one that has much appeal in political terms. Or maybe it just doesn’t have much appeal to me.

Scepticism about change makes sense. Support for change per se, regardless of direction, no doubt describes a sort of temperament, but not one that has much appeal in political terms.

The opposite of “skepticism about change” isn’t credulity about change, but skepticism about tradition or the status quo.

“One who calls himself a liberal is nowadays diversely called by others a traitor, coward, parlor-pink, eclectic, jelly-fish, a selfish or muddy thinker who wants both to have his cake and eat it, rationalist, skeptic, conservative, radical…. But there is unanimity of opinion on one thing, namely, that liberalism is essentially negative, paralytic, and disintegrative. It’s boasted open-mindedness is nothing more than axiological anemia.”

Leslie Page, “Liberalism, Dogmatism and Negativism”, “Journal of Social Philosophy”, 5 (1940), p. 346.

Cited in John Gunnell, “The Descent of Political Theory”, Chicago, 1993, p. 136.

If you are going to define “conservative”, reasonably enough, as “sceptical of change”, rather than something transparently unreasonable like “rejects all change”, then you ought to extend the same courtesy to “progressive” and rather than defining it as “supports change per se” (which is certainly not an appealing position) define it as something like “optimistic about the possibility of positive change”. I don’t think this is meaningless, or stupid, nor does it seem to implicate one in the imperio-heteronormative assumptions, or whatever, some people are denouncing.

The label ‘progressive’ has undergone a revival in Britain of late. Gordon Brown talks about building a ‘progressive consensus’. The centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research recently published a book, in collaboration with the Liberals, called ‘Beyond Liberty: Is the Future of Liberalism Progressive?’ (Full disclosure: I wrote a piece for it.) Indeed, the term is all over the place in the centre-left literature. Its interesting to wonder why it has undergone this revival. Partly because the old language of socialism is seen, rightly or wrongly, as carrying too much of the wrong kind of baggage. But why not then use a term like ‘social democracy’? Perhaps because social democracy is sometimes taken to be in opposition to something called ‘liberalism’, and the self-styled ‘progressives’ are interested in some sort of creative bridging of liberalism and social democracy?

While I’m all for that creative synthesis of liberalism and social democracy, I have my reservations about the language of progressivism. If somebody defines themselves as a progressive, I want to know what type of ‘progressive’ they are.

Just to be clear, I’m not condoning the use of the word “progressive” here in the UK, which would sound awfully NuLab to me (and anyway what’s wrong with “social democrat”?); I’m defending its use in the more impoverished linguistic environment of modern American political discourse — a kind of Appropriate Technology for a politically developing nation.

j smith – Careful, you’ll be giving postmodernists fits of apoplexy. Less facetiously: yes, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise and consolidation of the New Right, the intellectual consensus does seem to be that history is just a big butter churn or ferris wheel and there isn’t a natural, evolutionary tendency towards freedom and enlightenment written into history. In certain circles you will be savaged as a ‘Whig’, ‘enlightenment fetishist’ or an imperialist for suggesting there is any kind of progress in history, be it science, politics or culture. Certainly this position has some merit, its not hard to find embarassingly naive utopian rubbish written by 20th century ‘progressives’.

In my view ‘progressive’ does denote something important related to the content of left-liberal political ideology. Different ideologies are grounded by their social imagery. Central to fascism is the notion of national rebirth, hence the obsession with ancient myth. Conservatives dream of a recently passed golden age before society’s morals went to hell. Radical greens dream of anything-but-now, either the distant arcadian past or the far future when human beings are again one with gaia.

‘Progressives’ (both liberal and socialist) on the other hand saw the near future as being the promised land. Through reform in the here-and-now, a world of peace and plenty could be acheived in the foreseable future. The march of history was on their side and centuries of superstition, despotism and foolishness were ready to be swept away by modernity. This grounded and orientated the rhetoric and thinking of those on the left until the 1980s/1990s when this vision hit the rocks of reality. Those on the left are now more circumspect and so the word now seems to be primarily used by centrist politicians as a codeword for ‘social democratic’.

Still, progress and human improvement are still important tropes in ordinary political conversation between people of a left-wing and centrist leaning. Conservative initiatives are constantly described as a ‘step backwards’ or similar.

stuart white: “If somebody defines themselves as a progressive, I want to know what type of ‘progressive’ they are.”

That seems right to me. ‘Progress along which dimensions? at what costs, for whom? why these dimensions? why those costs?’ seems to get at some of the reservations expressed so far about the dark side of Progress. But that garbled mouthful doesn’t have ‘ummph’-factor of, say, “Equality of What?”, I readily admit.

Thanks, nick l, I think those are useful ways of looking at the different basic philosophies. As to the po-mo, ferris-wheel / butter-churn view of history, it seems to me that it can be tested empirically (albeit retrospectively) against what it would predict. If there’s no particular direction to history, then we should expect, looking back, to see different political systems and epochs appearing and giving way to each other either randomly, or in some kind of cyclical way with the backslides as big as the rises that preceded them. So, for instance, the 20th century B.C., the 2nd century B.C., the 12th century C.E. and the 20th century C.E. should be all be equally likely to be democratic, or equally likely to be ruled by pharoahs, or equally likely to foster Enlightenment-style science, or equally likely to believe the earth is flat. But that’s not what we see; we see the more democratic, rational and enlightened centuries grouped toward recent times, the priests having lost power rather than gained (or re-gained) it, and the pharoahs long dead. So, the butter-churn theory’s prediction is falsified.

Hence there’s a need for another theory, some way of explaining this grouping of eras — this way in which their dominant social and intellectual systems are not randomly distributed over the 5,000 or so years of recorded history. What is that theory? It seems to me the “Whig interpretation” coherently explains the observed facts, as does some modified Marxian theory, although perhaps both are wrong (fundamentally and/or in details). At any rate, some theory is needed to which the word “progress” would seem to apply. Of course it would be fallacy to assume from the facts I’ve outlined that progress is inevitable — but it would also be a fallacy to assume that if it isn’t inevitable, it therefore isn’t happening at all. Short of some cataclysm that wipes out the Enlightenment (and granted, some of our conservative friends are working on this), I just don’t see how the idea that there’s NO progress, let alone no direction at all, can possibly be rescued at this point, however fashionable it may currently be.

I am with j smith. Progress happens. It isn’t foolish to consider universal health care or gay rights as part of that progress.

I still prefer the word liberal. If someone is going to attack you, you have to attack them back, not change what you call yourself.

There is a difference between regarding history as having a trajectory that is visible in hindsight and having one that is visible in foresight, and the latter is necessary if one is to align oneself with the “direction” of history. For a good while, movement towards greater government control of the economy was regarded as “progress”, as soon as the trend changed, those lessening government control could and did claim the mantle of “progress”, as Blair claiming to modernize the Labor Party. Which one is right? One can construct a theory to pretend to know, but the track record is not good. And the answer could be different even with complete knowledge of the future, depending on which time scale of the future you choose to reference. Trying simply to side with what currently looks like the future makes one an intellectual Yes Man. Since humans are given to faddishness anyway, this is probably not useful.

As for theories of historical progress, Whig history is probably the classic example of theories of progress leading logically, as I had suggested, to glorification of the present (or possibly constructed for that purpose, but to the same effect). Marxism is a little more complicated.

John E.

I don’t think liberals have been much grounding everything on individual freedom. Why do they not, by and large, favor drug legalization? The Libertarians have long since stolen their thunder on this. Liberal intellectuals like Dworkin explicitly argued that freedom is not a right in itself, save to the extent that it follows from equality. Personally, I’m not much a Libertarian, but I’m more of one than that.

As for the usefulness of the term “progressive”, the fact the Hillary can co-opt it even before the “true progressives” can get it well-established shows one problem with the term. It is so vague, it can be stolen without recourse.

j smith,

Here’s my problem with history-as-progress.

I will agree that there is general progress in knowledge of the physical world. Newton knew important things that Galileo didn’t; Oppenheimer knew important things that Newton didn’t. The blast furnace makes more steel more cheaply than did the Toledo swordsmiths. Radio carries messages more efficiently than signal fires.

What I don’t see is progress in any overall sense in social organization or “rightness”. I don’t see a good argument that the 20th century (with Communism, Nazi-ism, the eugenics movement, easily available abortion, all the various mass slaughters in the de-colonializing world, etc) was in some moral or organizational way more advanced than, say, the 1st century.

To repeat Martin Bento, even if you regard the first half of C20 as an aberration, and conclude that, in a lot of ways the world has been getting better morally or organizationally, that doesn’t help in terms of the use we are discussing, in which “progressive” refers to one side of political debates in modern democratic countries.

Samchevre,

“What I don’t see is progress in any overall sense in social organization”

“I don’t see a good argument that the 20th century…was in some moral or organizational way more advanced than, say, the 1st century.”

Well the idea that one baby is not born as inherently more morally valuable than another is an idea that has really been gaining some ground recently.

Many societies now reject the idea that boy’s are so much more inherently valuable than girls that it is morally justifiable for the former to own a wife/wives for the services she can provide (i.e. as we own non-human animals today).

The same goes for the idea that this or that race is not owed equal moral concern by virtue of their skin color. No state today legally enforces the status of some humans as property of others (which was common practice in legal orders all over the world until recently). And some of these states actually mean it.

Even the idea that killing people in other countries for money is OK because they are not Americans, or Brits, or Japanese, or Spanish, or whatever is starting to be questioned.

