A publish by Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) at Digressions & Impressions, responding to an essay by Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra (Purdue) at Aeon that was talked about not too long ago within the Heap of Hyperlinks, raises questions on ethical progress and the position that the work of ethical philosophers performs in it.
[Giorgione, “La Tempesta”]
Schliesser writes:
What set me off on this rant is that this sentence: “altering the social world for the higher will fairly often imply altering some previous, dangerous norms and changing them with higher ones”…. Let’s stipulate there’s a germ of fact right here. However we don’t consciously norm-engineer our approach to a morally improved social world primarily and even fairly often; the drivers of ethical progress are usually not the ethical elect; moderately collective motion, prophecy (non secular and philosophic), institutional change, and the unintended side-effects of long-range patterns of habits.
You possibly can learn Kelly and Westra’s essay here and Schliesser’s response here.
Dialogue welcome.
