Moral Progress by Kitcher Philip;

Author:Kitcher, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

Individuals make moral progress when they revise their moral beliefs in ways governed by the methodological maxims I have presented (or by the progressive successors to those maxims). But only when certain conditions are in place. The new beliefs must play a role in superior conduct. Those beliefs must be pertinent to the situations in which the people find themselves. Old habits must be reshaped. New kinds of reflection must be undertaken when the circumstances call for stopping to think.

I shall start with individual moral progress, deferring for the moment the harder case of moral advance at the societal level. The simplest picture of individual moral practice, surely adopted in many philosophical discussions, views moral beliefs as consciously invoked in directing behavior. We think of people saying to themselves “I should do A” (or something similar), and of that self-counseling issuing in their doing A. The connection between the thought (A is to be done) and the deed (A) comes about through the action of a separate faculty—the will. Hence arises the idea of a two-component account of moral practice. People have a set of beliefs about what to do (and what not to do), B, and a capacity for acting on their beliefs, W. What is done is then a product of both components. The simple objection to thinking of moral practice as one-dimensional (beliefs alone) stems from recognizing that, if the will is sufficiently weak—W consists of dispositions to ignore whatever is in B—changes in moral belief will generate no differences in behavior.

My apparently pedantic elaboration of a very straightforward idea is useful in preparing the way for some of the complexities to follow. For the moment, however, it suffices to note that, on the two-component approach, changes in individual moral practice take the form:

< B,W > → < B*,W* >

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