Protection of individuals’ property rights,
Democratic political rights,
Decriminalization of homosexuality,
etc…

Of course justice as a project is far from finished business. Yet all the moves noted above are in the right direction if we are committed to the idea that there are “no common inherent or circumstantial differences between people that could justify viewing some as valuable individuals that are owed our respect and concern but that could also justify treating others as things or as if they had no value at all.” (aaron_m, 2007 forthcoming)

On the big question of progress: I believe in secular material progress, and there are moral benefits to material progress. But controlling for material progress I don’t think there’s secular moral progress. I just can’t look at a century that permitted Hitler, Stalin, and Mao and think that it represented a moral pinnacle of humanity up until that time.

The half-century that followed 1914 was a morally worse time than the half-century that preceded it, and was morally at least as bad as most of the worst times in human history until then. The 16th and first half of the 17th centuries– genocide in the western hemisphere, the birth of Atlantic slavery, and wars of religion in Europe– were probably morally worse than most of human history up until then.

The world’s been getting better for the last few decades, even controlling for material progress, and I’m hopeful about that continuing, but I don’t place inherently greater stock in “make things get better” than in “prevent them from getting worse.”

“I believe in secular material progress, and there are moral benefits to material progress. But controlling for material progress I don’t think there’s secular moral progress.”

Uhh,

All the evil stuff you note is intimately bound up with material progress. Would it have been better not to have material progress at all if those types of events were not avoidable given such progress?

All the evil stuff you note is intimately bound up with material progress. Would it have been better not to have material progress at all if those types of events were not avoidable given such progress?

I don’t know. No, if the baseline is the material condition of humanity c. 1400; but surely there’s some level of prosperity that would have been worth trading off to avoid the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution and so on. On the other hand, “prosperity” means, among other things, “relief from misery, disease, and starvation,” and it makes possible moral improvements beyond that level.

But “I don’t know” is part of my point– I don’t know how one can look at human history and see a clear trend-line other than the material-technological one, other than by cherry-picking. (The western capitalist democracies c. 2007 are better than the Spanish Inquisition– true enough, and yet…)

Levy and I are posting simultaneously. OK, before we go any further, Professor, you need to read the Pinker article. He cites hard evidence against your position, which you should at least have some kind of answer for. Plus, it appeared in the same magazine that’s been publishing you.

j smith,

I have two problems with your responses.

1) You are way over-focused on the US and Western Europe. Since 1945, the US and Western Europe have been peaceful, and have made some changes that can reasonably be considered “progress.” It is harder to see that there has been progress in any kind of universal sense; the de-colonialization process in Africa and India/Pakistan has featured extremely high levels of violance and brutality.

2) You consider a several things progress that I consider not-progress. Loss of stabilizing social institutions isn’t necessarily a good thing, even when those institutions aren’t ideal in some theoretical way. Eliminating aristocratic vetoes, and traditional religious influences, enabled Stalin, Mao, and Hitler to do more damage than they could have done in a more constrained envronment.

The Levyian fallacy is the assumption that people don’t learn anything from historical experience. But it’s precisely because of the Holocaust, among other things, that there will never again — short of some catastrophic civilization-level collapse — be a Western nation that’s taken over by a political party that claims that everyone’s problems are caused by “die Juden,” and that this cancer on the body politic must be removed. That will no more happen than the Mayo Clinic will suddenly announce that real cancer is actually caused by demon spells after all.

And samchevre, of COURSE I’m focused on the U.S. and Western Europe. That’s where the trends are furthest advanced. Some of them either haven’t taken hold yet, or got started later, in the Middle and Far East. But, first, is there a serious chance that (say) the Sunni-Shiite warfare now roiling Iraq is going to ignite new Protestant-Catholic wars in the West, plunging us back into something resembling the 16th century? (Again, barring the collapse of Western civilization, and therefore the end of its history, after the big asteroid hits or something.) And second, are there no lessons at all to be drawn from the enormously rapid progress — first materially, and now politically (albeit in fits and starts, as it happened in the West) — we see having been made in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and several other “Asian Tigers”? Isn’t that a trend? Or are those countries, having seen what modern life is like, just going to lapse back into warlordism any day now?

Sam, most of the events you are citing – the decline of religion and the aristocracy, the increased availability of safe, legal abortion, the end of imperialism – are actually morally good things. Just so you know.

Also, you are repeating your previous BS about how the aristocracy resisted the Nazis: they didn’t.

Pinker: “Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.”

Pinker says that the years since 1989 are better than what came immediately before (true), that the last fifty years have been better than what came before (true), and that humanity is proportionately less violent than it was during prehistoric tribal times (which he has evidence for so I believe.)

But the comparison at the level of centuries in historic (rather than prehistoric) time seems tougher to me. True, Parisians no longer engage in cat-torturing as a public sport. But if we compare the 20th c in aggregate to most of what came before, we’ll find that a significant corner of humanity (western Europe and its offshoots) had less day-to-day coarse enjoyment of brute violence but an emotional deadening to large-scale, long-distance bureaucratic violence. Very refined Germans in the 20th c, and Americans, Belgians, and others in the 19th c., who would never have tortured a cat for fun sanctioned far-away genocidal or mass-murder level violence that I don’t think the refinement in personal sensibilities does much to compensate for.

And anyway, Pinker’s point of reference is always “now.” To see a trend-line, I’d want to know that we could stand at most points in the historical past and tell the same story: Life at time T consistently tends to be morally better than at time T-50, T-100, T-500 years. I don’t see it. We might be at a local peak, which can be very misleading about the shape of the overall curve…

Humanity seems to have learned some stuff since then. But the eighteenth century even more filled with the conviction that humanity had learned so much and made so much moral progress. So was humanity c. 1910. I don’t know how to be sanguine that lessons learned will stay learned, or that they won’t be rendered obsolete by new forms of horror.

??

1860s-1910s > 1910s-1960s

A V-shape, perhaps, but with the “near” side of the V “higher” than the far side, correct? Or are you saying that there’s nothing to be said for the 1950s-2000s as compared with the 1860s-1910s, a period of intense and overt racism and sexism, not to mention imperial competition and arms races even among the nations of Europe? I mean, if the interventing period (1910s-1960s) was so awful, wasn’t it in consequence of those problems? And don’t the past 50 years reflect the lessons learned, or is it now basically 1867 again?

If we go back to where I originally proposed my own view of progress, I said it happens in fits and starts. But that doesn’t mean there’s no overall trend. To the contrary, because I think the gaining of historical experience is the engine driving the progress, I would expect there to be violent upheavals based on earlier problems, with those upheavals themselves then inspiring new and better arrangements. That isn’t precisely what we saw in the 20th century?

Any takers for restoring the feudal system? Burning heretics and stoning adulterers? Replacing surgery with blood-letting? Shortening the life expectancy to around 30? Abolishing voting and the legal system? Scrapping universal education? Forgetting the theory of evolution and the position of the Earth in the solar system? Disenfranchising women? Bringing back slavery? Re-introducing colonialism?

The shorter engels: THE FUTURE IS NOW!

j smith wrote:

“Oh, and I might add that before 1914, overt racism, fascism and anti-Semitism were respectable opinions, as they had been for centuries, and they even claimed “scientific” grounding (in theories of racial superiority, etc.).”

You might not. Certain bad ideas from the 19th and early 20th centuries seem to be getting projected backwards to infinity. Fascism did not exist before 1914. Eugenics was invented in 1865 by Galston, a cousin of Darwin. Its basis was explicitly Darwinian, and I know of no set of ideas more specifically modern than Darwinism. While Plato also wanted elitist breeding, the idea of using such to transform the race itself required a notion of evolution to be coherent. “Scientific” racism is also a child of the 19th century. The bad ideas that animated Nazism had not been around for centuries. Arendt lays them out pretty well, and little predates the 19th century.

Right, as engels say, moral progress can’t be separated from scientific / material progress, for this simple reason: Scientific progress doesn’t just happen, it comes about as old dogmas and old authorities are abandoned and conservative opposition to it overcome. Those are political and moral achievements too, and are therefore part and parcel of the progressive project.

And apropos of loren’s comment, yes, it’s important not to imagine that “overcoming opposition” means killing your opponents and the like. But what I’ve been talking about — and where I disagree with Prof. Levy, apparently — is the way in which we learn collectively from historical experience. The radical-messianic political movements of the past century or two have been proven not to work and to cause immense amounts of suffering. Therefore we know that those approaches don’t represent progress, and, therefore, no serious progressive will have anything to do with them.

That said, it’s important to point out the error in the butter-churn and “V-shape” theories of history we’ve been hearing. To summarize: the butter-churn theory would predict a random distribution of the things we value (equal rights, etc.) and the things we don’t (religious obscurantism, etc.) over the centuries of human history. But the distribution we actually see isn’t random but sequential, so the butter-churn view fails. Prof. Levy’s V-shape fails if he means by it that we come out of bad patches no better off than we went in, but I can’t believe he really thinks on reflection that that’s what happened between the late 19th and the late 20th centuries. The real “shape” isn’t a V but a kind of checkmark, with the bad stuff inspiring new reforms and new knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, so the later rise is higher than the earlier fall.

Finally, why does one’s view or interpretation of history matter? Because it goes to the question of what’s possible to achieve and of how and where to invest one’s political energies. There is, let’s remember, conservative opposition to everything good, socially, scientifially, morally, intellectually and politically. Do we fight that opposition expecting to beat it eventually and actually make things better, or grimly hoping just to prevent disaster from heaping upon disaster? Do we fight it in the name of progressive goals, i.e. substantively better lives for most people, or only “liberal” goals like Prof. Levy’s — preserving the rule of law, intellectual freedom and the like? They’re both important, but it’s a question of one’s priorities, of how one frames arguments, and of whether one believes that somehow the substantive outcomes take care of themselves once the liberal goals have been secured.

