The shape of things to come?

On Sunday 10th May, a distinguished panel met at the Corn Exchange to discuss the sweeping motion that ‘Human history is characterised by moral progress.’

Chair Polly Toynbee set out the format: each speaker had eight minutes to argue their case, to be followed by audience questions and brief concluding comments. The structure did not stipulate an attempt to define the term “moral progress”; an unfortunate oversight which severely hindered the debate.

Mary Warnock made the most explicit attempt to disambiguate the term, expressing her admiration for the biblical metaphor of original sin. She stated that we are all subject to temptation, and that, as we succumb to it, we become increasingly immoral.

With this interesting but unfinished sketch, she then argued for the motion with the claim that we’ve ‘become marginally better at resisting temptation.’ She described the source of morality in traditional Humean terms, stating that it arises from our capacity for sympathy. She then claimed that sympathy increases with the accumulation of knowledge; therefore, that we are entitled to infer moral progress inasmuch as we believe human knowledge is increasing.

“We would progress more if we stopped believing in progress”

Sigfried Rousing opposed the motion, arguing that it is overly complacent to make such a self-gratifying statement. She cited numerous examples of barbaric and (intuitively) morally abhorrent acts which have been perpetrated in ostensibly civilised societies. She also mentioned the role of chance in human history, appealing to the insight of chaos theory in interpreting historical events on a macroscopic scale.

Mark Malloch Brown followed, using his time to document sustained upward trends in income, social mobility, freedom of expression and religion, and the reduction in poverty and infant mortality rates. In the 20th century, he could discern a movement towards ‘global laws, global rights, global solutions to poverty.’ For him, these were clear indicators of moral progress.

John Gray disputed the legitimacy of the link which Warnock had claimed between knowledge and sympathy. He paraphrased a correspondence from Freud to Einstein: ‘human knowledge grows, human nature doesn’t change much.’ He conceded that human nature is now an ‘unfashionable’ concept, but suggested that he still considered the observation adequate grounds to reject Warnock’s account.

Gray continued to pose the first explicitly philosophical question of the evening: is moral progress actually possible? He explained how many modern thinkers believe that morality is inextricably linked with society, so that on this view it becomes difficult to evaluate human history in an objective sense – there’s no fixed point of reference. He made the compelling psychological claim that ‘we like to believe we believe in moral progress,’ and concluded with a paradox: ‘we would progress more if we stop believing in progress.’

Given the quality of the panel, it was a disappointingly nebulous debate, with an abundance of ambiguity and unsubstantiated claims. Appeal to intuition was frustratingly frequent; most strikingly with regard to what ‘moral progress’ actually means. Audience questions reflected this.

For me, the most interesting feature of the debate was that the two antagonists to the motion maintained belief in the possibility of moral progress in some – unspecified – sense. They both stressed the importance of positive social action, despite the probable futility of all such effort. Gray claimed it was obvious that an opponent to the motion would retain ample reason to get out of bed in the morning. Sadly, he failed to say whether one could still be motivated to become a social activist on such a view. The implication, however, was yes: that baby steps toward moral progress have value, no matter how fleeting and intangible their realisation may be.

An audience of 427 voted 62% against the motion.