As I said previously, I think “moral progress” is the heroic story we tell of social change, and I find it unlikely that these changes are really caused by moral deliberation. I’m not a cultural relativist but I think we need to be more attuned to the fact that people inside a culture are less harmed by its practices than outsiders feel they would be in that culture. You can’t simply imagine how you would feel as, say, a woman in Islam. Baselines change, expectations change, and we need to keep track of these things.
As for democracy, I think there are many cases where democracy is an impediment to economic progress, and so causes standards of living to be lower. I doubt Singapore would have been better off had it been more democratic and I suspect it would have been much worse off (nowadays it probably wouldn’t make a lot of difference either way). Likewise, I think Japan, Taiwan and South Korea probably benefited from relative authoritarianism during their respective periods of industrialization.
My own perspective on electoral democracy is that it’s essentially symbolic and the only real benefit for developing countries is legitimacy in the eyes of the West; it’s rather like a modern form of Christianization. Westerners tend to use “democracy” as a catch-all term for every good they perceive in their society and imagine having an election will somehow solve a country’s problems. I think we’d be better off talking about openness, responsiveness, lawfulness and how to achieve institutional benevolence rather than elections and representation.
Now, you could argue that because I value things like economic progress, I have a moral system. I don’t think it’s that clear cut though. One of the distinctive features of moral philosophy is that it’s tested against people’s supposed moral intuitions. I value technological progress and growth in knowledge but, importantly, I would still value them if they were intuitively anti-moral. If technological progress and growth in knowledge were net harms for us as human beings I would still want to maximize them. I think many people here would agree (although perhaps they’ve never thought about it): if pursuing knowledge was somehow painful and depressing, I’d still want to do it, and I’d still encourage the whole of society to be ordered towards that goal.
As I said previously, I think “moral progress” is the heroic story we tell of social change, and I find it unlikely that these changes are really caused by moral deliberation. I’m not a cultural relativist but I think we need to be more attuned to the fact that people inside a culture are less harmed by its practices than outsiders feel they would be in that culture. You can’t simply imagine how you would feel as, say, a woman in Islam. Baselines change, expectations change, and we need to keep track of these things.
As for democracy, I think there are many cases where democracy is an impediment to economic progress, and so causes standards of living to be lower. I doubt Singapore would have been better off had it been more democratic and I suspect it would have been much worse off (nowadays it probably wouldn’t make a lot of difference either way). Likewise, I think Japan, Taiwan and South Korea probably benefited from relative authoritarianism during their respective periods of industrialization.
My own perspective on electoral democracy is that it’s essentially symbolic and the only real benefit for developing countries is legitimacy in the eyes of the West; it’s rather like a modern form of Christianization. Westerners tend to use “democracy” as a catch-all term for every good they perceive in their society and imagine having an election will somehow solve a country’s problems. I think we’d be better off talking about openness, responsiveness, lawfulness and how to achieve institutional benevolence rather than elections and representation.
Now, you could argue that because I value things like economic progress, I have a moral system. I don’t think it’s that clear cut though. One of the distinctive features of moral philosophy is that it’s tested against people’s supposed moral intuitions. I value technological progress and growth in knowledge but, importantly, I would still value them if they were intuitively anti-moral. If technological progress and growth in knowledge were net harms for us as human beings I would still want to maximize them. I think many people here would agree (although perhaps they’ve never thought about it): if pursuing knowledge was somehow painful and depressing, I’d still want to do it, and I’d still encourage the whole of society to be ordered towards that goal.