Has not Socialism been the dominant progressive political philosophy of the last 200 years or so? It may have been the Progressives who took on the label in the US, but they did so at a time when Socialist ferment was much in the air, and were influenced, I believe, by the Bellamy clubs and the Fabians. It was Socialism that held that society was moving in a certain direction, and that that direction was good.

The utopian socialists began by deciding what kind of society they wanted. This gave them a basis for regarding changes as moving to or away from that ideal, and thus a basis for normative claims regarding progress. However, their basis for arguing that their desired outcome was the natural trajectory of history was fairly weak. It just appeared so to them. Utopian socialism was a vision, and it was realized through narrative. Their normative claims were ultimately justified on the basis that what they valued was genuinely better in a sense they were prepared to defend on its own terms. Many of the positive social changes praised here originated with the utopians.

Marxism claimed to be a scientific theory of history. It also had normative claims, but it was possible to accept the theory and reject the normative claims (the formula became “I am Marxist in my analysis, but not in my prescriptions“); the normative claims were not the foundation. This became ethically problematic. If one’s premise is a set of normative claims, one can be held to normative, e.g., ethical, objections. But if one’s premise is simply that what one does is the inevitable direction of “history”, what point is there is raising ethical objections to the natural progress of history? Are not ethics themselves a product of the same historical process? I think Marx was correct in regarding his thought as anti-utopian. He was, however, the ultimate progressive. Marxism was a theory, and it was realized through method.

I think progressivism in the utopian sense is desirable: state your ideals and goals and justify them. Ask people if the world you envision is one they want. Constructing an argument that they are the inevitable, or even naturally prevailing, destination of history absolves you of moral responsibility for what you advocate, as no one need take responsibility for what is inevitable.

Along the lines of what martin said, I like Franklin Roosevelt’s formulation, from his second inaugural: the point isn’t to substitute the ideal for the practical, but to wipe out the line that divides the two.

As to the danger that believing in an inevitable direction of history absolves one of ethical responsibility, I think it’s important not to see positive reform as inevitable, but rather as “logically favored over the alternatives.” Not only is that actually the case, I believe, but seeing things this way encourages one to keep up the struggle, since it promises a good chance of success while still requiring effort on our part.

I also agree with aaron about half-assed relativism, which I see a lot of in the academy. It’s all very easy to suspend judgment about which system is better, until you actually start talking in detail about what life has been like for most people in most other societies. (I guess we’re back to Rawls now.) Personally, I’m happy not to have been killed at age 31 by appendicitis, as would probably have happened in any other century. But the mechanisms that saved me weren’t just “scientific progress” in some abstract sense, important as that was; they were social reforms that freed researchers to pursue that progress, that made saving my life a matter of concern to strangers (including the French doctors who took care of it), and that organized society’s resources (through taxation and funding policies) to ensure that the means to save me were in place when they were needed. Give me all that over medieval China any day.

Engels: “… and melodramatic allusions to Kurtz’ descent into racist murder …”

Melodrama, hmmm, let’s see …

Engels: “Any takers for restoring the feudal system? Burning heretics and stoning adulterers? Replacing surgery with blood-letting? Shortening the life expectancy to around 30? Abolishing voting and the legal system? Scrapping universal education? …”

(chuckle)

Engels: “… which possess no discernible logical connection to any arguments anybody has here advanced?”

The relevance, as I see it, has to do with the complex psychology of our moral motivations and the resultant fragility of goodness, not with the obvious evils of racism, brutal exploitation, and mass killings.

I confess to largely agreeing with the broad worldview lurking in yours and J. Smith’s posts: I believe in moral progress through history, however fitful and halting it has been. I think `the arc of the moral universe’ really ought to `bend toward justice’, and I think reason, properly applied, can help us pull that off, through scientific and institutional advances, and careful reflection on preferences and values.

But I don’t imagine that there is one true arc, one glorious path, blazing through history and on into the future, pushing aside wrongheaded ideas and mistaken practices. And while I think justice has to satisfy certain minimum moral conditions, beyond those I suspect there are probably a variety of just ways of life, some of which I’ll no doubt find to be ‘foolish, perverse, or wrong’.

The real challenge, to my mind, is how we act when we find these ways of life that agree with us on certain moral fundamentals, but then move off in directions we believe to be mistaken.

A lesson I take from Conrad (in addition to the obvious one about the evils of colonialism) is that even the most laudable motivations may belie considerable psychological conflict and moral ambiguity, and that’s a worry worth keeping in mind.

I worry that sarcastic talk of restoring feudalism and witch-burning obscure these less dramatic but perhaps more relevant worries about how we encounter other values and practices that are not obviously evil, but nonetheless strike us as controversial.

I also don’t think this concern is merely half-assed relativism: it’s obviously shaped by the later Rawls, and it’s closer is spirit to the liberalism of fear that Jacob takes from Sklar in his very interesting book from a few years back.

Of course, some might still think that, at the end of the day, a liberalism that allows for diverse and conflicting (but nonetheless legitimate) claims about justice and progress must collapse into muddleheaded relativism. That, I think, is ultimately an argument we’d have to have about (at least) the viability of political liberalism and the possibility of constructivism in ethics.

Loren,

You make it sound as if we have been advocating perfectionism. We have been advocating justice not perfectionism or cultural homogeneity.

You say that you believe in moral progress and that what is just is knowable, but then you say that there is not one true notion of what is just that pushes “aside wrongheaded ideas and mistaken practices.”

This seems to suggest that we can’t be sure enough about what justice is to reject contrary views. You need to make a choice. Either we can or we can’t make knowable moral progress. Either it is true that homosexuality is morally wrong and just societies make it illegal for this reason or criminalizing homosexuality is “wrongheaded,” based on a “mistaken” moral view. One of these views is correct or we just can never be confident one way or the other.

We were not suggesting that mistakes in moral assessment aren’t common or that we shouldn’t be skeptical about our own held beliefs. But when we offered ‘sarcastic talk of restoring feudalism’ it was because some people here seriously argued that there are no clear signs of moral progress.

You note only the peril of making assertions about what is moral or just and getting wrong. What about the risk of not asserting what is just?

someotherdude

Talk about sloppy!!!!

Your comparisons are certainly true. WTF is your point?

Picking somebody that has is bad today and comparing them to somebody that had it good then is not any kind of argument against the view that there is a trend of moral progress.

See all of what j smith said.

My point was not that bad things no longer happen.

Someotherdude – Your comparisons actually support Aaron’s point which was that the question of whether one way of life is preferable to another is not radically indeterminate (or unknowable).

What you said martin bento is that whether the middle ages or now is better is “impossible to know, as I would be a different person if I came from such an environment with different values and preferences.”

This suggests that what is good or bad is dependent on whatever values people happen to have and that there are no objective criteria for what is and is not just.

What I said and I quote was “We were not suggesting that mistakes in moral assessment aren’t common or that we shouldn’t be skeptical about our own held beliefs. But when we offered ‘sarcastic talk of restoring feudalism’ it was because some people here seriously argued that there are no clear signs of moral progress.”

And the substantive part of my “arrogant” and “uncritical” belief in the superiority of modern society has amounted to claiming that various forms of slavery are now viewed to be morally wrong.

Martin I do not understand why you attempt to so gravely misrepresent what I say when it is there for everybody to read in the thread.

Martin – This is starting to get a bit pointless. You’ve just posted a two paragraph long lecture on the “arrogance” of those who disagree with you (which was preceded by a similar sermon delivered to me on my alleged “self-righteous stridency”) which does not contain any serious argument for rejecting any of their substantive views, and half way through this exercise you stop to wonder “why is it the everyone who has stopped to sarcasm or personal attacks is on one side of the question?” And you really are being “dickish” if you are trying to impute to Aaron the claim that one can not acknowledge that one’s perceptions may be flawed, or that one must “uncritically [!] proclaim the superiority of the modern world”. He never said anything resembling that. Your claim in #79, if I may remind you, was that although you believe that your life is better than of an Athenian slave, you can not possibly know this is true.

Nonetheless, since I cannot know, I accept the values that I have and do regard the world I live in as having “progressed” in many respects from those of the past.

That is a far stronger claim than merely saying that one must question one’s beliefs about these things and frankly it is one which I find to be rather silly.

However, you do seem to be beating a steady retreat from substantive opposition to what J Smith and others have been saying to a statement that while they’re right about what they say you object to their manner of saying it. I suppose that’s progress of sorts.

Aaron, as I said comments slipped in and I hadn’t refreshed the page recently. I was responding to the thread as of post #85, which was before you clarified your position. However, objective determinations of what is and is not just are pretty problematic. You can’t get an ought from an is, and I don’t know what “objective” means if not referring to the world of “is”. Actually, I think there are approaches to this problem, but it would be a major digression here. Just noting that there is a problem. And conceptions of justice have to be attenuated to the needs of a particular society. I don’t accept your premise, for example, that homosexuality is either right or wrong for all societies under all conditions. A society under threat of extinction from under population has a stronger argument against homosexuality than one suffering from overpopulation. That argument may not suffice, but the moral logic is different.

I was being bit sarcastic and failed miserably.

It would seem that the last thousands of years have proven that one’s relationship to power still determines how one may enjoy the fruits of Progress in the Modern World. Whether that modern world is Ancient China, Mayan and Aztec Imperialism, Roman Republic, Medieval Japan…you get my meaning.

Engels, what I said is that belief in the superiority should be held critically, that one should “kick the tires a little”. Aaron, and evidently you, attack that position. If you attack the position that belief in the superiority should be held critically, but still proclaim the superiority, you are arguing that the belief should be held uncritically. I called you strident and sarcastic because you were. Do you deny that comments like this:

“Any takers for restoring the feudal system? Burning heretics and stoning adulterers? Replacing surgery with blood-letting? Shortening the life expectancy to around 30? Abolishing voting and the legal system? Scrapping universal education?”

are strident and sarcastic?

