Topics Ethics

Question We see that as society changes, yesterday´s vices become today´s virtues, and vice versa. E.g. intolerance of homosexuality was formerly considered a sign of decency, today it´s the opposite. Is there a branch of philosophy that deals with these changes in the moral code? Is there one that predicts what changes are most likely to occur in the coming decades?

Accepted:
May 24, 2012

Comments

The second question is easiest: there isn't any such branch of philosophy for a very simple reason: philosophy isn't in the business of predicting what will happen. Perhaps some branch of some social science might address such a question, but if so, it would be a very different sort of thing than philosophy.

But putting on my philosopher's hat… To say that yesterday's vices become today's virtues calls for a question and a distinction. The distinction is between what people take to be good or bad, virtuous or vicious and what is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. People – some people, at least – once took keeping women from being educated to be a good thing. What we now think is that this rested on all sorts of false beliefs about women's intellects and capabilities, not to mention a good deal even less noble. Those of us who think tolerance for homosexuality is a good thing think that old views to the contrary can't be defended successfully; that they rest on a mixture of prjudice and confusion about th facts. If that's right, intolerance for homosexuality was never a real virtue in the first place.

With the distinction in mind, we come to the question: when do people's views tend to change in these ways? That's not a purely philosophical question, but surely part of the answer has to do with coming to understand things better. That may be partly a matter of learning more about the facts, and it may be partly a matter of learning to empathize with people we had trouble empathizing with before, but when we come to see that what we once thought was wrong is not really wrong, or that we once thought was right is not really right, it's because one way or another, we've learned something.