Interdisciplinary Lecture: Dan Kelly: Cultural Evolution, Reasoning, and Moral Progress

Speaker: Dan Kelly, Purdue University

Date & Time: May 11th 2022, 16:00

Location: Hybrid talk. Live: S.R. Annex, Online: via link

!! Attendance is free of charge, but if you want to follow online, please book a ticket by filling out the RSVP below. You will then receive a link to the event a day before. 

Abstract

In this talk I consider recent discussions of moral progress from the perspective of cultural evolutionary theory. I begin by describing a premise shared by those theorists I am addressing, namely that morality is best construed as an evolved and evolving kind of sociocultural technology, a complex set of adaptations that has norms and normative psychology at its core.

I then divide those theorists into two camps, depending on their view of the contribution that reasoning and intentional human activity make to moral progress. Rationalists see reasoning and human activity aimed at moral progress as playing a central and perhaps indispensable role to bringing it about. I examine several variations on this view and the specific forms of reasoning (e.g. normative reasoning, consistency reasoning) their advocates see as most important, and raise some difficulties for each. Skeptics have doubts that reasoning and human activity aimed at moral progress have the kind of influence that rationalists tout. Such theorists defend their skepticism with a number of related arguments: they are suspicious of claims to the kind of expertise that would be required to guide moral progress, they have more confidence in the wisdom accumulated in tradition than in contemporary human reasoning, or they are deeply dubious that we can understand, let alone effectively control, the relevant sociocultural technology. One way or another, these arguments hold that the systems of interconnected norms and institutions have become too large and complex for us to fathom, and so it is hubristic to think we could engineer their improvement.

I then formulate an argument similar in spirit to these skeptical arguments that emphasizes causal opacity, the idea that the process of cultural evolution often generates packages of traits whose complete workings and even adaptive benefits remain opaque to their human beneficiaries. I argue that rather than supporting the skeptical position, this cultural evolutionary perspective points to a third way between those suggested by either the skeptics or the rationalists. I end with a brief sketch of the program suggested by this third way, highlighting that it recasts the role of reason and reasoners as students and steerers of the process of culture evolution and the myriad mechanisms of change, but also implies that we should bring no small amount of epistemic humility to the task of trying to understand and guide moral progress.