Trust the Process: Should We Become Proceduralists About Moral Progress?

Abstract

How should be think about moral progress? In her book Progress and Regression, Rahel Jaeggi answers this question from the perspective of critical social theory. She claims that, if we want to avoid falling into the familiar traps of colonial and/or imperialist thinking, theorizing about moral progress requires that we proceed proceduralistically and negativistically: instead of identifying positive instances of substantive moral improvement, we should understand moral progress as a process of self-enriching experiential learning through which certain forms of regression are blocked. In this paper, I argue that these methodological commitments remain unjustified, and that there is nothing inherently objectionable about identifying cases of morally progressive social change.