I’m not beating any retreat. How has my position changed?

Aaron, you have made many claims about the superiority of modern society, not limited to slavery. For example, you mentioned:

“Protection of individuals’ property rights,
Democratic political rights,
Decriminalization of homosexuality,
etc…”

I don’t object to any of these claims, but if you are concerned about being misrepresented, I don’t know why you misrepresent yourself.

No, Martin, we don’t. You just don’t seem to want to read what we have written so it’s a bit pointless to try to continue this. If you found one of my comments “strident” then I apologise. It wasn’t sarcastic. But objecting repeatedly to someone’s tone in a single comment is really a poor substitute for engaging with his arguments. Unfortunately, I don’t see any point in taking this any further.

Martin,

What engels is saying is that you are being disingenuous, and this just sucks the fun out of it for the rest of us. Beat us up for what we say instead of making up straw men and we will be like pigs in shit.

#106 was addressed to #104. As to #105, no I’m not going to try to give a nutshell knockdown argument against moral scepticism, but I do not believe it is ultimately a tenable position. If you disagree I doubt there’s much chance of convincing you otherwise in the space of a couple of blog comments.

This has been a very interesting discussion. If there’s anything it seems to me, in general, to reveal, it’s that those on the left who shy away from notions of progress — for whatever reason: Foucauldian relativism, fear of messianic leftist tyranny, or just a feeling that “the Whig interpretation of history” is passe — either don’t have any way of explaining why and how things are different in different historical eras, or they deny that the differences are improvements, or they concede they’re improvements but warn against drawing conclusions from them going forward. OK, the warnings are fine: progressivism shouldn’t be messianic political perfectionism (and can’t be, I don’t think, for reasons I gave in #80). But I’m surprised at the refusal of intellectuals, especially, to give a coherent account of the facts or to draw the most obvious conclusions from them.

At the point where Prof. Levy last checked in, for instance, he had just informed me / us that the half-century before WW I (call this his Era 1, for convenience) was a better time than the half-century following it (Era 2), but that the further half-century since then (Era 3, up to the present) has also been a better time than Era 2, the period of the World Wars and related horrors. Now, there are only two possiblities: either (a) Era 3 has been no better than Era 1, or (b) it’s been even better than Era 1. If you choose (a), then you’re saying that a period rife with the rising tensions that led to the World Wars, Holocaust, rise of Communism, etc., was as morally well-grounded as the period that followed and responded to those horrors by putting key reforms in place (like the founding of the EU). You’re also saying that the era when Jim Crow reigned and women were denied even the vote was as good as the period since the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of modern feminism. I can’t believe anyone seriously thinks that.

But if you pick (b), then, first, you’re conceding that there’s been progress (interrupted by Era 2, but still leaving us better off now than people were a hundred years ago), and, second, you’re obliging yourself — it seem to me — to explain that progress. Was it just random chance, or did the historical experience of Era 2 in fact inspire the new arrangements that have made for greater peace and justice in Era 3? It would seem obvious that that’s what happened, but this would mean that there’s not only been progress, there’s a discernible reason why (because societies learn from their historical experience). What I’m getting here is that some on the left would rather not admit to this, even if this leaves them arguing things that make no sense. I do find that surprising, I guess.

Well, from my perspective, I’m getting the straw men. Maybe it will be more clear if I state my position systematically:

1) It is problematic to invoke “progress” in support of contested political positions. As I said: “There is a difference between regarding history as having a trajectory that is visible in hindsight and having one that is visible in foresight”.

2) What one regards as “progress” will depend on values partly given by one’s society, so one’s values will naturally tend to validate one’s own society.

3) Historically, including in recent history, claims of the superiority of one’s own society have justified and psychologically enabled behavior that dramatically violates values that I accept.

4)However, our society has experienced “progress” relative to previous ones as measured by values that I accept. I said this in comment #79 and reiterated it in comment #95.

5) The tension between 2 and 3, on the one hand, and 4, on the other, leads me to accept claims of superiority, but only with caution. Given our biases and their demonstrated bad consequences, we should look for other explanations to be sure what we are seeing is progress, and that the values that judge it such are sound. Hence, I pointed out that the relative peace of the late 20th century (compared to the early) is probably due to the threat of nuclear war, and it is debatable whether this constitutes moral progress, as it is not clear that earlier societies would have made a worse choice; the choice was not presented. This is not, nor did I present it as, an argument that all claims of moral progress are dubious.

6) I cannot arbitrate claims of one society being superior to another by referencing the subjective experience of being a member of a society dramatically different than my own, as that experience is not available to me. Hence, the response to “would you like to live in 1500?” is not a meaningful argument as the “I” that would exist in 1500 is not the “I” that is present to answer the question.

However, the position that seems to have gotten attributed to me, and that is being bitterly and sarcastically attacked, is that j smith’s original contention, that there are historical trends and that these may be regarded as “progress” by some set of values, is false. I never said this, and in fact said the opposite. Given that my position is only that claims of superiority should be regarded critically, I take attacks on my position as attacks on the criticality. I realize, Aaron, that you later said (though it appeared earlier in the thread) that you did accept a critical approach, but if that is so, then what is your objection to my position?

I think it also behooves me to explain something a little better, which is what I mean when I say that “societies learn from their historical experience” and that this is why, in fact, there is progress. I mean that certain arguments no longer resonate in light of what’s already been discussed and/or what’s just happened. So, in science, it stops being interesting at some point to argue that the sun goes around the earth; persisting in that view leaves you out of the real discussion, which is how we account for the new facts and observations we’ve been gathering about moons orbiting Jupiter and the like. And because people’s active careers tend not to last more than about 40 years, the last holdouts — not to put too fine a point on it — die out, and their arguments ultimately die with them.

In political affairs, similarly, a new group of elites comes along making new arguments, which resonate in ways they wouldn’t have before. Thus, in the Weimar Republic, social democrats made their arguments and even temporarily ran things, but they started losing elections (and losing control of other legitimating institutions and processes) to extremists who said Germany’s problems were caused by Jews and stabs-in-the-back, and that these problems would be solved by aggressive militarism and ethnic cleansing. After World War II, a party making those arguments would not have found many takers; the social-democratic claims — that the big problem was preventing any further wars among European nations, and that the solutions included securing their friendship through economic cooperation and the like — resonated a lot better, for obvious reasons, among Germans picking their way through the rubble created by the previous arguments and their collapse. Those are simple examples, and obviously the right lessons aren’t always learned, but this kind of dynamic is common enough in history, it seems to me, to explain why things have, overall, moved in certain directions rather than others, and why we should be confident in refuting conservative arguments to the contrary (which often amount to, “This is the best things are going to get, and if you try to reform anything further you’ll just screw everything up”).

1) I never said my view on this was not mainstream, Aaron argued for a simply binary morality on homosexuality independent of context. Context matters. And his response spoke only of implications of my position that he happened to find scary, and of technical means to avoid the counterfactual, which are not relevant. And the context in which Aaron made his remark with his response to Loren’s attack on the notion of “one true moral path”. So, he was implcitly affirming one true, moral path.

2) I did not say “as an objective fact”, I said “as measured by values I accept”, an entirely different matter.

3) I took “Who wants to turn the clock back to the 1500’s”? as “Who wants to live in the 1500’s”? Apparently, you meant it as “Who would judge the society of 1500 as morally superior to our own”? OK, that’s what you meant. But I would not call it the most obvious interpretation of the question.

3b) (numbering problem here) However, it is legitimate to argue: “I believe X. A is attacking the arguments I put forward in support of X, attacking me personally for supporting X, and offering no alternative arguments in favor of X (at that point in the discussion). Therefore, A is attacking X.”

4) Well, maybe I won’t have to see anymore scarecrows with my name get slaughtered.

Aaron, I’m sorry for the “verging on insultingly stupid” quip. That was out of line, and not at all called for given your comments here. I just instinctively bristle at even the vague hint that I might think of the wrongness of rape as somehow contestable. Sorry.

Martin, you have not shown that “context matters”, as I said, you have just pointed out a well-known caveat which must be entered for all rule-based moral theories. This has nothing to do with the universalism/particularism issue.

Secondly, fine so it is your position that progress occurs relative to your values, which you do not believe can be objectively justified. It follows that you do not believe there has been progress, in any objective sense. (This is because, it turns out, you do not believe there are any objective moral truths.) Surprisingly enough, this is why people are disagreeing with you, and not because they have an “uncritical” view of progress or of the modern world. (If you want to know whether I have a critial view of modern capitalism you could look at other comments I have made on this blog.)

engels: “As is evident from some of the comments on this thread and from public discourse the consensus behind progressive achievements such as the end of colonialism or the abolition of torture is far from unanimous … It seems odd to me that a “liberal of fear” would wish to downplay such issues.”

I dunno. I guess I don’t see the debate here at the twilight of this thread as dealing with terribly difficult moral-philosophical questions, because I don’t think your interlocutors seriously do dispute the core moral matters at stake, and instead are really pointing to other plausible metrics of progess, and reminding us that the happy and very real story of average improvements in life quality still hides considerable inequality, suffering, and subtle forms of coercion.

Yes, yes, I know some folks have come out swinging a bit, including Jacob, but when the rhetorical fun and, yes, the odd melodramatic flourish (“the horror!”) are stripped away, I think the real dispute among these latter posts probably is about how noisy the distribution is around the ‘progress’ trend line, and what costs progress has come at. I may be glossing over some real disagreements about progress, sure, but that’s how I see it.

