Ethics

Do ethical truths change in response to social or technological developments? Or is what was true two thousand years ago still true today?

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There is surely some such change. For example, it was not wrong 2000 years ago to have as many children as you could comfortably raise with your spouse or partner; but today -- when global warming and resource scarcity are real threats and when it is quite possible for affluent people to adopt children who would otherwise grow up under very oppressive conditions -- it would be wrong to have a dozen children.

But the change here may well be explainable in terms of some unchanged ethical principle that persists. For example, Kant's principle that tells us to permit ourselves only such conduct as we could permit to all others as well. In 12 AD, it would have been fine if everyone had felt free to have as many children as s/he could afford to raise. Today such conduct would impose great harms of future generations as well as on various impoverished contemporaries.

Some dramatic changes in the prevailing morality do not have such an explanation. Suppose, for example, that social and technological developments played a role in the emergence of the conviction that women and men are equal and thus should have equal rights and responsibilities. The nature of this conviction does not allow us to regard it as conditional, that is, to say that women are equal with men when certain technologies exist and inferior otherwise. Rather, we say that certain technological developments contributed to moral learning: to our replacing a moral falsehood with a moral truth.

There is yet another, more difficult case worth thinking about. It is illustrated by (one reading of) the account John Rawls develops in his book The Law of Peoples. He sketches there the realistic utopia of a Society of Peoples that admits, alongside liberal peoples, also so-called decent peoples, which may not be democratic and may not treat either women or the members of minority religions equally. It is quite clear that Rawls does not believe that decent societies are as good (just, reasonable) as liberal ones. But he judges it to be much better -- for the sake of world peace and also for the sake of promoting peaceful internal reform within decent societies -- to include them as equals. Now I assume that Rawls would not have made his claim -- liberal societies ought to accept decent societies as equals -- if he had found himself in a world in which only stably liberal societies exist. But in a world in which actual and potential decent societies are a serious reality (e.g. China), it would be quite counterproductive to express this conditionality. It would be counterproductive, that is, to tell decent societies that we liberals accept them as equals only because they are numerous or powerful. The reason is that decent societies will then feel that they must aggressively protect and enhance their competitiveness in order to defend their equal standing -- precisely the kind of attitude that the Rawlsian Society of People was supposed to stamp out among its members.

On one reading of Rawls, then, he thought of some moral truths as historically contingent: given how history actually transpired, liberal societies ought to aim for a capacious Society of Peoples that preserves in perpetuity a place of equal standing for decent societies. This permanent moral accommodation of decent societies is a crucial element in solving the morally important problem of securing a peaceful international system that can solve its urgent collective problems. However, if history had produced stably liberal-democratic regimes in all the major societies around the world, then it would have made more sense for liberal societies to aim for a less capacious Society of Peoples that does not accept as equal members in good standing societies that assign inferior places to women and religious minorities.

It is tempting to think that, when we judge a morality by whether it delivers plausible answers to many diverse scenarios, we ought to pay equal attention to scenarios that fit the conditions of this world and scenarios that belong to worlds quite remote from our own. (Or should I say that this seems to be tempting especially to philosophers?) But there is an alternative view according to which a morality must solve, first and foremost, the real problems in the world in which it is to be adopted, then secondarily the problems in close worlds in which we may yet come to find ourselves -- and according to which it matters little or not at all that this morality provides bad or incomplete guidance for worlds that are remote from our own.

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