Michael Huemer – TRANSCRIPT
I’m a philosopher and as a philosopher, I sometimes hear people complain that there hasn’t been any progress in philosophy, that philosophers are still debating the same questions they were debating 2,000 years ago. Well, this is completely false, actually there’s been enormous progress and in particular, there’s been progress in moral philosophy, so I want to talk about that.
I’m going to talk about how human values have progressed over time, and what does this can tell us about the nature and source of values. Most of this progress has been in a direction we could call a liberalization of values. I don’t mean this in the sense of contemporary American politics, I mean, liberal and a broader philosophical sense which is characterized by these 3 things.
First, we see increasing respect for the dignity and the rights of the individual over time. Second, we see an increasing recognition of the moral equality of persons as opposed to the earlier idea that there were some people or groups who are inherently superior to others and therefore, entitled to rule over them.
And the third thing is we see an increasing aversion to violence, and an aversion to resorting to physical force to solve human problems. I’m just going to talk about some examples of this moral progress. Several examples: first start with the issue of slavery. Slavery was very widely practiced throughout human history – throughout history and across the world – not only that but it was actually explicitly endorsed by some of the moral thinkers of the past. This is a quotation from Aristotle: “But the art of acquiring slaves, I mean of justly acquiring them, differs both from the art of the master and the art of the slave, being a species of hunting or war.” Try to imagine somebody today saying that we need to go to war to capture some slaves.
Second, this is from the Bible: “If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod, and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.” You’ll appreciate that these are not minor or obscure sources, this is Aristotle who is one of the leading figures, possibly the leading figure in the history of Western philosophy, and the Bible, which is considered by many to be the leading source of moral wisdom for human beings.
Fortunately, attitudes have changed dramatically over the past 200 years. This is the timeline for when slavery was abolished in each of 49 different countries.
Slavery is now illegal everywhere in the world. The last country to abolish it was Mauritania in 1981. War was also a worse and more commonly practice in the past than it’s today, and it was also endorsed by some of the moral thinkers of the past. This is a quotation from the famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.” And elsewhere he says: “One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.” And then this is from the famous French author Emile Zola: “Would not the end of war be the end of humanity? War is life itself. Nothing exists in nature, is born, grows, or multiplies except by combat.”
In the past, more people as a percentage of the population died as a result of war; this graph is based upon anthropological studies of 7 different primitive tribes, this is the estimated percentage of people who end their lives as a result of war. You can see that it ranges from around 10% to around 30%. The tiny bar at the bottom that you can barely see is Europe and the United States in the 20th century, that’s including both World Wars. This other graph, this is the same idea except this is based on prehistoric primitive societies.
This is from archaeological sites where the archaeologist dug out human remains and they looked for signs of death at the hands of other human beings, such as weapon marks on the bones. So this is an estimate of how many people, what percentage of people in these societies, died at the hands of other human beings. And again, the tiny bar at the bottom that you can barely see, that’s Europe and the United States in the 20th century. Torture and execution were also much more popular in the past, so these are medieval torture devices. This one is a chair that you could be asked to sit in; actual torture device.
This one is known as the Judas cradle, the victim was forced to sit on the point of that pyramid. This is how they used to execute people in the Ancient Rome as you all know about that, and this is how the witches were executed during the Middle Ages. And by the way, these are only two of the many horrific ways of killing people that human beings have developed over the centuries, and those were just a couple of the many horrible torture devices. Those aren’t even the most horrific pictures that I could have shown. During the French Revolution they came up with this new humane method of execution; it was the guillotine, and after the execution, the executioner would hold up the head for the crowd to look at, because this was a former public entertainment, became this great spectacle and people would be entertained by looking at that.
OK, this is when judicial torture was abolished in each of 19 different countries; it’s now been abolished throughout Europe and much of the world. Mostly between 1600 and the year 2000, torture has become much less popular. Execution has also become much less popular. This is the US execution rate from the year 1700 until 2000. This is the number of executions per 100,000 population per year, so, your probability of being executed in the US has gone down dramatically.