But even if most people, on reflection, probably do accept something like (or important elements of) the progress thesis, I suspect that the ‘how to deal with persistent reasonable disagreement’ problem, while seemingly less dramatic, has the potential to be far a more difficult problem over the longer term that it might at first seem. But that’s a story for another day.

Loren, I wasn’t referring to the final part of the thread (and that is quite clear from the examples I gave). But that really is quite an amazing distortion of the issues which people have been arguing over throughout this discussion, and it really is obvious if you just look back through the thread. (When, for example, did I get into a “dispute” with someone about the “costs of progress”? It’s rather hard to see how I could have, since I never ventured an opinion on them.) Never mind. I don’t have any more time for this.

Still the good news is that apparently at least we all believe there is moral progress (even if we don’t believe that this statement is objectively true). Even those of us, like Jacob Levy, who explicitly said that we didn’t. Because that was just the standard practice of saying the opposite of what one believes for rhetorical effect. Or something. Great stuff! Like I said: must dash.

Engels: “Still the good news is that apparently at least we all believe there is moral progress (even if we don’t believe that this statement is objectively true). Even those of us, like Jacob Levy, who explicitly said that we didn’t. Because that was just the standard practice of saying the opposite of what one believes for rhetorical effect. Or something.”

Here’s what I think is a good representative chunk of his very tentative remarks that have gotten you riled up …

Jacob T. Levy: “To see a trend-line, I’d want to know that we could stand at most points in the historical past and tell the same story: Life at time T consistently tends to be morally better than at time T-50, T-100, T-500 years. I don’t see it. We might be at a local peak, which can be very misleading about the shape of the overall curve… [my emphasis]

Humanity seems to have learned some stuff since then. But the eighteenth century even more filled with the conviction that humanity had learned so much and made so much moral progress. So was humanity c. 1910. I don’t know how to be sanguine that lessons learned will stay learned, or that they won’t be rendered obsolete by new forms of horror.” [again, my emphasis]

And here’s my charitable “distortion” of these and some of the other remarks …

“Yes, yes, I know some folks have come out swinging a bit, including Jacob, but when the rhetorical fun and, yes, the odd melodramatic flourish (“the horror!”) are stripped away, I think the real dispute among these latter posts probably is about how noisy the distribution is around the ‘progress’ trend line, and what costs progress has come at. I may be glossing over some real disagreements about progress, sure, but that’s how I see it.”

Again, reading Jacob’s entirely reasonable remarks, the constructive points I take away are that the distribution seems noisy, and while we can find trends in snapshots of the data, we shouldn’t rest complacent that the engine of history is happily driving us toward a morally better world.

But I can fully understand your less charitable dismissal, given the stance you’ve been taking here.

someotherdude: So if Progress is inevitable, what are we progressing toward?

I think to many of us are confusing “progress” with “change.”

Just briefly, in case anyone’s still reading, my answers would be:

1. In terms of knowledge (aka “science”), we progress toward explaining ever more of what’s observable in the world and our lives without reference to mysticism.

2. In terms of society, we progress toward (among other things) a situation in which fewer and fewer people are seen as “others” and more and more are understood to be part of our moral universe and even part of the same polity. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable, over time, (a) to see people still remaining behind, with no real chance to find happiness or realize their potential, and (b) to imagine treating others as instruments rather than beings equal in dignity to ourselves.

3. Those first two points are related, because social progress is based on increasing knowledge and fosters it in turn.

4. We do see progress, not just change. If all we saw in history was change, we’d be just as likely, looking back, to see societies moving, say, from tolerance of minorities, gays, other religions, etc. to intolerance of them; or the voting franchise starting out broad, then contracting; or broad systems of cooperation giving way to warring tribes; or democracies replaced by feudal aristocracies; or naturalistic, evidence-based accounts of the cosmos, the cell, the atom, etc. giving way to mystical dogmas about these matters rooted in ancient holy writings; and so on. But while there are local exceptions, we do not, broadly speaking, see the movements I just described, we see their opposites (mystical dogmas –> science, feudalism –> democracy, etc.).

5. To me this demonstrates that progress is historically favored — it’s what tends to result from experience (including collective experience) and the knowledge this brings — but not that it’s “inevitable.” The struggles on behalf of #1 and #2 need to be kept up, because conservative opposition is forever trying to impede and undo these good things. But because progress is favored, those struggles also have a good chance of success; they’re not just fingers in the dike, holding back the cataclysm, even if it sometimes feels that way (especially in the era of George W. Bush).

1. In terms of knowledge (aka “science”), we progress toward explaining ever more of what’s observable in the world and our lives without reference to mysticism.

Well, there goes most of humanity.

Well Loren these remarks among others

I don’t see a good argument that the 20th century … was in some moral or organizational way more advanced than, say, the 1st century.

I don’t know how one can look at human history and see a clear trend-line other than the material-technological one, other than by cherry-picking.

seem to me to be disavowing any belief in social progress, and that idea is what I was objecting to. I do not deny that

the distribution seems noisy, and while we can find trends in snapshots of the data, we shouldn’t rest complacent that the engine of history is happily driving us toward a morally better world

and I’m really not sure whether anyone could! But next time I come across someone believes that the graph of history describes a perfectly straight line, and who is in favour of “complacency” about politics, I will be sure to give her the benefits of your “wisdom”.

someotherdude,

Could you please list those things noted in the thread as examples of progress that are not in fact progress, and explain why. Please give specific arguments on specific claims and not generalizations about how only stupid/evil people believe in progress.

Could you please note specific things we have said that amount to a justification for imperialism.

In other words I think it would be a good idea for you to do just a little bit of work here. Otherwise I am afraid may will conclude that it is difficult to take you seriously.

Right, someotherdude, I’m sure you don’t benefit in any way from science. I’m sure you don’t fly on planes, or get vaccinations, or drink purified water, or make any use of medical services past the witch-doctor stage. Right? OK, then.

I’ve explained why I think progress is historically favored. If you object to the term, suggest another one. I don’t see what the problem with it is, myself — I also think that falling to the ground is gravitationally favored, which doesn’t mean that gravitation has any opinion about the matter (nor that falling to the ground is inevitable; if you can put aside your revulsion to science, check out one of those airplane thingies I mentioned sometime).

I don’t see how you can boil this remarkably complex discussion down to “American Progressivism is a mix of Hegelianism and Social Darwinism,” particularly if it’s actually true that you’re reading the posts. Just to note one of many counterexamples, point #2 in my previous answer to you (post 132) names a progressive aspiration that is poles apart from Social Darwinism.

The Neoconservatives and other fellow travelers on the Right used the language of English Progress to “bring the Middle East into the modern world”. Campaigners for reforming the American health system use the same “logic”.

“However, I hate looking like Candide by pro-claiming I live in the best of all possible worlds.”

None of use make such an idiotic claim and none of us defended any of the other nonsense you are spouting.

Get serious buddy!!!

“What’s your point?” HA HA HA HA

After reading these posts, it would seem that American Progressivism is a mix of Hegelianism and Social Darwinism.”

Did you actually read the posts? Its going to be difficult to get your homework done unless your read the assigned literature.

Sorry engels.

The sad thing for me is I do take very seriously the argument that developments in recent history — such as the rise of fascism in twentieth century Europe, the Jewish Holocaust, the famines in British colonial India in the nineteeth century, Stalin’s purges, the accelerating destruction of the natural environment, the ever-present threat of Nuclear annihiliation and the resurgence and entrenchment especially in America, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall, of some of the most repulsive and retrograde forms of reactionary politics, with their irrational abeyance to religious dogma, extreme nationalism and xenophobia, worship of violence and glorification of material wealth and power, blind fatalism about the cruelty and iniquity of the existing social order and assaults on the social achievements of the twentieth century, including the foundations of international peace and co-operation — cast doubt on the very idea of progress.

Although I do ultimately believe that the idea of progress can be salvaged, I do not believe that this is at all uncontroversial or uninteresting (as Loren seems to think it is) and I think that there is a very important debate to be had on this issue. I took some of Jacob Levy’s remarks, as well as Martin Bento’s earlier posts, to be very interesting contributions to that debate.

Unfortunately, that discussion was soon made impossible by the familiar chorus of vapid po-moid claptrap.

Engels, I wasn’t talking about complacency in politics, but more specifically in our normative commitments to core moral ideals (that might seem to be the same thing, but as I’ve said, I suspect there’s more than one legitimate political and philosophical path from those ideals).

Not that I think you or J Smith are personally complacent in this regard. Indeed, Smith clearly believes that such complacency is an enemy of the normative commitments central to his thesis about progress being historically favoured (“The struggles on behalf of #1 and #2 need to be kept up, because conservative opposition is forever trying to impede and undo these good things”).

My question for Smith is whether he thinks those normative commitments (to such things as knowledge and understanding, freedom and dignity) are what drives progress, or whether they simply keep on track his learning model of progress (“it’s what tends to result from experience (including collective experience) and the knowledge this brings”).

I’m inclined to the former view, whereas Smith says something (“because progress is favored, those struggles also have a good chance of success”) that makes me think he might favour the latter view.

The latter view, while more sophisticated in Smith’s rendering than the complacency Candide ridiculed, nonetheless seems too conducive to an unwarranted trust in progress as the favoured track of deep historical structures, rather than the halting and fragile fruits of our morally-directed labours.

That’s why, incidently, I find a caution worth heeding in Jacob Levy’s earlier comments (“I don’t know how to be sanguine that lessons learned will stay learned, or that they won’t be rendered obsolete by new forms of horror”) even if I don’t agree with some of his other points.

Of course I could have focused on those disagreements and joined you guys cheering for the enlightenment (rah), but I haven’t really felt like picking fights in this thread.

“but I haven’t really felt like picking fights in this thread.”

I take that back: post 37 is looking for a fight.

now I really will shut up.

Loren, if you’re still here, I think you’ve correctly characterized my position. I don’t think I’m a Candide, but I do tend to be the most optimistic member of whatever group of liberals / progressives I find myself in. I think it’s pretty clear that the normative commitments you refer to keep being favored or “selected for” because they provide the most robust basis for social organization. Alternative principles (aristocracy, racialism, etc.) tend to be unstable and to break down at some point — and human beings, while capable of immense folly and self-destructiveness, are also capable of noticing this and making adjustments as time goes on.

I also tend to think that people who are politically active tend to focus on what’s wrong and what they want to see improved. Combine that with the naturally short time-horizon of individual people’s experience, plus our natural tendency to overrate the importance and permanence of local conditions because they’re the most apparent to us, plus the awfulness of the particular local conditions we’ve been dealing with since the Reagan era, and I think it’s obvious why a certain pessimism would have become the default position of contemporary progressives. I make the arguments I do partly as a corrective to that.

Of course, the pessimism might prove justified, especially if some huge cataclysm — global warming, a nuclear attack, alien invasion, a big asteroid hitting the earth, etc. — scrambles the whole picture and sets us back several centuries. Global warming in particular really worries me. Still, I see no more reason to think that bad outcomes are inevitable than to think that progress is inevitable. Here’s hoping, anyway.

I can play this game

“…what people should be doing is justifying the claim that there are such objective truths. The only thing we’ve seen like that is Aaron’s assertion that the subjectivity/objectivity question cannot be settled, but that there is no reason to privilege subjectivity. I think there is good reason to privilege subjectivity over objectivity as a default account of moral systems. Moral judgements exist in minds; this we know. That moral judgements have any existence or meaning independent of minds needs to be argued. Things that exist solely in minds are normally considered “subjective”. So the burden of proof rests with those who want to argue that moral judgements are objective.”

Martin’s argument does not succeed in shifting the burden of proof onto those that defend moral truths. This is because the claims he uses to defend this position are all truth statements about the way things objectively are. If we have reason to be sceptical about the idea that X is a moral truth the same reasons for this scepticism should also lead us to be sceptical of the conviction that we ought to be sceptical of the idea that there are moral truths. And it seems that the risks are similar for both kinds of scepticism. In claiming X is morally true we risk being wrong, which I take it Martin thinks is bad because we are imposing some moral truth of people that is not accurate (I suppose martin thinks it is bad in terms of the effects it would have on people). In claiming that we should be sceptical of asserting that any X is a moral truth we also risk being wrong. The down side here is that we will not demand that some actual moral truth be followed because of our scepticism. If so this will be bad for people affected by our lack of conviction.

Obviously the second kind of risk is something to worry about only if there are in fact moral truths about how people should be treated. But the interesting thing is that the first kind of risk is ALSO only a problem if there are in fact objective truths about how we should treat people. The implication is then that if there are not moral truths we do not need to worry about either of the two risks, and if we worry about only the first risk we are already committed to the idea that there are moral truths.

Well, Loren, we’ve both said we’re done with this but it’s a pity you had to finish with a repetition of your silly jibe that I have been “cheering for the Enlightenment”. I have been attacking a specific claim made by several people at the start of this thread, that the idea of progress has now been discredited. This is a different albeit related issue to a general evaluation of the Enlightenment and I don’t really get why you insist on trying to fudge the issues at stake in this way. And on that point it really is difficult to pass over this rather desperate misrepresentation of what some people have been arguing about above (which I hadn’t noticed before).

Engels: by ‘costs of progress’ I had in mind the ideas floating around midway up the thread about material progress allowing moral progress but also enabling evil, and also the suggestion that decolonization (progress) did come with considerable brutality (surely a cost of that progress?). You’ve been debating with some of the folks who floated such concerns. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious.

1) The point that material progress allows for the possibility of greater good and greater evil was made by Aaron in #56, who has been defending the idea of progress, along with J Smith and myself. So it is not true that we have been “debating with folks who floated such concerns”; we were the ones who floated them!

2) I wasn’t arguing with someone who said that “decolonization (progress) did come with considerable brutality (surely a cost of that progress?)”, I was arguing with someone (Sam Chevre in #62) who denied that it was progress.

In view of all this I am forced to conclude that you are just hell-bent on misrepresenting the disagreement between us in order to cast me as an uncritical cheerleader for Enlightenment achievements, in contrast, of course, to your measured, qualified and critical endorsement (while doubtless patting yourself on the back for the way in which your sceptical attitude toward our core moral ideals has protected you from falling into this trap.) As ought to be obvious, this judgment is not justified by anything I have argued here and your insistence on trying to maintain it, by recourse to dark insinuations and groundless jibes, rather than any serious argument based on something I have said, does strike me as rather silly and unprofessional.

“Since we are going to have some beliefs about the world, and since these beliefs may be wrong, we need some way to arbitrate between beliefs that does not rely on certainty, and the one that seems to me the best is reason.”

I agree.

I also agree that on the balance of reason and evidence we should think that dreams do predict the future. I do not see what your argument is for the claim that such a view should be the default position. I think what you have done is taken the fact that most people believe that dreams do not predict the future and their requirement for a lot of evidence to the contrary if they are to believe otherwise as somehow showing that we accept the ‘dreams don’t predict the future’ as a default position prior to reasoning about the issue. This is plainly wrong.

Instead it is the case that most people just have a lot of evidence from their own experience that dreams do not predict the future. They don’t require to be proven wrong because they take ‘dreams don’t predict the future’ as a default position. Rather they have a lot of on experience and reasoning that convinces them that dreams do not predict the future and would need new evidence to convince them otherwise.

Furthermore both believing and not believing that dreams predict the future are “phenomena of the mind.” So all that stuff is just a side show(I am not going to do the job for you of working it out at the illogical aspects of what you seem to imply here because I am getting a bit frustrated with the trickery you employ to avoid the issues at hand). The stuff about consequences is also not relevant.

OK, since we’re still chatting….. :-)

Martin, about this: In large part, I think our “moral progress” reflects less that we have improved morally (though I agree with smith that cultures learn) than that moral problems that were managable in the past have vastly worse consequences with modern technology and institutions. Racism, militarism, and authoritarianism were not new, but the Nazi’s showed where they could lead in the hands of a modern state with modern technology. We learned to constrain our appetite for War because nukes forced us to.

I would say two things. First, I think you’re overstating the importance of the nuclear threat. Long before there were nukes, there was, for instance, a general retreat from pressing religious claims to the point of war. John Locke wrote his “Essay Concerning Religious Toleration,” which influenced the American Founders and others, after it had become clear that religious wars were lose-lose propositions. For the most part, the West has stuck by that insight ever since and has been a better place for it.

Even in the post-World War II era, there were progressive steps taken that weren’t inspired by the nuclear threat — the Civil Rights Acts in the U.S., for instance, and the beginnings of the Common Market in Europe. What motivated France, Germany and the others to start working together, I think, was the feeling that war, empire and ethnic cleansing had proven not to be the ways to solve Europe’s problems. Therefore it was time to try something radically different, like cooperating through closer economic ties.

You might say that that’s an example of the lessons of Nazism you allude to. (In fact, to some degree so were the Civil Rights reforms — they were helped along by the fact that people had seen where racism could lead when it was the basis of national policy.) Well, you’d be right, and that’s my second point: This is progress. This is how it works. People recoil in horror at what’s come before, and so they look for some better way. The postwar situation, in my view, isn’t an exceptional case that’s had some luckily good effects just in the last 50 or so years; it’s a fine example of what’s been happening in various ways for many centuries now. I believe most if not all of the progress we’ve seen in the last couple of generations — and it’s been extraordinary, no question, which is one big reason for my optimism — would have happened even if nuclear weapons hadn’t been invented.

Mr. Smith (or should I call you “J”?), I don’t think we have too much substantive disagreement here. My claim about nuclear war is specifically that it forced us to limit our use of military solutions to conflicts, not that it is solely or primarily responsible for everything that could be called “progress” in that period. The ideological conflict between Capitalism and Communism does seem to be to have been just as bitter as the religious wars of previous centuries, though. Look what America did in Viet Nam; got into the war on false pretences, killed millions, mostly non-combatant, extensively bombed neighboring countries (Cambodia and Laos) not directly involved. Also, during this period the US supported figures like Rios Montt, Suharto, Pionochet, even, in a limited way, the Khmer Rouge (because we were backing China’s ally against Russia’s). And not just “supported” – other than the Khmers, probably none of those figures would have been able to gain and hold power without US assistance (and the Khmers were largely the presumably-unintended consequence of the bombing of Cambodia). And the USSR and China were even worse.

So I would limit claims of “moral progress” in the sense that we have actually gotten morally better. It is more that our “bad” instincts are more constrained by contemporary conditions. And we are seeing novel forms of “bad”. Children randomly shooting up schools? Seems a recent development. Serial killers and other brutal murders apparently devoid of rational motive, including revenge (save perhaps vague revenge at the world). Maybe this has long been going on, but I wonder about it.

Let me amplify something here: the reason you default to skepticism on existential claims is that it is a necessary condition of having a coherent world view. Look at all the claims that could be made: Santa Claus exists, Spiderman exists, Heaven and Hell as the eternal fates after death exist, endless reincarnation exists, a divine injunction against eating pork exists, a divine injunction *to* eat pork (in some religion somewhere, I’m sure) exists. If you accept all possible such postulates, it is chaos. If you even regard all such postulates are equally likely to be true as false, it is chaos, as they wildly contradict one another, and reason would indicate that most must be false. To have a coherent world view, you must reject most, and to have a coherent world view based on reason, you must be able to use reason to justify why those you accept should be accepted when most should not be accepted. Hence, the burden of proof is on you to show that the things you claim exist actually do, not on someone else to show that they do not.