Throughout history, the overwhelming majority of societies have been dictatorships, the overwhelming majority of governments had been dictatorial, only in about the last 200 years that has changed dramatically. So, this is a graph showing the number of democratic countries in the world by modern standards. By modern standards in the year 1800 there were no genuine democracies, and it goes to after 2000 when there are almost 100 which is about half the world. By the way, the spike that you see, after about 1990, that is following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
OK, what else? Racism and sexism have been much more popular in the past and much more blatant. In 1960, black people were expected to ride on the back of the bus, they had to use different drinking fountains, they couldn’t go to the same schools, all of that was changed by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 20th century, half of the adult population of the United States could not vote because they were deemed inferior. These are women suffragettes protesting in 1917. They got the right to vote in 1920. This shows the number of countries that have women suffrage in the world from 1840 to the present.
As you can see, starting around 1920, the idea just spread across the globe. Some of the sexism in the past was remarkably blatant. This is a coffee ad from the 1950s. It says, “If your husband ever finds out you’re not ‘store-testing’ for fresher coffee, if he discovered you’re still taking chances on getting flat, stale coffee woe be unto you.” So it’s just a little bit of domestic violence humor there.
OK, this one is even more amazing. This is a man’s clothing ad from 1970, and the text underneath says: “Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn’t have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. If you’d like your own doll-to-doll carpeting, hunt up a pair of these he-man Mr Leggs Slacks.” Would that convince you to buy this clothing?
OK, now the question is: why did this change happen? There are a great many theories that you could have about this that we don’t have time to talk about and I’m only going to talk about three theories that people have about the nature and source of values and see what they can tell us about this question.
So, first, inspired by evolutionary psychology, there are some who believe that, essentially, morality is an adaptation, that our genes program us to hold certain moral beliefs because somehow that helped our ancestors to reproduce more. The problem with this theory is you can’t explain the phenomenon that I’m talking about, because the liberal values that we have are too recent of a phenomenon and the progress has occurred too quickly to be explained by biological evolution. It’s not plausible there was this racism gene that was selected out of the gene pool in the 1960s.
Another theory that people have is cultural relativism. Some believe that all of our values come from our culture, and that there’s no culture independent standard for values. There are two problems with this: the first problem is it doesn’t explain why cultures around the world should be changing in a specific direction. The trend towards liberalism is very widespread, it’s been going on for a long time, for centuries, and it’s been going on in many countries. Slavery for example was abolished throughout the world, and we have to explain this kind of convergence. The other thing is it doesn’t explain why we should regard the change as progress.
If there is no culture independent standard of morality, then we should just view it as changing from one arbitrary set of practices to another equally arbitrary set of practices, and we don’t regard it that way. So lastly, there’s moral realism, the view that there are actual real facts about what’s right and wrong, just or unjust. There’s quite a lot to say about this that I don’t have time to say, but I’m just going to suggest: suppose that these liberal values that I’m talking about are the objectively correct values, and suppose that human beings have at least some sort of limited ability to grasp the truth.
Then we have an explanation for why this trend has occurred over the centuries because in every area of human intellectual endeavor we see this kind of progress, we see a move from simplistic and inadequate ideas to ever more sophisticated ideas, ideas that are closer to the truth. And that’s in all of the sciences, it’s in mathematics, it’s in philosophy, and we would expect the same to be true in ethics.
And so the suggestion is that, for example, the reason why slavery was abolished was it was unjust, it wasn’t that it wasn’t profitable, and it wasn’t that it was against the interest of some powerful group of people; the only thing going against it was that it was unjust OK, but that proved to be enough. I’m afraid that we’re just about out of time, I’m just going to suggest some further reading. So you can look at John Mueller’s book, “The Remnants of War”, which makes the case that the reason for the declining war has been a change in our values and attitudes about war. There’s Steven Pinker’s book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, from which I got a lot of the information for this talk, and he just talks about how violence has declined dramatically over the centuries and millennia.
Finally, there’s my own book, “Ethical Intuitionism”, which talks more about this idea that there are some objective moral facts which we have at least some kind of ability to grasp. I’m afraid that that’s all I have time for today, so. Thank you.
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