It was “progress” for white Europeans, because the unleashed primal reactive forces on the less evolved/civilised nations.

It seems that, if the White Europeans are primarily comfortable, then all of mankind should be comfortable. And when White Europeans are not comfortable then all of mankind should be made to feel uncomfortable.

Progress indeed.

And then progress for whom?

Sorry for posting so hastily.

I read #164 and rushed to post, when I should have “refreshed” the page to read Martin articulating my intensions, much more eloquently.

Sure, Martin, we’re on a first-name (or first-initial) basis here. It’s just that with a rare, distinctive name like “Smith” I crave a little anonymity, you know? ;-)

You’re right we don’t disagree by much. But if we’re questioning whether there’s really been moral progress, we would need to look carefully at all the facts. It’s easy to remember Vietnam, My Lai, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, etc., because those happened within living memory. Recent events loom large, which exaggerates their relative size for purposes of the comparison in question — in this case, a comparison of degrees of evil or immorality.

Obviously past wars killed fewer people in total because there were fewer people to begin with and the weapons were less destructive. But Vietnam, indeed the East-West conflicts of the Cold War generally, are piddling compared to the evils of the old religious wars. People deemed “heretics” under the Inquisition (and you could get that designation for things like translating the Bible into the vernacular) were sometimes burned or buried alive. In one not-untypical instance — and I apologize for even quoting this, but I think these are the kinds of facts that are getting overlooked here: “When a whole town, Münster, went over to the Anabaptists in the 1530s Catholics and Protestants joined forces to retake the city. The Anabaptist leaders were publicly tortured to death with red-hot pincers and their bodies hung in cages outside a church, where they remained for some years.”

Notice that that wasn’t some renegade outfit that ran amok, it was an act of official policy by the people in charge of two powerful groups back then. Vietnam just had nothing like this. U.S. actions there were horribly misguided, they were driven in part by racial animus, and things got out of control at times. I don’t want to become an apologist for American policy in Indochina. But, my god, it has never been U.S. policy to make examples of people by torturing them and hanging them in cages, particularly not for a “crime” like espousing the wrong religion. (If you want to argue that Guatanamo, the CIA black sites, the flushing of Korans down toilets, etc. are just as bad, well, [a] they’re not, [b] they’re considered shameful enough that their perpetrators try to keep them secret, and [c] it’s pretty clear that the Bush Administration is an aberration — no other U.S. administration has gone as far that we know of, and the Bush practices are not only violations of international laws and treaties that otherwise are generally respected, but they’ve been widely condemned elsewhere in the Western world and even by other American officials.)

The Stephen Pinker article I reference earlier, which appeared in The New Republic this past spring, gives other examples and cites studies that have tried to look past anecdotal evidence to see whether there’s less tolerance for violence today, overall, than there used to be, whether there’s more concern for the well-being of strangers, animals, etc. Short answer: There is. There’s still bad sh– happening, of course, but just try to imagine what the world would be like if the huge increase in power wielded by modern Western governments had not been accompanied by moral improvements like religious tolerance, opposition to torture and greater concern for civilian casualties. It would simply be unlivable, I think.

smith,

If a gang of rapists decide to bound there victims as to keep them from hurting themselves and the rapist, because it would get messy a woman and girl swinging their arms around…this could be “progress”.

Say the same rapist no longer torture their victims to death after the crime…instead, they feed them nice French food and kiss them sincerely before killing them quickly and safely…”progress”?

I hate to be blunt but, it’s begining to sound like some latter-day Postmodern Candide over here.

someotherdude, if that’s an analogy to something, I’m not sure what. As best I can make out, though, you are a utopian political perfectionist who doesn’t think that, for instance, the Geneva Conventions, or Western governments’ abandonment of torture (with the recent unfortunate exception-that-proves-the-rule), or the increased discipline and professionalization of Western armies, etc., mean anything as long as there are still wars and people are still getting killed. However, you did concede a few posts back that there’s been progress. So, I guess you don’t like progress? I would remind you what the word means: moving forward, not arriving at utopia. You don’t think it’s good to move forward? Duly noted.

I’m not sure what literary character this makes you — I’m betting he’s somewhere in Dickens, though. But Candide, as I recall, believed the Panglossian view that “All was for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” not that “On balance, humankind learns from its mistakes and has, over time, embraced better, fairer, more moral ways of doing things, albeit with frequent backsliding, many local exceptions and a long way still to go.” If you know a character who espouses that philosophy, I’ll happily accept the comparison.

“Finally, I am not arguing in bad faith here, and the continual accusations of it are tiresome. If I am engaging in some trickery, show it.”

Oh really, no bad faith. Well how about this.

“You examine the potential consequences of wrongful skepticism of moral claims (that actual moral truth will not be followed because of our skepticism) and the consequences of wrongful belief in them, attributed to me (I suppose martin thinks it is bad in terms of the effects it would have on people). You cannot take this position and then say that consequences are irrelevant; you are arguing consequences.”

This is in reference to my statement about consequences in post #162, were I was clearly referring to YOUR USE of consequences IN POST #161. There you seem to imply that thinking about consequences was relevant to the issue at hand or my previous examples but you did not demonstrate any relevance of even explain why you were talking about it. My comment just like everything I said in #162 was a response to #161.

You have now tried to turn this into the ridiculous idea that I have been suggesting in general that consequences are irrelevant to our thinking about morality … Trying to make me look ridiculous in this was is what BAD FAITH ARGUING IS!!!!!!

Note, nothing of what you say amounts to a defense of the claim that we can identify certain default positions PRIOR to applying evidence and reason about what is and is not true. All you show is that we have good reason to not take seriously lots of truth claims people could make until we have substantial evidence for them. I never said anything like we should have the view that “unicorns are real” is just as likely as “unicorns are not real.” But the reason the two claims are not on equal footing is because of our evidence and reasoning and NOT because we have some way of knowing PRIOR to reasoning and evidence which of the two mutually exclusive truth claims is the default and which has the burden of proof. If we found ourselves suddenly in a different dimension of reality with different laws of physics, biology, etc.. we would not be able to identify what you call “default positions.” This is because all your examples are actually dependent on prior convictions about the way the world works.

You also demonstrate bad faith when you try to attribute to me an argument for the view that what most people believe is what should count as true.

Aaron, my post #161 was in response to your consequentialist argument in post #158. I thought that was obvious, but since your post #162 did not seem to acknowledge it, I demonstrated this in post #167 using direct quotes from your post #158. If you’re going to argue that argument is mistaken, you have to argue that what you said in post #158 is not a consequentialist argument. That still doesn’t establish bad faith, just a wrong argument, but it should be quite enough to keep you busy as #158 is clearly a consequentialist argument.

And I did not say you thought consequences are irrelevant; in fact, I based my argument on the notion that your argument was consequentialist, the exact opposite premise. You did, however, say that there were no relevant moral consequences specifically to believing that there are no objective moral truths . Post #158:

“Obviously the second kind of risk is something to worry about only if there are in fact moral truths about how people should be treated. But the interesting thing is that the first kind of risk is ALSO only a problem if there are in fact objective truths about how we should treat people. The implication is then that if there are not moral truths we do not need to worry about either of the two risks, and if we worry about only the first risk we are already committed to the idea that there are moral truths.”

The risks of which you speak, earlier in that comment, are risks of the *consequences* of believing that there are or are not objective moral truths. By stating that if there are no moral truths, we do not need to worry about the risks, you are saying that if there are no moral truths, there are no moral consequences to whether we believe in them. If that is not your argument, what is the argument of the above paragraph?

Pointing this out, however, is not arguing that you said consequences are irrelevant to the question of morality. Show me where I said that.

“But the reason the two claims [that unicorns exist and that they do not- m] are not on equal footing is because of our evidence and reasoning and NOT because we have some way of knowing PRIOR to reasoning and evidence which of the two mutually exclusive truth claims is the default and which has the burden of proof.
”

I have no evidence that unicorns do not exist. Other than the absence of evidence that they do, of what would such evidence consist? The notion that a horse could have a horn doesn’t violate my reason; given the variety of the natural world, it seems a minor variation. Nor does it even violate my prior conviction of how the world works. I can easily believe that unicorns could exist; I just don’t believe they do. That they could have magical attributes would contradict some aspects of my world view, but even if we define them minimally as horned horses, I do not believe horned horses exist. No reason they couldn’t; they just don’t. So my belief that unicorns do not exist is prior to the application of reason and evidence to the question even now. Reason does not rule it out, and negative evidence does not exist, AFAIK.

As I suggested in comment #168, if you want to have a coherent world view, you have to reject the vast majority of existential claims that can be made. Such claims are infinite and vastly mutually contradictory. Therefore, you cannot reject most of them based on reason and evidence; in your entire life, you will not begin to exhaust the list, and you will still be accepting an infinite variety of contradictory claims as equally likely to be true as not. You will not have a coherent world view, nor even one that is practical for the purpose of survival. What you have to do is assume the bulk of such claims are false, and then have some basis for believing those you choose to believe. Believing things unless you can see a reason not to won’t cut it.

Sorry for the double post.

J. The US did support the Khmer Rouge. Officially. And unofficially too. Specifically, it recognized it as the legitimate government of “Democratic Kampuchea” even during the period when it was not, in fact, in power in most of the country. It and China fought successfully for the KR to retain Cambodia’s UN seat when they were a government in exile. It provided military aid to it in the attack on Viet Nam that triggered the Vietnamese invasion in response. And US Special Forces protected the Khmers in the small Western area where they held power after the Vietnamese established control over the rest of the country and brought the “killing fields” to an end. All of this is really inexplicable other than as official government policy. What the US argues for in the UN, or in which country it deploys its special forces, are not low-level rogue actions.

The enemy of our enemy was our friend. We were concerned with Vietnam and, behind them, the USSR, not with the Khmers and, behind them, China. So Nixon normalized relations with China and a powerplay ensured with Viet Nam and the USSR on one side (though the Soviets did not get too directly involved) and the US, the Khmer Rouge, and China on the other. That’s a little simple, but it was the overall alignment.

It is also worth noting that the KR leaders were, as the wikipedia article on them puts it: “were perhaps the most educated leaders in the history of Asian communism. ” They were University educated in Paris, almost to a man. Pot himself was academically mediocre, but not all of them were. So they cannot be put down as people unenlightened by modern ideas.

Likewise, I don’t see how not to attribute such things as napalm to deliberate US intentions. They were planned and approved at the highest levels, and they were done routinely. How could they be rogue actions? When you get into actual rogue actions, well, I had a housemate who had fought in Nam, and claimed he had seen a US soldier sexually violate a decapitated cadaver. I don’t think he was lying, as it was not a story he seemed particularly eager to tell. That, I grant you, is something that does not reflect the national intention, but perhaps it shows something of the psychological state the war created in modern people fundamentally like us.

To be fair, the US does not seem to have full-throatedly supported Pot. It supported Sihanouk, who was a KR ally that had, at that point, no power independent of them. It also supported Son Sann, who was always trying to negotiate peace between various factions, and who was interested in a sane and democratic society, evidently. But for a couple of decades, there were only two real contenders for power in Cambodia, the Vietnamese communists and the Khmers, and between those two the US supported the Khmers. Geopolitically, this decision made perfect sense, too. Morally, well, that’s something else. Not that the Viet Minh were wonderful, but the Khmers were really impressively bad.

In this “world where we do not know anything”, how do we come to know things? Specifically, since this is the question we have been discussing, how do we come to know what sorts of things exist? Do we start by trying to conceive of every sort of thing that might exist and work through a process of elimination? That would be very hard, as it is not clear how one could establish the non-existence of anything without supposing prior knowledge of the world, and it’s a non-trivial problem even with such knowledge. And even if such a program were dramatically successful it would never succeed in lowering the set of possibilities enough to reach a coherent or even practical world view. Conversely, you could require positive evidence for things that might potentially exist.

And if we really require positive evidence for the claim “unicorns do not exist”, can we really make the claim? What basis is there for it other than the absence of evidence to the contrary?

As for this:

“”‘moral judgments exist in the mind therefore the burden of proof is on the objectivists.””

No what I said was:

“Moral judgments exist in minds; this we know. That moral judgments have any existence or meaning independent of minds needs to be argued. Things that exist solely in minds are normally considered “subjective”. So the burden of proof rests with those who want to argue that moral judgments are objective.”

If you’re going to complain about people misrepresenting your ideas, you really should knock stuff like that off. The question is whether they exist *solely* in the mind. The activity that we call “the mind” does not exist solely in the mind. It can be objectively traced in considerable detail by EEGs. Tee Hee.

“Yet, I think you should stop framing the issue as a problem if you really do not think there are any moral truths. In such a world there is nothing wrong or bad with being delusional.”

This assumes strongly, as I said before, that the only problems are moral problems. Let’s apply this premise – that there is nothing wrong or bad with being delusional if there is nothing morally wrong with it – to science. By this criterion, science should evaluate theories by how they serve some set of “objective moral truths” not by whether they serve factual truth. If the moral consequences of Darwinism are bad, science should reject Darwinism. Now, whether the moral implications of Darwinism are actually bad is debatable, and will obviously rely in part on precisely which “objective moral truths” you accept, but for the argument it does not matter. Given the premise, do you accept the conclusion? With your position, I don’t see how you cannot.

In comment #180, you wrote:

“Oh really, no bad faith. Well how about this.

[quoting my comment #167]“You examine the potential consequences of wrongful skepticism of moral claims (that actual moral truth will not be followed because of our skepticism) and the consequences of wrongful belief in them, attributed to me (I suppose martin thinks it is bad in terms of the effects it would have on people). You cannot take this position and then say that consequences are irrelevant; you are arguing consequences.”

[your response in comment #180]This is in reference to my statement about consequences in post #162, were I was clearly referring to YOUR USE of consequences IN POST #161. There you seem to imply that thinking about consequences was relevant to the issue at hand or my previous examples but you did not demonstrate any relevance of even explain why you were talking about it.
”

The quote from #167 above contains ns *two direct quotes*, in parentheses, from your comment #158. Your comment in #158 was clearly not in response to my comment in #161, yet you responded as though it were, and accused *me* of bad faith for not responding to your comments in #158 as a response to #161.You attribute to me a claim that “thinking about consequences was relevant to the issue at hand or my previous examples” in the context of a bad faith accusation, which implies that this was not true. Now, you acknowledge that you were making a consequentialist argument all along and accuse me of bad faith for supposing you were so stupid as not to realize that. Speaking in good faith does not mean I have to assume you are coherent; it is your job to demonstrate that. On the current evidence, it is rather hard to maintain the position that you are even if I were inclined to assume such a thing “by default”, which, from courtesy, I am.

Smith,

Your devotion to some mystical Moral Progress has you justifying American Imperialism, now you know how German exceptionalists felt in the 1920s.

Engels, I’ve no idea what Aaron was up to in post 56, but his question (whether sarcastic, baiting, whatever) clearly resonates with some of the posters and positions you and he and J. Smith have since been arguing against.

And I read post 62 (by samchevre, esp. “the de-colonialization process in Africa and India/Pakistan has featured extremely high levels of violance and brutality” and “Loss of stabilizing social institutions isn’t necessarily a good thing”) as I described: certainly he’s rejecting a universal thesis of moral progress, but he’s also doing just what I say he’s doing (see again my ambition here to engage in charitable mining of posts for interesting claims and positions).

Martin Bento in 63, 78 and 95 are also in the ballpark of the sort of thing I had in mind.

To be clear: I’m not trying to fudge the issues at stake (although I have no doubt you’ll continue to believe that this is what I’m up to, regardless of what I say here, but alas, while I obviously am obsessive enough to defend myself this far, I simply don’t care enough to repeat myself many more times: a near-200 comment blog post reminds me too much of my old Usenet addiction).

I’m choosing the issues that interest me, and interpreting some posts in that light. You pit yourself against the forces of darkness and their muddled pomo sympathists (I enjoyed your post 150). It’s a good fight, but I personally don’t think the forces of darkness and their pomo dupes have much by way of an interesting philosophical position. So yes, I do think it’s uninteresting arguing with them, although, like fixing the basement plumbing, I suppose it has to be done, and by someone who knows what they’re doing.

I also don’t think you need unabashed universalism and strong claims about moral objectivity to make the case for generalizable and authoritative moral knowledge, and I think my roughly constructivist position, if tenable (I’m still not sure, and there are strong arguments against my tentative stance) probably has implications not only for one’s philosophy of history, but more critically the sort of philosophical questions about history that one finds interesting and/or tractable.

Clearly our interests here are in the same ballpark, but not especially convergent. Alas.

Welcome back Loren. I guess we’re all (but especially Engels) like the characters in that Gilbert and Sullivan show who keep singing “We Go! We Go!” until another character blurts out: “But you don’t go!”

The comparison between the Inquisition and Viet Nam is, for me, an example of being careful of such claims. It is always hard to see yourself and your own society with as cold an eye as you apply to others.

I think we actually tend to go too easy on the past and to forget just how seriously evil things really were then. The evils committed within living memory tend to loom large, though, for obvious reasons.

(Oddly, this is reversed when people talk about works of art. You hear invidious comparisons of TV drama, say, to the brilliant achievements of the Elizabethan theater, with no acknowledgement that most plays of Shakespeare’s time were absolute dreck, and even his aren’t all Hamlet. But I digress.)

On this Vietnam comparison, basically it seems to come down to a different sense of what kinds of intentionality can be assigned to the national policy-making of big, bureaucratic modern states, plus what the particular intentions were behind recent American policies, plus what difference it makes that the destructiveness has increased in scale. I still think that attacking, torturing and killing a bunch of Anabaptists — hardly the most threatening group I can think of — and justifying this on grounds that they have the wrong theology of baptism, or whatever, is different from launching attacks — however misguidedly — as part of military operations against allies of a major power, under a doctrine that requires not targeting civilians as such, even if an incidental (though foreseeable) result of those attacks, given modern tactics and firepower, is burned villages and dead civilians.

But I grant that it’s a subtle distinction at best (as all the caveats indicate), and I will say this: As a believer in progress, I think that in another three hundred years — or, God willing, much sooner — modern methods of warfighting will also look absurd and immoral in the same way that the old religious wars and Inquisition look today. I really don’t think we’re just in a big cycle here, with equally (let alone increasingly) immoral acts being committed in every age even as the issues and parties happen to change. To go back to where we started — and to a question I wish I’d posed a lot sooner, since it’s forward- rather than backward-looking — I really wonder if the people who deny or question that there’s been moral progress look at contemporary Western societies and see any serious chance that they’ll somehow evolve from what they are now into the kind of mess they were for most of the time before 1950. Does the directional arrow really point both ways? If not, then there must be a name for the stronger tendency one way, and for me that name is “progress.”